The gods may have been against Odysseus on his mission home, but they weren’t going to stop the filmmaker who dared to bring the journey to life in the broadest way possible. After reaching this point in his career, some parts of Christopher Nolan’s bucket list were easy. Assembling one of the biggest all-star casts in cinematic history outside of a Marvel movie was a small-potato affair. It was a matter of filming them all in his preferred filming format, which turned out to be the real undertaking.
Having tinkered with IMAX since his second fight with Batman, Nolan’s “The Odyssey” was expected to be revolutionary on many fronts. Not only was it the director’s first film shot entirely in this format, but it was also the first film to do so, period. This task may seem simple, given that the Oscar-winning filmmaker has given audiences massive sequences in some of his big sci-fi films and used one of the best sci-fi movie motorcycles in a chase scene in “The Dark Knight.” But an IMAX camera is a beast. Larger than normal cameras, they can be so noisy that any scenes involving actors having long conversations can be completely drowned out by the noise of the machine at work.
This, along with a few other issues, was something Nolan had to overcome to deliver the epic he was aiming for. So it seems fitting that, in an effort to master this new and elusive type of cinematic magic, he’s resorted to some good old mirror tricks to get the job done. And an airship.
Silence was golden during the filming of The Odyssey
It’s nothing new to ask for quiet on set, but with an IMAX camera, it’s much harder to achieve. To remove the noise from Nolan’s most popular kit, a special type of enclosure was created. Nicknamed “the airship,” the device enclosed the camera in a box to absorb the sound it emitted, capturing even the most hushed conversations. “The airship system is a game changer,” Nolan told Empire. “You can shoot a few steps away from (an actor’s) face while they’re whispering and get usable audio. It opens up intimate moments of performance on the world’s most beautiful format.”
Problem solved, then? Well, not quite. With the cameras now having additional soundproof armor, the problem was getting the actors to work around them. Just because a camera now weighing 400 pounds no longer looks like an industrial air conditioner doesn’t mean it’s smaller than one. A simple camera setup that could be placed between Nolan’s stars now had to be reworked, so that their performances wouldn’t be hampered in the heat of battle. For this, the director applied a rather ingenious method to get the job done that even his star agreed ultimately became barely noticeable upon reflection.
Mirrors helped The Odyssey in its most moving moments
Any actor worth their salt would agree that a scene can really take off if they can react to their on-screen partner. To ensure Nolan’s big screen team could achieve this, even with a camera built like a Transformer, they used a clever mirror placement technique to get the job done. Lining them up around the cameras allows Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway and company to avoid losing eye contact and stay in the emotional moments reserved for them.
It may sound like a struggle, but the actors tackled the process with ease, with even the film’s protagonist confessing that he quickly forgot that he was looking at his co-stars’ reflections, rather than doing it directly. “The effect worked perfectly. And actually, I was talking to Anne about it yesterday because I realized that in my memory of that very intimate scene with her at the end of the movie, I don’t remember it being a mirror,” Damon told Collider. “I remember I was so drawn to Annie’s eyes that I just remember Annie being there, and she being there, but I was doing it in front of the mirror. But it worked. It worked really well.”
Now, after the runaway success of “The Odyssey” (especially in IMAX) and the herculean efforts to get the job done, one wonders if Nolan will reapply these techniques in any of his future projects, or more importantly, if other directors will take the chance and deliver films as epic as this one. Well, they can at least try.
