Get A Behind-The-Scenes Look At The Making Of Tenet In IMAX
For more than a decade, Christopher Nolan has been utilizing IMAX cameras to get his movies past "in your face" and into the realm of "in your head." He used them to unsettling effect in Inception, and brought the audience further into the fray for Dunkirk. Some of us are still battling vertigo caused by the opening shot from 2008's The Dark Knight. Creatively, it's a perfect marriage: one of the most sensationalistic filmmakers of a generation with a penchant for shooting practical effects and cameras designed for the biggest movie theater screens in the world.
After months of delays, moviegoers are primed to watch Tenet, the latest addition to Nolan's oeuvre, a film that already has critics saying "...huh?" And thanks to Nolan's ongoing partnership with IMAX, the exclamations of "huh?" will be as big as ever. Helpfully, they'll also read the same forwards and backwards.
Leading up to the film's release, IMAX has put out a behind the scenes look at the making of Tenet, presented in glorious, um, 1080p.
Nolan and IMAX: an occasionally violent match made in heaven
In the video, Nolan describes his affection for biggest-of-big-screen filmmaking in no uncertain terms, soliloquizing that the format "has this extraordinary strength and power in terms of how deeply it can take the audience into the story." Scott Smith, an IMAX technician on the project with credits from Nolan's Interstellar and Dunkirk, as well as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, estimated that the production of Tenet "used more cameras and shot more film" than any other movie he's aware of.
Nolan's appreciation for the technology hasn't always been gooey — sometimes love is messy, after all. During filming for 2008's The Dark Knight, a car chase sequence saw the destruction of a $500,000 IMAX camera, one of just four in the world at the time. Then, while making The Dark Knight Rises, a stunt driver accidentally bat-crashed a bat-pod into another IMAX camera. So who knows? Maybe all of Christopher Nolan's adoration for shooting in 70mm is genuine — or maybe it's just survivor's guilt. Check out the behind-the-scenes look and decide for yourself.