Watch: IMAX production on “Oppenheimer”
Director Christopher Nolan sought out a medium sufficiently powerful and immersive to present his historical epic Oppenheimer.
A devout believer that motion picture film is an essential component in creating a true cinematic experience, he chose to shoot the story of the scientist who oversaw the creation of nuclear weaponry in 65mm, 15-perf IMAX format. Learn more in the video above.
To clarify: That’s the same super large-gauge film stock that directors such as Quentin Tarantino (The Hateful Eight), Paul Thomas Anderson (The Master) and Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey) have used but with a crucial difference.
Instead of running the film stock through the camera with the width of the film perf-to-perf used to define the width of the frame and the height of the frame measuring five perfs, this format runs that stock past the lens on its “side,” with the height of the frame being defined from the perfs on the left to those on the right and the width of the frame extending to 15 perfs.
Watch: The image capture for Oppenheimer
This allows for a truly enormous frame that can be projected significantly larger and with much more fine detail than even the above-mentioned epics. It also uses approximately three times as much film between “action” and “cut” as traditional 70mm; that is in itself a prohibitively expensive medium for all but the most established filmmakers to even consider.
Watch: The trailer for Oppenheimer
As reported by Rochester First, from Kodak’s home town, “part of the movie was shot on custom-made film by Kodak: black and white large format IMAX film.
“Nolan is one of our biggest customers,” says Commercialization Manager at Kodak, Diane Carroll Yacoby. “He engaged Kodak right from the beginning. He had several ideas he wanted to try, one of which was to capture some of the scenes in Oppenheimer in black and white large format negative, which unfortunately, we did not have available.”
The task of making the Double X negative in the larger gauge involved some serious revamping of Kodak’s manufacturing plant in order cut the rolls of emulsion and perforate it to create sprocket holes for this format for which Double X had never been sold.
“It’s so cool … bringing your friends and family [and saying] ‘We made this film, I remember when this was going through the whole process,’” enthuses Operations Manager of Film Finishing, Kristen Taglialatela in the article.
As viewers of IMAX specialty films know, the medium is a powerful way to present giant, sweeping landscapes, “but I got very curious to discover this as an intimate format,” cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema recalls.
When shooting in the format, he says, “The face is like a landscape. There’s a huge complexity and a huge depth to it.”
The history of the title character’s role in transforming nuclear warfare from a possibility to reality, says Nolan, “is one of the biggest stories imaginable.
“Our film tries to take you into his experience. And IMAX, for me is a portal into a level of immersion that you can’t get from any other format.”
van Hoytema told Collider that Nolan is very much dedicated shooting scenes with a single camera, the old school way.
Of course, the expense of running multiple 15-perf 65mm for every take would likely be prohibitive even with the type of budgets he gets for his movies, but it’s about more than that.
The cinematographer elaborates that the camera is like the “magic box” on set that everything is directed towards. All the action, “‘is sucked into that one little box so that one camera really becomes an epicenter of our shoots. As soon as you put two cameras on the set, that that attention gets somehow divided.'”
Additionally, the director is not one for hanging around the video village. Nolan is almost always found directly to the side of the camera during a take. “‘The actors know exactly towards where they’re working,'” the DP says, adding that this is also true for ‘”the production designers, the set dressers and us in lighting…it all has to [aim] towards that one direction.'”
The IMAX cameras, in addition to their size, present some challenges for shooting, especially when capturing the type of close, intimate compositions that make up the majority of the film. van Hoytema explains that each frame of 15-perf, 65mm stock, “‘is a huge piece of exposed film. So, 24 of those frames … pull pulled through the camera per second! You can imagine how much power and inertia and how big the motors are that you need in order to do that, and how aggressive your mechanism has to be to…stop that frame'” to achieve the intermittent motion necessary for a film camera to work.
This is why “‘that camera is so loud, and it’s so bulky. It’s just physically very heavy.'” And while there is a blimp available that will dampen the sound (likened to that of a lawnmower), the device itself a rather enormous apparatus which van Hoytema refers to as the “coffin.”
Another factor comes from the unique attributes necessary for the optics. Lenses designed to cover such a large image area will, as a rule of physics, have to have a longer focal lengths to capture the same frame as a lens designed for a traditional sized frame. For example, if a filmmaker wants to capture a head-and-shoulders shot of an actor with the camera six feet away to focus that image onto a 35mm 1.85:1, they will require a much longer lens to get the same head-and-shoulders framing with the camera at the same distance to the subject.
All else being equal, longer focal lengths have shallower depth of field to work with and longer lenses are trickier to design for very close focus than wider lenses.
As a piece in Vulture notes, “shooting close-ups in IMAX was harder, technically, than capturing the vistas of Los Alamos, N.M., where Oppenheimer oversaw the creation of the atomic bomb as part of The Manhattan Project. van Hoytema usually relied on tight 80mm lenses for close-ups, but he needed to get closer than six feet for greater intimacy. With no available lenses,” up to the task “Panavision lens specialist Dan Sasaki supplied and adapted [medium format still] Hasselblad, Panavision Sphero 65, and Panavision System 65 glass specifically for the purpose.”
Nolan wanted to avoid CGI for the film, despite the fact that some of the most powerful moments involve abstractions, such as imagery of molecules and incendiary moments of atomic bomb testing, particularly the climactic Trinity Test, which the title character and his fellow scientists set off leading to proof that their atomic bomb would *spoiler alert* both work as expected and not set the earth’s atmosphere ablaze. It’s obviously a key scene in the movie and Nolan wanted to put it together with practically acquired imagery.
“Pushing the Button:” Recreating the Trinity Test for “Oppenheimer”
An interview in American Cinematographer covers quite a bit about the specialized glass Panavision made for Oppenheimer, and takes a particularly deep dive into a pair of lenses that had to be specially made to capture the practical effects that would make up elements of that bomb test sequence. The fascinating interview with Dan Sasaki, Panavision’s vice president of Optical Engineering and Lens Strategy, goes into the creation of these custom optics.
“Initially,” Sasaki recalls, van Hoytema “really couldn’t say what he was trying to do, because any project with Chris Nolan is generally very top-secret. All he said was that he wanted a waterproof probe lens that would focus very close, to cover whatever format we could. Then we said, ‘Well, what camera?’ And he said, ‘Can you make it work for IMAX?’ We told him it was going to be a challenge, but then I remembered we built large-format probes for the airplane cockpits in [Nolan’s feature] Dunkirk. Then there was talk about photographing particles with a probe submerged in water.”
As the discussion evolved, Sasaki recalls the cinematographer doling out a bit more info and a Panavision optical expert realizing. “’Oh, you want a microscope.” And he goes, “Yeah, a wide-angle microscope for IMAX.” We came up with a proof of concept for [both the 5-perf] 65mm and IMAX cameras.
‟It had all to do with the fact that we wanted to see physics, we wanted to be within the world of atoms and, of course, we couldn’t build lenses the size of atoms!” van Hoytema explained to British Cinematographer.
They then set out to design both a 24mm and a 35mm version of this microscope lens, first tackling the 35 as they knew the 24mm would be more difficult. After more testing, Sasaki recalls, “‘Hoyte asked us for closer focus and to make sure it [so it can] can go at least nine inches below the water’s surface. Our next step was to make it waterproof and set the lens stops.
“Initially, they were testing the probe with a waterproof membrane in the side of the tank that limited the diameter of the relay, but because the depth of field was so shallow, he was working at deeper stops, which accommodated smaller glass elements and shrunk the size of the probe.'”
As with any project of such complexity, the initial prototype had some issues related to the waterproofing and other issues. Sasaki’s team also realized that the calculations they’d made for the extremely fine close focus abilities of (one of the lenses needed to focus down to roughly 1mm!) were off because the density of water itself had a small but perceptible effect on the ability to calculate precise focus. So, to address that, they built “‘an intermediate optical surface, similar to a snorkel to separate the lens itself from the water.
“Hoyte is one of those people you’ll do anything for because every project he touches is amazing,” Sasaki enthuses. “He’s also technically astute — he has his own machine shop, and he builds his own parts, so he’s very understanding of the process and gives us the lead time to do things right. He’s hands-on, so it’s not, ‘here’s what I want’ and then comes back six months later. He gets involved.”
“We created science experiments,” the DP told IndieWire. “We built aquariums with power in it. We dropped silver particles in it. We had molded metallic balloons which were lit up from the inside. We had things slamming and smashing into one another such as ping-pong balls, or just had objects spinning.
“We had long shutter speeds, short shutter speeds… negative overexposure, underexposure. It was like a giant playground for all of us,” the D.P. recalls of these practical effects shots.
van Hoytema’s enthusiasm for this format is evident in his recent interview with British Cinematographer: “IMAX is constantly innovating, and they’re constantly helping us solve problems or make those cameras better. I always compare that camera to, in a way, a Formula One car. It needs a lot of care and a lot of love. But anything that gives images like that, you wouldn’t expect less. It’s not an off-the-shelf thing that just shoots school pictures. In order to get to that very specific level, it just needs service and a very meticulous guidance.”
So, given all this work to shoot the movie in 15-perf, 70mm IMAX format, Slate‘s Sam Adams asks “Is it Really Worth the Trouble to See Oppenheimer in IMAX?”.
“I’ve seen Oppenheimer twice, in digital and 70 mm IMAX,'” he writes. “Both times, as it turns out, in the exact same auditorium. So, while I can’t speak to the full range of formats in which the movie is being exhibited—standard and 4K projection, laser and xenon IMAX, not to mention 35 mm and non-IMAX 70 mm film—I can say precisely how much of a difference seeing it in this most rarefied of formats brings to the process, and how much is just hype.
“Oppenheimer is going to look spectacular in any of them…But where most IMAX movies are solely interested in exploiting its capacity for spectacle—making the big things bigger and the loud things louder—Oppenheimer is up to something different. While the Trinity test does fill the theater floor to ceiling with a cloud of nuclear fire, the movie is largely driven by conversations.
“By blowing those conversations up so much larger than life, to the point where Cillian Murphy’s eyes are not just the color but the size of swimming pools, Nolan underlines how seemingly mundane or undramatic events, the kind movies often don’t even bother with, can have absolutely massive consequences.
“The showstopper, so to speak, is the Trinity explosion itself, but the movie is dotted with arresting images all along, some of which remain abstract or ambiguous until the closing moments: the ripples of raindrops in a pond evolve into the blast radii of nuclear detonations covering the globe; an ethereal vision of clouds that we later realize are the ghostly trails of missile launches. And that’s where the added power of the 70 mm IMAX format, which offers more than four times the resolution of the best commercial digital projection, really comes in.”
