How Christopher Nolan Shot The Odyssey Entirely on IMAX Film – Inside the New Keighley Camera

Industry Insights

by Nino LeitnerJuly 24^th, 2026

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Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, now in theaters, is the first feature film ever shot entirely with IMAX 15-perf/65mm film cameras, a milestone enabled by a newly developed camera generation named the Keighley. Let’s dive into what the quieter, rebuilt camera, a purpose-built (and massively large) sound blimp, and three-minute film magazines meant in practical terms on a 91-day shoot across six countries.

For two decades, IMAX film photography in narrative features has followed the same compromise: the format’s enormous 15-perf/65mm negative delivered unmatched image quality, but the cameras were so loud, heavy, and short on runtime that directors reserved them for action and spectacle, switching to quieter formats for dialogue. Nolan’s films from The Dark Knight through Oppenheimer all mixed IMAX film with 5-perf 65mm or Panavision systems for exactly this reason. The Odyssey, Nolan’s $250 million adaptation of Homer’s epic starring Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya, and Robert Pattinson, breaks that compromise for the first time. According to IMAX and Universal Pictures, every frame of the 172-minute film was captured on IMAX film cameras, with the film’s native 1.43:1 aspect ratio preserved on IMAX 70mm prints.

Why an all-IMAX feature was impossible until now

The obstacle was never image quality; it was physics. The 15-perf/65mm format runs film horizontally through the gate at roughly 5.6 feet per second, and the transport mechanism required to move that much celluloid produces noise that cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema has compared to “an unhinged lawn mower.” Sync-sound dialogue was effectively off the table, which is why even IMAX-forward productions like Oppenheimer, or more recently Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, paired IMAX film with quieter 5-perf 65mm cameras for intimate scenes.

After Oppenheimer, the calculus changed. IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond recounted the pivotal phone call at Cannes: “Chris called me up and said, ‘If you can figure out how to solve the problems, I will make [The Odyssey] 100 percent in IMAX.’ And that’s what we’re doing.” The groundwork had already been laid; in 2022, IMAX announced a program to build a new fleet of 65mm film cameras in collaboration with Kodak, Panavision, and FotoKem, with Nolan and Jordan Peele advising on the specifications.

The Keighley camera and the people behind the name

The result of that program is the camera IMAX calls the Keighley, which we covered in detail when it was unveiled. The name honors David Keighley, IMAX’s longtime chief quality officer, who supervised post-production on some 500 IMAX films over a 53-year career, and his wife Patricia Keighley, who continues in a quality role at the company. David Keighley received a terminal cancer diagnosis shortly before principal photography began; together with Patricia, he personally reviewed and approved the dailies from the production before passing away in August 2025 at age 77. Nolan dedicated the film to him at its London premiere.

Technically, the Keighley is a ground-up internal redesign that deliberately keeps what worked. According to Bruce Marko, IMAX’s head of post-production and image capture, the camera looks similar on the outside but is completely rebuilt inside, with one crucial exception: the proven film movement, which IMAX describes as the heart of the camera, was retained. Around it, IMAX engineered a multi-layer carbon fiber body, a new and brighter optical viewfinder designed and built by Panavision, a 5-inch color LCD, a 4K video tap for live on-set monitoring, and modern connectivity including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Gigabit Ethernet, and USB-C. Paul Constantinou, IMAX’s VP of hardware engineering, summed up the goal as making the camera “feel like a modern camera” while keeping “all the things that are great about IMAX film together.”

How quiet is it really?

The headline improvement is noise, and here the numbers deserve scrutiny. IMAX’s official specification puts the new cameras at 30% quieter than the legacy models. Van Hoytema, speaking after the shoot, described the real-world improvement as closer to 15 to 20%, though his characterization of the change is more vivid than any percentage: the difference between “an unhinged lawn mower” and “a nicely lubricated sewing machine.”

Either way, quieter is not silent, and the production still relied on a purpose-built soundproof housing, known on sets simply as a blimp, for intimate dialogue. Before committing to the all-IMAX approach, van Hoytema shot a proof-of-concept test of a child reciting the lyrics to David Bowie’s “Sound and Vision” in extreme close-up on an IMAX camera; Nolan called the result “electrifying,” and the decision was made.

The blimp and the mirror trick

The blimp is where the practical reality of this production comes into focus. Reported weights for the fully assembled rig vary by source, from roughly 240 pounds for the housing alone to around 300 pounds all-in, and it required reinforced, steel-plated dollies and a dedicated crew of six or more to reposition. Damon compared having the running camera near his face to “a blender, like a Cuisinart,” while Pattinson likened acting next to it to performing beside a moving SUV. Yet it delivered what no IMAX film production had achieved before. “The blimp system is a game-changer,” Nolan told Variety. “You can be shooting a foot from [an actor’s] face while they’re whispering and get usable sound.”

The housing created a new problem, though: it formed a physical wall between scene partners, destroying eyelines in close-ups. The solution was resolutely analog, a double-mirror periscope system mounted to the blimp that let actors maintain genuine eye contact through the rig – you can see that setup in the featured image of this article. Hathaway called the setup “truly ingenious,” and Damon has said that in his memory of the film’s most emotional scenes, the mirrors simply disappeared. Constantinou recalled van Hoytema telling him the blimp “was the most essential piece of technology that we had on this movie.”

Three minutes per magazine

The other unavoidable constraint of 15-perf/65mm is runtime. A 1,000-foot magazine is consumed in roughly three minutes at 24 fps, imposing a reload rhythm that shapes performances and set discipline alike. Holland, who plays Telemachus, has recounted that on his first day he assumed Nolan disliked his work because “cut” came so quickly, until a crew member explained the magazine had simply run out. The constraint forces exhaustive rehearsal and precise blocking, a working method closer to theater than to the open-ended takes of digital production.

The appetite for film was correspondingly enormous. Kodak confirmed the production exposed more than 2 million feet of 65mm stock manufactured in Rochester, all processed at FotoKem in Burbank, the last laboratory in the world producing 70mm release prints. Nolan reviewed dailies at IMAX’s David Keighley Theater, named for the man the camera now honors as well.

Seven cameras, six countries, four months at sea

In practice, The Odyssey was not shot on Keighley cameras alone. IMAX built four of the new bodies to start, and Nolan’s production ran seven IMAX film cameras in total: two Keighleys alongside five legacy models. The new cameras accounted for roughly 15% of the finished film, deployed where the older bodies were too large or heavy, most notably aboard Odysseus’s ship at sea. Van Hoytema, who has operated IMAX cameras handheld since Tenet and won the Academy Award and ASC Award for Oppenheimer, continued that approach here, at times with Nolan physically supporting the rig in crowd scenes.

The shoot ran 91 days across Morocco, Sicily and mainland Italy, Greece, Iceland, Scotland, and stage and tank work in Los Angeles, with Nolan spending, in his words, four months out on the water, including aboard the ocean-going Viking-style longship Draken Harald Hårfagre. Van Hoytema has framed the format choice in characteristically direct terms: “IMAX is a camera that doesn’t lie. This is definitely the format, or the window, that this story wants to be seen in.”

Where and how audiences are seeing it

The exhibition side tells its own story about demand for photochemical cinema. The Odyssey is playing on 41 IMAX 70mm film locations worldwide, up from 30 for Oppenheimer, after IMAX trained 60 new projectionists to support the rollout. Advance tickets for those engagements went on sale a full year before release, an unprecedented move, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, 95% of seats sold within an hour. The bet paid off commercially as well: the film opened to $124.5 million domestically and $264.1 million worldwide, Nolan’s biggest global debut, with premium large formats contributing 53% of domestic ticket sales and IMAX alone accounting for 23%, per Variety.

For working DPs, the deeper takeaway is that the last structural barriers to large-format film capture, noise, ergonomics, and monitoring, are now engineering problems with demonstrated solutions rather than immovable limits. The Keighley will not make 15-perf/65mm production cheap or easy, and the three-minute magazine is here to stay. But The Odyssey proves that an entire character-driven feature can live on the largest capture format in the business, sync sound included.

Have you managed to catch The Odyssey in IMAX 70mm, and would you ever consider large-format film for your own work? Don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below!