In 2024, Christopher Nolan approached IMAX CEO Rich Gelfond with a bold idea. The Academy Award-winning director wanted to film his next movie entirely with IMAX cameras and listed 10 demands to make it work, such as “how quiet it had to be, how light it had to be, how many he needed,” Gelfond recently told Page Six Hollywood.  

The result of that conversation shattered records.

“The Odyssey”‘s historic weekend haul which included $124 million domestically and $264 million worldwide, saw IMAX theaters account for $29.6 million domestic and $51.8 million worldwide making it the theater chain’s best-ever weekend. The 41 screens that projected the movie in 70MM — Nolan’s preferred method — drew $6.3 million. 

As most filmmakers know, IMAX cameras are notoriously bulky and loud, which made close-up, dialogue-heavy scenes nearly impossible to film. You couldn’t sync sound, meaning you had to add dialogue in post, which is a highly inferior audio process.

IMAX had already been working on a new, quieter camera when Nolan’s call prompted the Toronto-based company to speed up their timeline for a new suite of filmmaker tools.

“We also developed a blimp, which you put the camera in, which makes it so quiet that you could film these very close-up scenes, and the camera was made of a special alloy, which we kind of invented — so it could be both very light and very quiet,” Gelfond said.

Nolan and his longtime cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema spent months working with IMAX on the new cameras, which were named after David Keighley, an IMAX legend (who was memorably snubbed during the In Memoriam segment at the Oscars).

Gelfond said they had a company rep on the set at all times during the globe-trotting shoot. 

“Chris put the camera to the test like no other director we’ve worked with. He flew it on helicopters. He put it on boats. He put it in when waves were curling,” Gelfond says.

The cameras were such a hit that Denis Villeneuve shot part of “Dune: Part Three” using the new tools.

Gelfond bragged that a pair of filmmakers walked out of a screening last week discussing ways to use the IMAX cameras themselves.