Christopher Nolan has been pushing IMAX film further into narrative filmmaking for over a decade, but The Odyssey, his 2026 adaptation of Homer starring Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway, is the one that finally closes the loop: the first feature film ever shot entirely on IMAX 15-perf/65mm film, dialogue scenes included. The headline fact “shot entirely on IMAX film” undersells how genuinely strange and difficult the actual on-set solutions were. This is what it took.
IMAX film photography delivers a look nothing else touches image quality reported at up to three times the resolution of digital cinema cameras. The problem was never the image. It was the camera itself: traditional IMAX film bodies are large, heavy, and loud enough to bleed straight into a dialogue take, with magazines that hold only two and a half to three minutes of film before they need reloading. That combination is exactly why directors have historically reserved IMAX for wide spectacle shots and switched to quieter formats the moment actors needed to actually talk to each other.
To make an entire feature work this way, Nolan’s team and IMAX engineered a new camera generation just for this production, named the Keighley. It’s built with a carbon-fiber body meaningfully lighter than any IMAX film camera before it while still pulling 15-perforation 65mm film through the gate. IMAX also built an all-new soundproof housing, called a blimp, around the camera specifically so the production could record usable synchronized dialogue instead of looping everything in post.
The Keighley is quieter than its predecessors. It is not quiet. Matt Damon described shooting next to it as sounding “like a blender, like a Cuisinart in your face,” and Anne Hathaway separately commented on just how loud the camera still is on set, even with the new housing. Tom Holland said the blimp made a real difference once it came out going from unusable to workable but nobody involved has described the Keighley as silent. It’s a smaller problem than before. It’s still a problem, on every single take.
The blimp housing surrounds the Keighley by several feet in every direction, which creates a problem nobody talks about when they praise IMAX’s image quality: actors can’t actually get close enough to the lens to look at each other normally, because the camera itself is physically in the way. Nolan and van Hoytema’s solution was a custom double-mirror periscope system mounted beside the lens. Two actors on opposite sides of the massive camera body would each look into a mirror, angled to reflect into a second mirror, giving each performer a clean sightline to the other’s face despite a few hundred pounds of camera sitting directly between them. It’s a genuinely old-school, mechanical solution to a problem that only exists because the camera is too big to get out of the way and it’s the kind of workaround that never shows up on screen but shapes literally every two-person scene in the film.
Van Hoytema has operated IMAX film cameras handheld since Tenet, and he kept that same approach on The Odyssey rather than defaulting to a crane or dolly for coverage. The fully assembled rig runs roughly 240 pounds for the blimp housing alone, and closer to 300 pounds all-in repositioning it required reinforced, steel-plated dollies and a dedicated crew of six or more just to move it between setups. And in crowd scenes, by multiple accounts, Nolan himself physically helped support the rig while van Hoytema operated it. That’s two of the most successful people in the film industry manhandling a 300-pound film camera by hand, on purpose, because a tripod head couldn’t give them the movement they wanted.
The commitment to doing things the hard way didn’t stop at the camera. Nolan avoided CGI for nearly every major effects sequence in the film. For Polyphemus, the Cyclops, the production built a 60-foot animatronic creature rather than generating it digitally. For the Laestrygonian giants, they used forced perspective pairing seven-foot-tall stunt performers with body doubles under five feet tall, shot and blocked to sell the size difference in-camera. Even the film’s pig-transformation sequence, one of the more surreal beats in the story, was built from moldable prosthetics shaped live on camera, combined with real trained Tamworth heritage pigs interacting directly with the actors on a physical set.
Nolan shot the majority of The Odyssey on location across 91 days in six countries, including Morocco and Greece. The voyage sequences Greek soldiers crossing the Mediterranean were not shot in a controlled water tank on a soundstage. Cast and crew went out on the actual open water in manned vessels, hauling the Keighley rig, blimp housing and all, out to sea with them.
None of this is a gimmick or a format flex. Getting a 300-pound film camera quiet enough for dialogue, light enough to operate handheld for 91 days, and rigged with a mirror system just to let actors see each other is a genuine engineering and logistical achievement, layered under a production that also refused to fake its Cyclops, its giants, or its ocean. The Odyssey premiered in London on July 6, 2026, and opened in the U.S. and U.K. on July 17, running 173 minutes and whatever else it’s remembered for, it’s already changed what’s considered possible on a large-format film production.
High On Films. “Inside ‘The Odyssey’ Camera Rig: How Nolan and Hoyte van Hoytema Shot 15/70 Anamorphic IMAX.” https://www.highonfilms.com/the-odyssey-cinematography-imax-keighley-specs-hoytema/. 2026.
Y.M.Cinema Magazine. “The Odyssey’s IMAX Blimp Was So Big It Needed Mirrors for Actor Eyelines.” https://ymcinema.com/2026/07/03/the-odyssey-imax-blimp-mirror-system/. July 2026.
The Credits (MPA). “The Clever Mirror Trick That Helped Christopher Nolan Film ‘The Odyssey’ Entirely in IMAX.” https://www.motionpictures.org/2026/07/how-mirrors-became-the-key-to-filming-the-odyssey-entirely-with-imax-cameras/. July 2026.
Collider. “The Odyssey’s Tom Holland and Anne Hathaway Explain Christopher Nolan’s Never-Before-Seen IMAX Trick.” https://collider.com/tom-holland-anne-hathaway-odyssey-imax-mirror-system-christopher-nolan/. 2026.
Y.M.Cinema Magazine. “Matt Damon on Shooting The Odyssey: “IMAX Cameras Sound Like a Blender in Your Face”.” https://ymcinema.com/2026/01/12/matt-damon-imax-camera-sound-the-odyssey/. Jan. 2026.
PetaPixel. “IMAX Reveals New Large-Format Film Camera That Filmed ‘The Odyssey’ and Boasts LCD Screen.” https://petapixel.com/2026/07/08/imax-reveals-new-large-format-film-camera-that-filmed-the-odyssey-and-boasts-lcd-screen/. July 2026.
CineD. “How Christopher Nolan Shot The Odyssey Entirely on IMAX Film — Inside the New Keighley Camera.” https://www.cined.com/how-christopher-nolan-shot-the-odyssey-entirely-on-imax-film-inside-the-new-keighley-camera/. 2026.
Yahoo Entertainment. “Christopher Nolan’s No-CGI Rule on The Odyssey Applied Even to the Pig Scene.” https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/movies/articles/christopher-nolans-no-cgi-rule-111951761.html. 2026.
The Week. “From ‘The Dark Knight’ to ‘The Odyssey’: Nolan’s Enduring Commitment to Practical Effects.” https://www.theweek.in/news/entertainment/2026/07/24/christopher-nolan-odyssey-practical-effects.html. July 2026.
Wikipedia. “The Odyssey (2026 film).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Odyssey_(2026_film).