‘Precious cargo’: the ultra-rare, 18kmlong Oppenheimer Imax reel screening in Melbourne
If Richard Morrison unravelled the Oppenheimer film reel from its new home in Melbourne’s Imax cinema, he wouldn’t have to stop until he reached Sandringham Beach, more than 18km away.
He won’t be doing that.
Morrison is one of only two people in Australia who are qualified to show the much anticipated Christopher Nolan film, about the physicist and architect of the Manhattan Project, in Imax 1570 format: the largest and highest resolution film format in existence.
With a running time of three hours, the 1570 Oppenheimer reel weighs 260kg. The copy in Morrison’s care is the only one in the southern hemisphere, and one of only 30 in the world.
The platters that hold and feed the large-format film reels through the Imax projectors had to be widened to 1.85 metres to accommodate the sheer heft of the work. The technology accompanied the film on its journey, arriving in Australia on 53 individual reels.
It was Morrison’s projectionist,
David Booty, who spent two days “building” the film – sorting the reels, splicing them together and winding them on to the platters.
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“Oppenheimer is definitely the longest film we’ve ever projected in one go on the Imax film system,” said Morrison. “These are the costliest film prints in the world. It’s pretty much precious cargo.”
When the film opens on Thursday, Morrison and Booty will share the projection room shifts. While most cinemas went digital more than a decade ago – making the job of projectionist largely obsolete – the 1570 film system requires constant supervision.
There is no margin for error as the film is fed through the projector. A slipup can irreparably damage the product and there is little time for rectification as the film moves through the projector at 1.7 metres a second.
Nolan’s championing of 1570 film as the “gold standard of motion picture photography” has single-handedly kept it alive. In Melbourne’s Imax cinema, the 1570 projector was decommissioned in 2015 to make way for a digital system using a laser light source. Then Nolan, who has been shooting with Imax cameras since The Dark Knight, shot his 2017 film Dunkirk mainly on 1570.
The world’s 30 Imax theatres still in existence (Melbourne is one of only four outside the US) dusted off their 1570s so cinephiles could see Dunkirk as the director intended.
“What we’re seeing now is a much younger skew of people interested in real film, who may never have watched a film that hasn’t been shot on digital video,” Morrison says.
As the highest resolution film format available, projected on to a 23metre-high screen, the 1570, he says, is the ultimate expression of a filmmaker’s craft.
Pre-sales for Oppenheimer in all Imax formats in Melbourne have surpassed the venue’s previous record achieved by Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015, with more than 21,000 tickets sold for Nolan’s film.
“They’re double what we expected them to be, to be honest,” Morrison says.
Oppenheimer premiered in Paris on 11 July, attracting almost universal accolades. The Los Angeles Times film editor, Joshua Rothkopf, hailed it as “incredible”, while the Associated Press writer Lindsey Bahr described the film as “a spectacular achievement”.
Full reviews of Oppenheimer will be published early on Thursday morning AEST.