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Watching The Odyssey in Christopher Nolan’s preferred 70mm format is not accessible for everyone — there are only 41 theaters in the entire world that will show the large-format film projection.
One of those theaters, IMAX Melbourne, is the only cinema in the southern hemisphere to show the 15-perforation, 70mm film. They recently gave The Guardian a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how technical manager Dan Drobik manages the enormous reel that runs over 10 miles long and weighs 500 lbs.
Drobik works with a giant platter that has a device that controls how fast the film is taken up. He then uses a series of pivot rollers to connect the film to the actual projector, some of which are sticky to the touch to hoover up any pieces of dust on the celluloid.
The complex system, which is reminiscent of a Rube Goldberg machine, culminates at the point where a frame is projected out into the theater. The film moves horizontally through the projector, unlike normal film, which moves vertically.
Once he has synced the audio and video, Drobik still has to stay close to the projector for the length of the movie, listening for anything that sounds out of the ordinary.
“It’s so much more involved with how many steps and processes there are,” Drobik tells The Guardian. “You can just see the size of the film itself. Just the logistics of getting the film here, let alone building it and putting it on the platter and running it.”
“You can see why the industry moved to getting a USB stick you plug in the back of a projector,” adds Drobik. “But something’s a bit lost there, and so when you have something this special, it means people will come and they’re willing to pay and experience something like this and put their phones away and really disconnect and fully immerse themselves in the enormous screen.”
He isn’t wrong. There are people traveling around the world just to watch The Odyssey at IMAX Melbourne, which has the world’s largest 1.43:1 cinema screen. The cinema has already sold 30,000 tickets for the film, making it their eighth-biggest film ever — and it hasn’t even opened yet.
“It can feel very isolating up in the projection booth,” adds Drobik. “So it’s very humbling to know people have travelled so far just to come and see the film in this format. It’s great.”
It is the scale of the movie that has everyone talking about it: yesterday, PetaPixel reported on the mirror system the crew had to rig so the actors could see each other around the enormous IMAX camera.
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English (US) ·