The Oldest Tradition in Art

On a black volcanic beach, Christopher Nolan peers into a wheeled contraption that looks like a portable air-conditioner. The IMAX camera, weighing some 180 kilograms, is encased in a black box—a “blimp”—designed to muffle the camera's sound. Unhoused, the machine is so loud that Matt Damon compared it to ‘a blender... in your face’. Nolan had used IMAX cameras for action scenes before, but this new casing let him do something he never could: film quiet dialogue, with the huge machine only inches from an actor’s face.