A new IMAX featurette has revealed how Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey handled a problem created by its own camera setup: a mirror system that let actors see each other around a massive blimped 15/65 IMAX film camera. The solution was built for sightlines, not style, and it kept the huge camera in place while performances continued around it.
The timing matters because The Odyssey is being presented as an IMAX milestone, shot entirely with IMAX film cameras. That alone would have made it a talking point, but the new behind-the-scenes material shows how much engineering went into making the system usable for dialogue scenes, not just possible in theory. Earlier in production, IMAX developed new cameras and a blimp to reduce the noise of the 15/65 system, and that blimped housing wrapped the camera body in a large rectangular shell.
That fix solved one problem and exposed another. The blimp quieted the camera, but it also acted like a wall between actors in at least one BTS frame, blocking their direct view of each other. The mirror system was the answer: it gave the performers a way to maintain eye contact around the camera while Nolan and Hoyte van Hoytema kept the 15/65 setup in the correct position. In practical terms, the production had to preserve both the frame and the interaction inside it, which is not a small ask when the camera itself dominates the space between two people.
Hoyte van Hoytema, who has worked through complex large-format setups before, said The Odyssey fits his large-format career very well. He also summed up the job with a line that sounded less like a slogan than a working rule: “We, as filmmakers, we’re not supposed to be comfortable. We’re supposed to present the”. That is the logic behind the mirror system too. The setup did not make the camera smaller or the problem easier. It simply made the scene playable, which is exactly what the production needed if The Odyssey was going to keep its all-IMAX claim and still let the actors perform to each other instead of to a machine.
What the featurette leaves open is how broadly the system was used across the film. It confirms the method and shows the problem, but it does not spell out which scenes relied on it or how many times the mirrors had to be adjusted. For now, the clearest takeaway is that The Odyssey did not just use IMAX as a format. It had to invent a way for people to look past it.
