Director Christopher Nolan has made some of the most spectacular films of the 21st century: "The Dark Knight," "Inception," "Interstellar," "Dunkirk" and "Oppenheimer."
With each new film, the scale and ambition of Nolan's storytelling seem to reach new heights.
In 2008's "The Dark Knight," the filmmaker collapsed an entire building before the Joker, played by the late Heath Ledger, sped off in a school bus. In his last film, 2023's "Oppenheimer," which won seven Academy Awards, Nolan tackled a subject of immense proportions: the nuclear bomb and the man who made it, J. Robert Oppenheimer.
It's only fitting that his latest film, coming to theaters this July, takes on a nearly-3,000-year-old Greek epic, the bard Homer's "The Odyssey."
Actor Matt Damon plays Odysseus in "The Odyssey." It is his third film working with the director, having played roles in "Interstellar" and "Oppenheimer" previously.
"I think what separates him from other directors is… the stories he wants to tell are incredibly ambitious. And the way he wants to tell them is incredibly ambitious," the actor told correspondent Soctt Pelley in an interview.
"In this case, he wanted to do it 100% in IMAX, which had never been done. And that wasn't even announced, because we didn't know if we could do it."
"The Odyssey" is the first feature film to be shot entirely on IMAX film, prized for its high resolution – or image quality – that is up to three times higher than digital cameras.
But there are severe technical limitations that come with shooting IMAX film. Each camera magazine only allows between two and half to three minutes of continuous shooting before it needs to be reloaded. Another hurdle: the cameras that shoot with the film are loud while in operation, which can interfere with the recording of the actors' dialogue on set.
Nolan's team and IMAX worked together to create a special housing for the camera to muffle the sound of its operation.
"It's a really loud camera. So for intimate scenes… that would've been impossible in IMAX up until, you know, a year ago," Damon told Pelley. "Camera's just much too loud. The audio… would never work."
Damon said the housing was a "blimp" about "the size of a coffin" that "weighed I think over 300 pounds when it was all put together. They had to build special steel plating on the dollies to hold it."
The size of the camera housing also presented a different problem: the angle of the actors' eyelines, or line of sight when on camera, was too extreme in scenes where two actors speak to one another.
IMAX worked with Nolan and his photography team to create a mirror system that allowed the camera to capture the actors' faces from a much closer angle.
"So, there were mirrors that were put [up] so that we could shoot this scene… you could stand next to the IMAX camera, you'd be looking at a mirror which would reflect back to the camera, and my eyeline would be close to the lens. And it worked beautifully," Damon said.
"We kind of kept shooting with it and it kept working… it kind of dawned on us that we were gonna make it through the production and we were actually gonna be able to shoot entirely on IMAX," the actor said.
Pelley and the 60 Minutes team traveled to Fotokem in Burbank, California – the last motion picture film lab in the world that produces 70 millimeter prints, the format for IMAX film – to watch their team of artists put finishing touches on "The Odyssey."
Ron Juarez, a negative assembly technician, gave Pelley and Nolan a demonstration of how the edited scenes are assembled into an entire film.
"So every time a scene changes, which can be dozens and dozens in a minute, that scene change was cut by hand?" Pelley asked the director.
"Yes, Nolan said. "These are two pieces of negative now that he's going to splice together for us. And every cut in the film – and there are thousands of cuts in the film – is done this way, by hand. It makes me nervous just watching him."
Juarez took a cut negative, used a glue pot to carefully apply adhesive to its edge, and then attached another negative. The work looked flawless, almost as if it hadn't been cut at all.
"You see the skill involved, and the care that's taken with it. And, yeah, it's a really marvelous thing to see… in this age of digitization, AI, all the rest, this is a human process, an analog process," the director said.
Nolan then explained what sets IMAX film apart: "that's the highest quality imaging format that's ever been devised. There's nothing that competes with it."
"It's a massive negative, which when correctly exposed, correctly printed, and you know, projected onto a huge screen… there's an image quality there that you can't get anywhere else. Incredible sharpness. Very little visible grain."
In another room, Nolan and Pelley spoke with Lance Spindler, a lab color timer, who stood over a lightbox with a print of "The Odyssey," showing multiple frames of Damon in full military regalia. Spindler explained the color correction process.
First, Spindler takes a film negative to an analyzer to make adjustments, using a monitor to approximate what Nolan has said he wants the colors to look like. He then makes a test print, a positive image from the photo negative, and brings it to a light table.
"We fine tune it with our filters," Spindler explained, pointing to filters of varying colors on the light table.
Spindler places different filters over a frame of the test print, previewing the addition of color to the final print. "We have the primary colors, and we have the secondary colors," he explained.
Holding a cyan filter over a frame Spindler said, "this one, you can tell, is less red than over here. And that would indicate how I adjust my timing lights accordingly to achieve what [Nolan] wants."
"What do you get from using celluloid film and hand matching the color you're trying to get?" Pelley asked.
Nolan said: "What you get is the benefit of the closest sort of technological analog that's ever been created for how the eye sees," Nolan said.
"Film sees very much the way the eye sees. And particularly the way it sees color, the way it sees grays, or blacks, and whites, and everything… it really means that we're getting the audience as close to the experience of being there as we can."
The color timer, in this case Spindler, assigns numerical values to color correct each shot of the final print.
The photonegative is then run through a contact printer, which projects light, colored by filters, through the negative and onto the positive film stock, creating a final release print.
Pelley and Nolan watched as the filtered, colored light changed based on the numerical values assigned to each shot.
"Different colored lights expose across the frame as it rolls across. And each shot in the film, the ins and outs of that, are programmed [by the color timer]," Nolan said.
After a chemical bath, the release prints are dried in a glass enclosure. "And then once everything's signed off on, they just [start] making reel prints, reel by reel," Nolan said, standing outside of the glass with Pelley, looking in.
In the Vista Theatre in Los Angeles – one of only a few in the United States that still projects 70 millimeter film – Nolan and Pelley watched scenes from "The Odyssey": a wooden horse being dragged toward the city of Troy and a battle scene where Odysseus and his men fight an army of giants.
"People in the industry talk about their fear that theaters like this and giant screens…are going to be part of history," Pelley said to the director.
"I think theaters like this are part of history, and they're part of the future as well," Nolan said.
"When you watch a comedy in a room full of laughing people, you know, a tragedy where everybody's sad at the same time…that's very, very important and very unique to cinema."
"The idea of the movie as a communal experience, as a place [where] we come together to experience a story, I'm fully confident that that's a part of our culture forever."
Photos courtesy of Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
The video above was produced by Will Croxton. It was edited by Nelson Ryland. Reporting by Nicole Young, Kristin Steve and Scott Pelley.
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Why "The Odyssey" was shot on IMAX film
Why Christopher Nolan shot "The Odyssey" on IMAX film
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