Kodak Made Black & White Film Specially For ‘Oppenheimer’
Image via Universal Pictures
For all its colorful ideas, developing large-format black-and-white film was a first for Kodak. With the making of Oppenheimer, it finally crossed off that undertaking from its list.
The 131-year-old analog photography brand crafted a bespoke black and white film stock for Christopher Nolan’s monumental historical film, Oppenheimer.
The movie, now showing in theaters everywhere, narrates the tale of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy), who is often hailed as the “father of the atomic bomb.” To jump between timelines, the film cleverly utilizes two color settings: ‘Fission’ portrayed in vibrant color, and ‘Fusion’. depicted in classic grayscale. The pursuit of the perfect black and white segments led the creators to Kodak, as they felt simply manipulating footage to be devoid of color wouldn’t give off the same effect.
“One of my very first phone calls was to Kodak, enquiring if they had any 65mm large-format black and white filmstock,” recalls cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema. But Kodak had never produced large-format black-and-white film before.
Image via Universal Pictures
After months of perseverance and collaboration, the company pulled through, producing a prototype Double-X 5222 65mm film stock, wrapped in humble handwritten labels.
With that, the journey was not without obstacles. The prototypes necessitated re-engineering the IMAX cameras for this unique filmstock.
“It became quite a complex engineering process—encompassing things like the thickness of the backing for the film emulsion, and making new gates and pressure plates in the cameras so as to avoid scratches,” explains van Hoytema on the Kodak website.
All that effort was worth it, as van Hoytema revels that there’s nothing like shooting with actual black-and-white film. He drew from his time in film school in Poland to capture these unique perspectives.
[via PetaPixel and IndieWire, images via Universal Pictures]
This article was crafted with assistance from an AI engine, and has been reviewed, edited, and fact-checked.
