The Big Picture

Hoyte van Hoytema, a frequent collaborator of Christopher Nolan, discusses the use of IMAX and 70-millimeter film in the filming of Oppenheimer, revealing the technical challenges and benefits of these formats. The entire production team, including visual effects, lighting, and the star-studded cast, worked as a cohesive unit to achieve Nolan’s vision for the film. Hoytema shares his passion for filming and discusses his admiration for Nolan’s intuitive and sensitive approach to directing, which helps him connect with actors on an intuitive level.

One of the many reasons Christopher Nolan’s filmography is revered in the industry is due to his well-known affinity for IMAX and 70-millimeter film. His most recent feature dominating the box office this summer, Oppenheimer, pushed those limits, maxing out what IMAX film platters can do in the extraordinary biopic. To discuss the magic behind the lens, Collider’s Steve Weintraub had the opportunity to speak with another creative genius and a frequent Nolan collaborator, Director of Photography Hoyte van Hoytema.

In order to capture the gravity of the “father of the atomic bomb,” J. Robert Oppeneheimer’s story, played by Cillian Murphy, Nolan recruited trusted cinematographer Hoytema to work alongside him. While talking with Collider, Hoytema digs into his passion for filming, walking us through the details of all things IMAX, the format that can provide the spectacle a screenplay like this deserves. On top of the technical equipment, Hoytema also tells us everyone, from the visual effects department to lighting to the star-studded cast, including Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt, worked as a unit to achieve Nolan’s vision.

In this one-on-one, Hoytema also reveals the thing he geeks out over—besides filming—and shares surprising insight into one of today’s greatest filmmakers, having previously worked with Nolan on Interstellar, Dunkirk and Tenet. We find out why, unlike directors like Ridley Scott, Nolan’s productions generally employ the use of one camera, what Hoytema would change about IMAX cameras if he could, the equipment that didn’t exist prior to Oppenheimer, and tons more that you can check out in the video or transcript below.

COLLIDER: Because I’m at Comic-Con, I just want to start with, is there anything that you geek out over? Maybe it’s cameras, I’m not sure, but is there something that you geek out about

HOYTE VAN HOYTEMA: You mean in general in life?

Yeah, is there anything you collect? What do you geek out over?

HOYTEMA: I geek out over my machine shop. I have a CNC machine, a lot of metalworking things. We build a lot of stuff here in the garage.

I love it. So you have done such incredible work over your career, but there are going to be people who have never seen anything. If someone has never seen anything you’ve done, what’s the first thing you’d like them watching and why?

HOYTEMA: I think, obviously, it’s always the last film, you know? The last film you’ve done, it’s always sort of an accumulation of things you dropped and things you added, and you’re constantly growing, you’re constantly evolving. You’re constantly becoming wiser/more stupid, more interesting/more stuck up. But I think you always like to show the people who you are at the moment. So, I kind of feel the last film is always the nicest one to watch.

Image via Universal

What would surprise Christopher Nolan fans to learn about making a movie with Christopher Nolan?

HOYTEMA: What surprised me, and what was something that I had to learn from working with Chris, is that he is an extremely intuitive person as well. He’s, of course, known for his mind-bending intelligence, and his films; they always feel extremely well put together and extremely well planned. But what is very beautiful with Chris is that he is somebody that is not afraid of following his heart, and reacting to intuitive impulses, as well. He’s a very sensitive and very much a feeling person. It’s in that way, I also feel, that helps him very much in communicating with actors. A lot of actors, they are also people that work extremely much on an intuition level.

Ultimately with a film, you’re also sort of translating a feeling to the audience, and in that way, that was something that surprised me back then because it doesn’t surprise me today, anymore. But, as people call him sometimes, “Oh, he’s very technical,” I would definitely debate it. He is one of the most sensitive and most intuitive directors I work with.

One of the things I’m fascinated by are the various processes that people make movies. For example, Ridley Scott will shoot with six cameras or seven cameras, and Roger Deakins will shoot with just one, and that’s it. I’m curious, how often are you just using one camera on set, and how often do you like to do coverage?

HOYTEMA: For most of the time, we work with one camera on set. Effectively shooting with Chris is like a one-camera show. The camera is sort of the magic box that everything that happens around has to be directed and evolving towards, getting sucked into that one little box. So that one camera really becomes an epicenter on our shoes. As soon as you put two cameras on the set, that attention gets somehow divided, and being with Chris on the set is [an] extremely focused group of people that really work towards a very specific goal.

Chris is also somebody that loves to sit very close to the camera in order to understand what the camera is seeing, so he’s always very close by looking into the set next to the camera. He’s not a material collector or a cleaning lady or a vacuum cleaner, you know? It’s a very meticulous and very focused process. The actors know exactly towards where they’re working, the production designers, the prop people, the set dressers, but also, us, lighting, et cetera. It all has to evolve towards that one direction, and so the one camera should just feel very logical to us. It’s sort of a very ultimate way of filmmaking for us. It feels very focused.

Image via Universal

You shot with IMAX film, and you also shot with a 65-millimeter. Can you talk about the conversations you guys had as to when it would be an IMAX shot versus not an IMAX shot?

HOYTEMA: As I said before, as a lot of it is very much pulled out, we also work a little bit with our intuition there. That intuition is also very much led by the idea that we just wanna shoot as much as possible on as rich as possible negative. So, we love shooting as much as possible on IMAX. And also, in this film, the more intimate the situation got, the more sort of up close and personal things got, the more we want to get in there with an IMAX camera.

Now, of course, the IMAX camera has a few technical limitations that make it very hard and very challenging. It’s a very loud camera, and it’s also bulky, and it’s big. You cannot be a fly on the wall, for instance, with it, so in some situations, as much as you want to, they sort of require you to rethink it a little bit. Sometimes we had to record dialogue, so we would shoot on the five per 70-millimeter camera, but we very often would add an extra shot or an extra take on an IMAX camera to see if Chris could probably salvage the sound of it and put it in a film. So ultimately, I would say it’s a very intuitive choice, but driven by sort of the will to squeeze as much as possible in there.

Listen, I am so thankful for what you and Chris do with IMAX. It’s my favorite format. There’s nothing like sitting in a theater with that huge IMAX screen. What do you actually love and hate about IMAX cameras? Like if you could fix something, the big camera, or is it just the sound, how loud it is?

HOYTEMA: If we would be able to fix the sound in an IMAX camera, it would be fantastic. Now, it’s almost to solve that sound problem is like defying physics. It’s not just asking, “IMAX, can you make this thing more quiet?” What you have to imagine, and if you just hold on one second—I’ll just grab something so I can show you—we got some real fun things here, some film strips. Let’s start with this one, right? I’m just gonna show this. This is 35-millimeter, right? This is 35-millimeter anamorphic, that size. So a camera, in order to get these 24 shots per second in, the cam has to drag 24 of those frames per second through a camera, correct? So now we go five per, which is a camera that is 70-millimeter, that does the same as a 35-millimeter camera. And why are these cameras so bulky and heavy? This is five per old fashioned, the 65-millimeter camera. So per second, 24 of these big frames have to be pulled through a little hole. Well, it gets a little louder, it gets a little bulkier. But if you look at IMAX, this is how your negative is exposed, and this is how the film strip looks. So, instead of going like this through the camera, it goes like this through the camera. And here you see every frame is a huge piece of exposed film, so 24 of those frames, you have to pull through the camera per second.

So you can imagine how much power and inertia and how big [of] motors you need in order to do that, and how aggressive your mechanism has to be to every time stop that frame on the dime. That’s the reason that that camera is so loud and it’s so bulky and it’s so heavy. It’s just physically, it’s very heavy, and it’s very difficult. So, there you have the problem. I would love it to be as silent as a nothing, but it’s very challenging to get it there. But that’s definitely some improvement I would work on. And the more quieter that camera becomes, the more situations we can start applying that camera to. So ultimately, quieter would be my wish. I don’t care so much about making it smaller, making it more comfortable. We’re all the time sort of adapting the ergonomics of that camera. In the end, it’s a little box. It’s a mini fridge that you have to put in a special place, with grips that have the sensitivity of ballerinas. And [with] a little bit of smart external engineering, you can get the camera wherever you need it to be. But I think those sounds, that’s something that would be really wonderful to do something with.

This is gonna sound crazy, and I’m obviously just brainstorming in the moment, but is it possible to actually make the camera bigger for certain situations and almost blanket the camera with soundproofing? So instead of going smaller, you’re going larger, and you’re minimizing all the sound coming out of it, and you’re using it in specific shots where you don’t have camera movement, or it’s on a device that can move separately?

HOYTEMA: That’s not crazy at all. I mean, that’s exactly what we have built, a certain device — blimps, they’re called. So we have blimps for the IMAX cameras—a coffin, as we sometimes say—but it’s literally the device that fits like a glove, or like a sort of coffin, that fits like a glove around the camera and is made out of different soundproofing materials. And yes, you get it quieter, but by those kinds of experimentations, we already found out that, exponentially, you have to get so big just because the sound in relation is so loud. Also, what you have to think about, a lot of the sounds that come out of the camera come through the lens, come through the front of the camera, and, at some point, you cannot just keep layering your optics. It’s because that will, in the end, start to really affect some of your picture quality.

All I can say is you just demonstrated it with the examples of film, but when you capture an image on an IMAX frame like that, you’re capturing so much more information. I don’t think people realize when you film on IMAX, and then you bring it down to even 35-millimeter, the image is still so much better. There’s so much more information there.

HOYTEMA: Oh yeah, absolutely. That trickle-down effect that people underestimate very often very much. But if you trickle down from an original that is pristine and that is great, you will feel that quality trickle down very, very much in the derived formats. Every time you print down, or you go down on the resolution, you lose a lot of detail, and you also gain a lot of artifacts. The better your original materials, the lesser artifacts you get. So, when I look at that, and at Apple or whatever, and I look at something that’s originated in 70-mil or something that originated in 35-mil, I can very easily spot the difference.

Image via Paramount/Warner Bros.

I spoke to Chris, and he told me there are no CGI shots in the movie, which I found amazing. What was it like when you and him, and everybody involved, were talking about filming certain sequences, especially the use of light, and he wants to use these big IMAX cameras and do everything in camera? Can you sort of talk about making everything happen, with the visual effects team, obviously?

HOYTEMA: It’s, for me, always a super exciting period in the prep that is everybody sort of throwing those crazy ideas into the hats. And a lot of them, they don’t have necessarily technical solutions to it, and then, step by step, people come up with all these kind of weird solutions and weird ideas that we then very often test them, and we start testing them as well as we start building them. Like it was very clear to us that, very early in the start, we wanted to—and I’m talking then about Andrew Jackson and Scott Fisher, our glorious visual and special effects team that were working very close together, also, because visual effects and special effects on a shoot like this is very closely related. Because Andrew Jackson, as much as how he’s connected to a visual effects department, wanted to rely as little as possible on CGI. So he really took control over trying to get as much as possible in camera, as well in his world, and with the help of Scott Fisher. So they work very close together.

As much as we wanted this to be IMAX and part of the IMAX sequences, we realized that we want to shoot a lot of microphotography on IMAX format, [which] doesn’t really have those kinds of possibilities, right? So straight away, we started engineering those specific lenses for the IMAX camera. Effectively, when you do this sort of microphotography, when you want to have a camera, for instance, in between here, or track in between here to enlarge the world of this to sort of a life-size format, you need special lenses. You need what we call probe lenses. They didn’t exist for IMAX, so Dan Sasaki from Panavision built us this pro lens, and we experimented with it, and we improved it, and in the end, it was something that we used a lot for aquarium work and micro work and macro work. So, that was very exciting.

And basically, the visual effects department, you could say, was a tent that was always put up next to our set where we’re doing all these science experiments. We would shoot molded metal, shoot into aquariums with silver particles, or do micro explosions of balloons in reverse, et cetera, et cetera. There’s a lot of small, little, very tactile physics experiments going on that we then tried to film in different ways, with different kinds of cameras, as well. And then sort of cobbled together this kind of idea of the quantum physics or particle physics, or atoms crashing into each other, or a gigantic nuclear explosion, et cetera, et cetera.

Oppenheimer is in theaters now. Check out Collider’s interview with Christopher Nolan below.