Why Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland Never Made Eye Contact While Playing Mother and Son in ‘The Odyssey’

Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ was already considered a huge technical challenge before cameras even started rolling. The filmmaker wanted to do something that had never been done before: shoot an entire movie using IMAX cameras. While Nolan had worked with IMAX technology for years, including major sequences in films like ‘The Dark Knight’ and ‘Oppenheimer’, using the cameras for every scene created a completely new set of problems.

One of the biggest issues was not the size of the images, but the sound. IMAX cameras are famous for creating incredible visuals, but they are also extremely loud during filming. The noise comes from the large film reels moving inside the camera, making it difficult to record quiet conversations and emotional performances.

According to The Credits, Nolan and his longtime cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema had to find a solution that would allow them to keep the IMAX look while still capturing important dialogue scenes. The answer was a specially designed soundproof cover known as a “blimp.”

IMAX created a custom housing that reduced the camera noise enough for actors to perform normally around it. The invention allowed Nolan to place IMAX cameras closer to the actors during smaller, more personal scenes without ruining the audio.

However, the new setup created another unexpected problem. Because the soundproof casing made the already large cameras even bigger, there was no room to place the equipment between actors during certain scenes. This meant performers sometimes could not directly see each other while filming.

That became especially challenging for intimate scenes involving Matt Damon’s Odysseus and Anne Hathaway’s Penelope. For actors, maintaining eye contact is often one of the most important parts of creating a believable emotional connection, and the unusual camera placement threatened to make those moments feel unnatural.

Nolan’s team came up with a surprisingly simple solution: mirrors.

The crew placed mirrors around the camera so actors could look at reflections that matched their scene partner’s eye line. This allowed them to perform as if they were looking directly at each other, even though the massive IMAX camera was blocking the usual setup.

Damon explained that the trick worked so well that he barely noticed it while acting.

“The effect, it worked seamlessly. And in fact, I was talking to Anne about this yesterday because I realized that, in my memory of doing that very intimate scene with her at the end of the movie, I don’t remember it being a mirror. I remember I was so dialed into Annie’s eyes that I just remember Annie being right there, and she was, she was right there, but I was doing it to the mirror.”

Damon added that the mirror technique was part of a larger solution that allowed Nolan to achieve his vision.

“That was the hack that Chris came up with to say, ‘Okay, this will work if we can deaden the sound, which requires a giant box. If we can fix the eye lines, we can shoot large format, and we can shoot really quiet scenes.’”

The result allowed Nolan and his team to combine the massive scale of IMAX photography with quieter, character-driven moments that required emotional performances from the cast.

‘The Odyssey’ features Damon as Odysseus alongside Hathaway as Penelope, with a large ensemble that includes Tom Holland, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, and Mia Goth.

The film’s production has already been praised for its ambitious approach, and Nolan’s mirror trick shows just how much planning went into creating the epic adventure. Instead of changing his vision because of technical limitations, the director and his team found a creative way around them.

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