Why Christopher Nolan Dedicated The Odyssey To His Canadian Friend
My latest story for Be Giant about husband-and-wife duo David and Patricia Keighley who brought IMAX to Hollywood
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I have been a Christopher Nolan fan ever since I read how he fell in love with film: as a teenager watching science and space documentaries in the Omnimax theatre at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.
Me too.
Summers for me, growing up in the Toronto area in the 1970s and 80s, always meant Ontario Place and Cinesphere, the park’s signature geodesic dome that is the world’s first permanent IMAX theatre.
Whether it was with my parents, class trips, or friends, I think I saw every IMAX film in those years, which screened multiple times a day, summer after summer. Films such as North of Superior (1971), Snow Job (1974), and one of my early favourites Catch The Sun (1973), which includes a single shot riding in the front seat of a roller coaster as it crests the first hill and plunges down.
It was my first roller coaster experience and that image and feeling of speeding along the rattling track has stayed with me with greater clarity than all the real roller coasters I have enjoyed since.
Catch The Sun was the first IMAX film created by David and Patricia Keighley, two Toronto kids who had fallen in love with the Canadian-invented large format film while on a date at Cinesphere to see North of Superior.
The Keighleys would go on to build their shared careers with IMAX, officially as the Chief Quality Officers but unofficially known through the film world as the guardians of the IMAX experience.
It was David who first put an IMAX film camera in Nolan’s hands in 2006, and the Keighleys worked alongside Nolan and his wife and producing partner Emma Thomas, as Nolan sought to integrate IMAX more and more into his filmmaking.
A 20-year professional and personal relationship culminating with The Odyssey, the first Hollywood movie created entirely in IMAX film, and which is dedicated to David Keighley, who died of cancer last September, days after approving every frame of the 2 million feet of film shot by Nolan and his team.
As the Keighleys’ son Geoff wrote on Instagram following the film’s world premiere on July 7: “Like Odysseus, my Dad made it home.”
To reach more about the Keighleys, the new IMAX camera named in their honour and Christopher Nolan’s career-defining relationship with the made-in-Canada film technology, please click below for my latest story for Be Giant.
Why Christopher Nolan dedicated The Odyssey to this Canadian man
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