Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Was Nearly Longer, But IMAX Forced Him to Stay “Under 3 Hours”

There were some limitations in Christopher Nolan’s decision to shoot “The Odyssey” entirely with IMAX cameras, to the point that he was forced to keep the film under three hours.

Speaking with Letterboxd, Nolan mentions IMAX whiz David Keighley “dragging” him into the booth at an audience screening “to show me the final limitation of this three-hour limit on the film prints,” Nolan explained. “Over the years, I’d challenged him to enlarge the platters or come up with a clip system to hold the film end when it got a bit bigger than the platter.”

Sadly, Nolan says the only way the three-hour mark could be surpassed would be through “an entire rebuild of the projection system,” so he finally decided, “Yeah, okay. I’ll stay under three hours.”

Nolan mentions that he shot a ton of material for “The Odyssey” and that it was a “challenge” to pick and choose which scenes made the final cut. Enter editor Jennifer Lame, who was told by Nolan, “If it doesn’t serve the story, it has to go.”

Given that it’s Homer’s “The Odyssey,” condensing such an expansive story into a single feature proved to be a challenge. Can we really call Nolan’s version—which clocks in at 2 hours 52 minutes—“stripped down”?

By his own account, Nolan shot an enormous amount of material: roughly two million feet of IMAX film, equivalent to around 90 hours of exposed footage. After accounting for multiple takes and unused material, the actual usable footage would have been far less—but still likely dozens of hours.

Of course, the technical constraints at play cannot be ignored. IMAX 70mm projection generally tops out around the 165-minute mark. Nolan managed to reach that limit, with the possibility of adding another seven minutes of non-IMAX post-film credits. With “Oppenheimer,” Nolan’s longest film, he reached a full three-hour runtime through specialized projection solutions, and the film was only shot about 75% with IMAX cameras.

Truth be told, Nolan has only crossed the three-hour mark once in his career, with “Oppenheimer.” His next-longest films are “Interstellar” (2 hours 49 minutes) and “The Dark Knight Rises” (2 hours 44 minutes). However, “The Odyssey” is a different beast entirely—a story sprawling in both scale and ambition. Nolan is not one to release director’s cuts or deleted scenes, so it’s highly unlikely that we’ll get to see the shelved footage in the near future.