Christopher Nolan finally figures out "usable sound" for The Odyssey

In what appears to be a career first for Christopher Nolan, the Oscar-winning filmmaker claims his upcoming adaptation of Homer’s epic, The Odyssey, features “usable sound.” Taking after one of his cinematic heroes, Michael Mann, Nolan has long been a proponent of having his characters mumble through scenes as large bombs and engines muddy up the mix. Since the director prefers shooting on large-format film, which requires a noisy, cumbersome camera, and refuses to re-record audio during post-production, incoherent dialogue has since become a hallmark of Nolan’s auteurism. That was until science finally caught up with the director. IMAX recently developed “the blimp,” a casing for its cameras that reduces camera noise, allowing Nolan to record clean audio, to the delight of his massive viewership, which spends a good portion of his movies wondering what that guy just said. Despite “the blimp” being essentially the same technique filmmakers used in the 1930s as talkies took over, Nolan called the technology “a game-changer.” “You can be shooting a foot from [an actor’s] face while they’re whispering and get usable sound,” Nolan tells Empire. “What that opens up are intimate moments of performance on the world’s most beautiful format.” Nolan did not specify whether “blimp” technology could adequately capture the dulcet tones of Tom Hardy speaking through a mask with the same clarity.