The IMAX Keighley Camera: How Nolan and IMAX Built a Quieter 65mm Camera for ‘The Odyssey’

When Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey ends, a title card dedicates the film to a man most audiences have never heard of.

David Keighley spent more than five decades working with IMAX, the last fifteen of them as the company’s first chief quality officer, and for the last twenty years of his life, he was Nolan’s personal mentor on the format, going back to Nolan’s first use of IMAX cameras on The Dark Knight. Keighley reviewed the final dailies for The Odyssey just days before he died, in August 2025, at age 77.

The camera that helped make that production possible carries his name.

A New Camera for an Old Problem

Nolan has been building toward this moment since 2008, when The Dark Knight became the first Hollywood film to use IMAX cameras for select sequences – shot, fittingly, in Chicago, the same city where a 16-year-old Nolan first saw an IMAX film at the Museum of Science and Industry and wondered why nobody made a dramatic feature that way. Every Nolan film since has pushed the format further, culminating in Oppenheimer, the first film to shoot sections in IMAX black-and-white 65mm film, created specifically for that production.

What no feature had done before The Odyssey was shoot an entire film on IMAX film cameras, from start to finish.

The main obstacle was not image quality. It was noise. Earlier IMAX film cameras were loud enough to make sync dialogue difficult in intimate scenes.

To solve it, IMAX built an entirely new camera body: the Keighley.

Named After the Man Who Built IMAX’s Standards

IMAX confirmed the camera’s name shortly before the film’s release. It honors David Keighley and his wife Patricia, who continues to serve as the company’s chief quality guru. The two worked alongside IMAX from the early 1970s and joined the company in 1988.

The Keighley is built with a carbon-fiber body, making it meaningfully lighter and quieter than previous IMAX film cameras, while still moving 15-perforation 65mm film through the gate – the largest photochemical format used in cinema today. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, ASC, then paired that body with Panavision lenses specially developed for IMAX.

Solving Sound First, Then Sight

Even with the redesigned body, the Keighley wasn’t quiet enough on its own for close dialogue work. For those scenes, the crew built a soundproof housing, referred to on set as “the blimp,” around the camera. Fully assembled, the rig reportedly weighed close to 400 pounds.

The blimp solved the noise problem and created a new one: it made the camera too bulky for two actors to hold eye contact around it in a two-shot. The crew’s answer was a custom mirror system mounted beside the lens, letting performers look at each other around the machine instead of through it. It’s the kind of fix that works precisely because audiences will never notice it.

Kodak’s Film, IMAX’s Camera

One distinction gets lost in most coverage of The Odyssey: IMAX builds the camera and the theatrical format. It does not manufacture film stock. That’s Kodak.

The Odyssey was shot on more than two million feet of Kodak 65mm motion picture film, manufactured at Kodak’s plant in Rochester, New York. Kodak also produced the release prints for the film’s 35mm, 70mm 5-perf, and IMAX 70mm theatrical versions, meaning the same Rochester-made stock carried the film from camera to the 41 theaters worldwide equipped to screen it in full IMAX 70mm.

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What It Means Going Forward

The Odyssey opened in theaters on July 17, 2026, to strong reviews and a $264.1 million global opening weekend. Its significance for the industry, though, sits a level below the numbers. The Keighley camera now exists independent of this one production, and IMAX has indicated it will be made available to other filmmakers. The two practical problems that had shaped how IMAX film was used on narrative features – noise and eyeline – now have working solutions.

What happens next, and who picks up the camera after Nolan, is the more interesting story.

The Odyssey at a Glance

Thank you for reading! Discover the lenses behind the film.

🔗 What Lenses Were Used on ‘The Odyssey’?