I feel like we should be paying a lot of money for the privilege to hear Christopher Nolan give a masterclass about shooting The Odyssey on IMAX.
And, yet, here we are. For free, we get the legendary director breaking down each painstaking process of how the large-format film gets taken away after shooting, worked on, and edited for the final 'first generation' cut to play in IMAX theatres.
As you can see below, courtesy of guywithamoviecamera on TikTok, Nolan takes viewers through a step-by-step guide to what happens with each canister of film, starting with it being shipped to Los Angeles. Considering how The Odyssey went globetrotting with filming in Morocco and the Mediterranean, that accounts for a serious amount of air miles.
All told, it adds up to a fascinating look behind the scenes at something that Nolan and other directors – Ryan Coogler among them – have done their best to make palatable for a mainstream audience in recent years. If you don't know your diopters from your dailies, there's still a lot here to impress.
Not least of all are tidbits you wouldn't pick up anywhere else: the drying process (shown here in all its glory) and how rolls of film are literally glued together by hand to get the color correction down perfectly after being tweaked within the editing suite.
The Odyssey is the first film shot entirely in IMAX, and now has an appropriate popcorn bucket to match.
The historic first has led to selling platforms crashing, with some tickets being resold for up to $1000.
It's a little wonder, then, that Odysseus actor Matt Damon has lamented how The Odyssey might end up being the end of an era in Hollywood filmmaking.
"It was a really weird movie for me personally in the sense that I had almost a nostalgic feeling the entire time I was making it, because it felt like the movies when I started working. And I know that that’s going away," Damon told GQ. "I knew that this was the last chance I was going to have to do something like this."
The Odyssey, also starring Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, and Anne Hathaway, opens in cinemas on July 17.
For more, check out our list of best Christopher Nolan movies.
