Christopher Nolan takes viewers behind the scenes of the intimate process of putting together an Imax movie in a “60 Minutes” interview about “The Odyssey.”
In one of two pieces of footage exclusively obtained by Variety, Nolan tells 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley, “Taking on The Odyssey was all about scale. It needed to be the biggest movie we’ve ever done. It needed to be challenging for all of us, because that’s the nature of the story.”
“It looks like you almost drowned Matt Damon,” says Perry, who has seen a clip of Damon as Odysseus commanding a ship in a storm. Nolan laughed and replied, “We certainly paced him.” Damon agreed in a separate interview, saying, “It was the hardest movie I’ve ever done. It’s not even close to that.”
In the second clip, Perry explains in voiceover that The Odyssey is the first full-length feature film to be shot entirely in IMAX, as Nolan demonstrates the process (literally cutting and pasting frames together) in the world’s last film lab of its kind.
“When Nolan was 16 years old, he saw an IMAX documentary in a museum and was fascinated by the five-story screen,” Perry says. “But Imax is expensive and cumbersome. Digital shooting and editing is faster and cheaper, so very few people do it anymore.”
“Why keep this ancient art alive? Well, the resolution or image quality of a 70mm Imax frame is up to three times higher than digital,” Perry continues. “Art is a difficult path.”
Nolan’s “60 Minutes” interview will air Sunday at 7 p.m. on CBS and will also be streamed on Paramount+.
