He also knew, early on, precisely how he wanted to shoot the film. For The Odyssey, Nolan asked IMAX to design a camera that could capture not just big sweeping shots but intimate scenes of dialogue, something that was previously thought to be impossible, due to how loud IMAX cameras are. At Nolan’s behest, IMAX devised a kind of blimp covering to get the effect he wanted while still allowing the actors to hear themselves over the sound of the camera. And then, because the covering often blocked the actor’s eyeline, Nolan himself improvised a workaround, a system of mirrors that would allow a second actor’s face to be projected just left of his lens. “Chris doesn’t fake anything,” Holland told me. “Everything’s real. Everything you’re reacting to is what he wants your visceral human response to.”
Pattinson once had to shoot a scene in The Odyssey responding to a far-off sound. “I can’t see anything, apart from the camera,” he recounted, “and I was just asking Chris, because I’m supposed to react to this noise and I’m like, ‘Are you going to cue the noise? Where should I look?’ And he said, ‘Oh no, we’ve got Damon doing it.’ And Matt and Anne Hathaway are doing the entire scene about 200 feet away and I can’t even see them. And he’s walking and talking just to kick a bowl. Fucking crazy.”
Damon said: “He writes everything out in the script. There are no secrets. If you read the script and you’re working on the movie, you know exactly what you have to do that day because it’s all very clear. And so if you write the Sirens when…. It’s in the story. He gets lashed to the mast and he has a fucking existential crisis. You’re going to do that and you’re going to be on the open ocean and you’re going to be on a real boat and you’re going to be tied to a real mast and that’s going to happen. But there’s a real gift as an actor to knowing that, right? Because you know what to prepare for. It’s not like you get to work and you’re on a soundstage and they go, ‘Oh, we’re shooting the scene where you’re tied to the mast,’ and suddenly you’re tied to the mast.”
Nolan likes to, in his phrase, give people a reason to believe. Even if it requires an open ocean and a camera the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. Nolan, who’d first used IMAX on The Prestige, discovered its full power on The Dark Knight. “It’s such an addictive tool because it’s this beautiful, incredibly crispy image that if you can get the images, if you can find a way to get them on that camera, the audience just dissolves into it,” he said. It was maybe the happiest I saw him this particular afternoon, discussing this subject. “I mean, when we first started showing the prologue for The Dark Knight, it was the first time anyone had ever used those cameras in that way. It’d only been used for documentaries. You’d see them in museums. And every time the screen would open up in that helicopter shot at the beginning”—a bank, about to be robbed by the Joker, shot from above—“with every audience there would be a gasp, literally, and that’s very addictive as a filmmaker. You’re like, No, this is the secret sauce. This is the magic. If you could get people into one of those theaters, they’re going to have a very, very intense, tactile, but also larger-than-life experience. There’s that crazy combination of intimacy, and you feel like you know what things are going to smell like and taste like and feel like, but it’s also colossal. That’s the fun of it.”
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