Why The Odyssey could not exceed a duration of 3 hours
Christopher Nolan talks about the possibilities but also the limits posed by the IMAX format, which he pushed to the limit for his epic blockbuster.
Leaving the room, the spectator The Odyssey may feel like certain elements of the original story were shortened or omitted altogether by Christopher Nolan. It’s difficult to keep all the details of this epic tale of Ulysses’ return journey after the Trojan War, which lasted more than ten years, in a blockbuster. Even if it shows 2h53 on the clock.
In fact, the filmmaker initially had the idea of making a film lasting more than 3 hours to adapt Homer’s work for the cinema. But he had to give up due to technical constraints linked to IMAX. “We still cannot exceed three hours on a film print.“, he explains in an interview with Letterboxd.
Nolan had pushed the format to the maximum on Oppenheimerwhich is exactly 3 hours. The late David Keighley, the great quality manager at IMAX and faithful collaborator of the British director, convinced him of this before his death, in August 2025, after having finished his work on The Odyssey.
“He actually dragged me into the booth during certain public screenings to show me why there was this 3-hour constraint on film prints because over the years I pushed him to enlarge the trays or to find a system to support the end of the film if it is larger than the tray. But there is a specific arm that would have required completely rebuilding the projection system to get around this. So I ended up telling him, ok I’ll stay under 3 hours.“
The Odyssey is the first film in the history of cinema to have been shot entirely in IMAX, a format allowing films to be projected on gigantic screens with a very high ratio, close to 1.43. IMAX is not a new technology, quite the contrary. Tiger Childthe first IMAX film, was shown in 1970 at the World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan. Nolan recounts the long journey that allowed him to achieve this feat:
“I had wanted to shoot a film entirely in IMAX for a very long time, and if there was a film to do it it was this one (The Odyssey). In 2007, when we were preparing The Dark Knight, I approached IMAX. We talked about using these cameras to film the action scenes, and we were very excited about the result. Over the years I have tried to incorporate more and more IMAX technology into the films I have made: Dunkirk, Interstellar and of course Oppenheimer.“
But Nolan was faced with a technical problem. IMAX cameras make quite a racket because of the huge roll of film that runs at full speed when they are activated. This was not a problem for the action scenes, the audio track of which was redone in post-production, but made it impossible to use them for the dialogue scenes.
“So we challenged them to build new cameras with a casing system inside which we could place an IMAX camera and which could make them quiet enough to shoot an intimate dialogue scene with the camera very close to the actors (…) My cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and his teams had to find ways to move these enormous cameras – the whole thing weighed 150 kilos! It took us back to the old days of cinema.”
The Odysseyby Christopher Nolan, with Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland… Currently in cinemas.
