From 16mm to 65mm: My Degrees of Separation from Christopher Nolan

When Christopher Nolan shot his debut feature ‘Following’ for around £6,000, he was doing exactly what I was doing at the time: counting every foot of 16mm film and praying the 6:1 shooting ratio would hold. A few days ago, the first trailer dropped for his 2026 epic The Odyssey—a film that reportedly burned through around two million feet of 15-perf IMAX. The scale has changed beyond recognition, but the DNA hasn’t.

That same small-gauge discipline—obsession with preparation, economy, and physical capture—runs unbroken from 16mm to 70mm.

Over the years, through people, cameras, and engineering, I’ve found myself repeatedly brushing up against that lineage.

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The 16mm Connection: Lucy Russell and the Arri SRII

One of my earliest links to Nolan’s working method came while shooting, ‘Superstitious Minds,’ on an Arri SRII. Our lead actress was Lucy Russell, who had recently worked with Nolan on, ‘Following,’ where she played the “Blonde.”

Watching Lucy work, it was immediately obvious she’d come out of the same 16mm crucible many of us did in the 1990s. When you’re shooting self-financed film stock at a strict ratio, you don’t “find the scene” in the edit. You rehearse until it’s right, and you capture it in one or two takes.

Lucy brought that exact precision to our set. It was a reminder that whether you’re working with four figures or nine, the discipline of the frame is everything.

From counting feet to burning miles.

The 16mm Arri SRII and the 65mm Logmar Magellan — bookends of the same filmmaking philosophy.

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The Engineering Connection: Testing the Magellan.

Fast forward to 2023. I was asked to shoot 35mm tests for ORWO at Black Hangar Studios as they prepared to relaunch motion-picture film stocks for the first time in 50 years.

While there, I met Tommy Lau Madsen of Logmar, who had brought along the prototype of the Magellan 65mm camera—the same camera Hoyte van Hoytema had used on Tenet to address the weight, stability, and practicality issues of large-format cinematography.

Handling the Magellan felt like encountering a Formula 1 version of the SRII: Danish-engineered, astonishingly stable, and far lighter than its format suggested. I helped with some tests, and seeing that level of registration first hand was a revelation. This wasn’t nostalgia—it was evolution.

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The Future: Salford and The Odyssey

Just days ago, I saw Tommy and Lasse of Logmar again at the launch of the Salford Celluloid Centre of Excellence (SCCE), where two finished Magellan cameras are now permanently based.

What the SCCE is doing matters. They’re taking formats once reserved for filmmakers like Nolan and Tarantino and putting them into the hands of emerging crews—training a new generation who will graduate already fluent in celluloid, including 65mm.

That ecosystem—engineers, labs, trained crews—is what allows a film like The Odyssey to exist. Nolan has spoken about shooting over 100 hours of IMAX footage, including dialogue captured at sea using newly developed “silent” housings. That technology is the direct descendant of the self-blimped 16mm cameras many of us started on.

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Final Thoughts

We hear a lot about the “death of film,” yet ORWO are manufacturing new stocks, Logmar and IMAX are building new cameras, and major productions are exposing millions of feet of negative.

Christopher Nolan isn’t an outlier because he’s a genius—he’s an outlier because he never abandoned the discipline film demands. Whether you’re shooting a short on an SRII at 6:1 or a $250 million epic on 15-perf 70mm, the goal is unchanged: to capture a physical moment that exists in the world.

That’s a lesson film taught us early—and one it’s still teaching today.

Mark

You can watch, ‘Following,’ here: https://youtu.be/0cypA1fIMqI?si=3fdKVVt05pdWVobu

You can watch, ‘Superstitious Minds,’ here: https://youtu.be/-KvOh5_C-WQ?si=Zd7lFoR2fKVONJOZ