Ryan Coogler had a question that only a handful of filmmakers on earth could answer: was it madness to shoot a Southern Gothic horror film on the biggest, loudest, most cumbersome cameras in the business? So he called Christopher Nolan.
The reassurance
According to remarks from Nolan reported by Deadline, Coogler reached out before committing to IMAX for his 2025 film Sinners, looking for confirmation that the plan was workable. Nolan, who has spent two decades championing large-format film, told him it "wasn't crazy." That blessing helped set Coogler on a path that would push IMAX into territory it rarely visits — an intimate, dialogue-driven genre picture rather than a globe-spanning blockbuster.
What 'Sinners' is
Sinners, written and directed by Coogler, is set in the Mississippi Delta of 1932 and stars Michael B. Jordan as twin brothers who return home to open a juke joint, only to confront a supernatural menace. It was both a commercial and critical success: the film grossed in the hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide and earned multiple Academy Awards, including Best Cinematography for Autumn Durald Arkapaw — who, per the film's record, became the first woman and first Black cinematographer to win in that category, and the first woman to shoot a feature on large-format IMAX film.
The cameras nobody wants to lug around
Shooting on IMAX film is not a casual choice. The cameras are heavy and famously noisy — Matt Damon once likened working beside one to having "a Cuisinart in your face," Deadline noted — which makes the quiet, character-driven scenes that horror depends on especially hard to capture. The trade-off is image quality and scale: an enormous negative that lets a filmmaker hold both vastness and claustrophobia in the same frame.
Nolan, the format's patron saint
There is a reason Coogler dialed Nolan in particular. Since using IMAX cameras for sequences of The Dark Knight in 2008, Nolan has steadily expanded the format across Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk and Oppenheimer, becoming its most persistent mainstream advocate. He is about to go further than anyone has: his adaptation of The Odyssey, due in theaters July 17, is billed as the first feature shot entirely on IMAX cameras, The Hollywood Reporter reported — a feat that required a newly developed, quieter camera system to make dialogue scenes practical.
The Nolan-Coogler exchange reads less like a one-off anecdote than a hand-off: an established director passing along a conviction that chemical, large-format film is worth every logistical headache. For Coogler, the gamble paid off on screen — and at the Oscars.
