The Odyssey shot on real film; only 1 place makes it

Tomas Vysinsky prepares a 70-mm IMAX copy of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey for screening in Prague, Czech Republic, in July. (PETR DAVID JOSEK / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILES)

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — This past summer, buying movie tickets became like buying concert tickets. Moviegoers crashed websites to secure premium admission to one of a few dozen theaters in the world that can screen films in the 70-mm IMAX format.

The movie that inspired this was The Odyssey, director Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the ancient Greek epic that became a rare monoculture phenomenon and has made more than US$1.6 billion at the global box office.

To see The Odyssey in IMAX 70-mm was a cinephile flex. Nolan’s latest epic is the first feature film shot entirely in that medium.

Beyond specific formats, Nolan and The Odyssey are part of a broader revival of physical film after the digital revolution seemed to have left it for dead. Nolan has been an evangelist for the medium made of plastic, and other filmmakers are increasingly choosing to shoot and project that way — among their projects are action thrillers such as Disclosure Day and character studies including The Invite.

Nolan mostly wants you to see his movie on film — IMAX or not. “It is not just nostalgia,” he said in an interview this summer.

“Projection of the movie is literally light and shadow and colour,” he continued, “and when you shoot on film and you project on film, all of those prints are made from the original negative, which itself was in the camera, the light actually hitting it, creating shadows on that film that then get reprojected.

“It’s just a magical thing.”

Filming on film begins at a company that was once synonymous with photography: the Eastman Kodak Co.

Made in Rochester, N.Y.

For all of film’s renewed presence at the centre of Hollywood, every high-quality colour reel for shooting and projecting is manufactured in one place. And that is Rochester, a city in western New York known for cold winters, industrial decline and Eastman Kodak.

Decades after both the medium’s and the corporation’s heyday, Eastman Business Park is where this product is manufactured. Throughout the 20th century, Kodak loomed over Rochester as its headquarters loomed over the skyline.

George Eastman began hand-manufacturing gelatin dryplates there in 1880, and by about 1915, his company was the world’s driver of photographic film. It stayed that way until the latest turn of the century, as digital cameras overtook the analog medium.

Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012, and today is a fraction of its size at its peak.

But the 1,200-acre Eastman Business Park still stands, just across the street from the cemetery where the Europeans who started a settlement first known as King’s Landing are buried. (Eastman’s remains reside on the Kodak campus.)

Nor is Eastman Business Park a ghost town.

Since emerging from bankruptcy in 2013, Kodak has increasingly moved toward manufacturing pharmaceuticals. And it still makes film, still in Rochester.

Manufacturing process

When film manufacturing threatened to disappear about 15 years ago, Nolan and other directors helped persuade Kodak and Hollywood to think of film not as an antiquated format but as an alternative canvas — in the same way that vinyl albums persist in a music world dominated by digital files and streaming.

The Eastman Kodak Company world headquarters in Rochester, N.Y., where American movie film is produced. (TED SHAFFREY / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILES)

“If you view film as a technology, then it becomes obsolete and supplanted,” Nolan said. But film is not a technology, he argued, adding: “It’s a medium. It’s a very important medium. And media, they don’t become obsolete. They exist in parallel.”

It starts with plastic. Kodak makes polyester on-site. Then it adds microscopic layers of chemicals that turn a sheet of plastic into film. From this point until the product is sealed in its canisters, the process must take place almost entirely in the dark: light, as some may remember from high school photography class, can ruin film.

After the chemical treatment, huge sheets of film are dried, packaged and shipped within the campus to Building 326 in light-tight boxes called caskets.

The film’s next stop is a splitter. A K6 Splitter takes a raw plastic base that is 54 inches wide and as long as 12,000 feet, and cuts it into narrow strips small enough to fit through a camera or a projector.

Next, the film is perforated: holes are made on both sides to allow camera or projector sprockets to pull the film through. Kodak’s custom T-perforators can process 3,000 feet of film a minute.

The discarded bits of material from the perforating process (think doughnut holes) are known colloquially around Kodak as “fairy dust.” Kodak recovers silver from the fairy dust — silver halide is among the chemical compounds it uses to make the film — and recycles it.

Finally, the film is spooled so that it can be vacuum-sealed in a device that resembles a gigantic panini press, packaged in the familiar steel canisters with gold varnish and shipped to film labs or movie sets.

A reel like the ones Nolan used when filming The Odyssey can hold up to 1,000 feet of film.

How it gets on screen

The gold standard for seeing The Odyssey was at one of the approximately 40 screens around the world where it was projected in IMAX 70 mm.

In a small room above the highest audience seat at AMC Lincoln Square 13 in Manhattan, Chuck Snow, a veteran projectionist, went through the meticulous routine. He loaded the film onto the IMAX projector, which uses a unique rolling loop mechanism to drag the film horizontally through the projector at high speed to achieve the rate of projection: 24 frames per second.

The process is both technically challenging and aesthetically involving, an art unto itself.

There is a tactility to film, Nolan said, for which digital cannot substitute. And seeing a movie that was shot on film projected on film means a fidelity of image. “If you’re seeing a print of The Maltese Falcon, that’s what it really is,” Nolan said. “If you’re seeing a DVD, that’s a different thing. It’s valuable in certain ways, and in terms of people’s access to cinema it’s an incredible thing. But you can’t say that it’s the same thing.”

Nolan has a long relationship with IMAX, the company whose large distinctive cameras and gigantic screens were for much of its nearly 60-year history associated with documentaries often encountered at museums. The first moment filmgoers encountered any part of a Hollywood feature shot on IMAX cameras was when they took in the bank heist masterminded by Heath Ledger’s Joker at the beginning of Nolan’s 2008 movie, The Dark Knight.

In 2014, after Nolan had also shot parts of The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar on IMAX cameras, Kodak hired a new CEO, Jeff Clarke. David Keighley, IMAX’s chief quality officer, urged Nolan and Emma Thomas, his longtime producer (and wife), to meet Clarke and plead for the company to continue manufacturing film. They had lunch and made their case. Kodak listened.

In the credits of The Odyssey, Nolan dedicated the movie to Keighley, who died last year at 77.

“Without him,” Nolan said, “there would be no shooting on film now.”

— New York Times