Tom Holland said he briefly thought he was “totally sh*tting the bed” on his first day filming The Odyssey with Christopher Nolan because the IMAX cameras kept forcing cuts every three minutes. The misunderstanding vanished once George Cottle explained the camera’s limit, but the episode shows how the first all-IMAX shoot can scramble even a seasoned actor’s read on a scene.
Three Minutes on Set
Holland said, “Working with the Imax cameras for the first time is an experience,” adding, “It is unlike anything I have ever seen before, and I didn’t know that it only ran for three minutes.” That one detail changed the whole mood on set, because the repeated stops were not about the performance at all.
Holland described turning to Jon Bernthal and asking, “Why does he keep cutting? Why does he keep doing that?” He said he was thinking, “Does he not like what we’re doing? What is happening?” before Cottle stepped in with the answer: “No, no, no, no, no, there’s only three minutes in the mag.”
Christopher Nolan and IMAX
Tom Holland Reflects on MCU Growth Ahead of Brand New Day sits alongside a much narrower takeaway here: the equipment, not the scene, was driving the interruption. Christopher Nolan has used IMAX before in Oppenheimer, Tenet, Dunkirk, Interstellar, The Dark Knight Rises, Inception and The Dark Knight, but The Odyssey is the first film shot entirely with IMAX cameras.
The setup makes the first day of photography a technical test as much as a performance test. If the camera runs only three minutes, the actor has to treat every reset as part of the workflow, not as a judgment on the take.
The Odyssey on July 17
Holland said, “Oh, thank god,” once he learned why the camera kept stopping, and later summed up the moment as, “I thought I was totally sh*tting the bed in this scene.” That is the sharpest read on the day: the pressure came from the format, not from Nolan’s opinion of the work.
The Odyssey is set to premiere on July 17, and this account gives the clearest early glimpse of how Nolan’s first all-IMAX feature is being made. For Holland, the real lesson is simple: in this production, a cut can mean a camera limit, not a bad take.
