IMAX proves just about big enough to contain the huge rock star energy of The Rolling Stones.

IMAX Corporation

Rock bands don’t come much bigger than the Rolling Stones and cinema doesn’t come much bigger than IMAX – so putting them together makes a lot of sense.

It’s fitting then that the concert movie, Rolling Stones – At The Max — which was shot with IMAX film cameras at Wembley Stadium in London in 1990 as part of the band’s Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle tour and released in 1991 — has been remastered and, for a brief time, will be appearing on select IMAX screens this week.

The First Concert Shot With IMAX

IMAX 15/70 film is renowned as being the highest resolution film format available and Rolling Stones-At The Max was the first concert movie to be captured in the format. However, this digital re-release is unfortunately not getting a print release, so it’s a 1.90:1 aspect ratio only. While this was a slight disappointment, even so, there’s no denying the incredible clarity of the movie’s images, which, as the cliché goes, look as if they could have been filmed yesterday. The audio has also been remastered, and while surround is minimal, the bombastic style of the music works very well in IMAX sound.

The pin-sharp imagery on a huge screen conveys exactly what it’s like to be on a giant stage and is a fantastic time capsule that takes us back to the classic Wembley Stadium with its famous twin towers. The concert’s famously huge, provocative inflatables that accompany songs such as ‘Honky Tonk Women’, looked suitably oversized on the huge BFI IMAX screen.

The movie also did a great job at capturing the energy-laden performance of the band in its classic line-up, consisting of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, Billy Wyman, and Charlie Watts.

Unpredictable Rocks Stars vs IMAX

Just as the famous 2011 Maroon 5 song attests, the band’s legendary lead singer truly Moves Like Jagger, leaping around the stage as if possessing the energy of two men. In all likelihood, one of those was bassist Bill Wyman, who barely moves at all. That is, of course, except when you don’t want him to.

As renowned IMAX cinematographer James Neilson, who was a camera operator on the film, told me in a Zoom conversation, because Wyman was always in the same place, he specifically planned a dolly shot that would move underneath the stage and then tilt up, to dramatically reveal Wyman playing the bass.

“So, all that was my shot, and what happens is that we go and then we tilt up and Wyman’s not there! It was the first time he had moved!”

IMAX film cameras are known for having magazines that only hold three minutes of film, so multiple cameras were needed to capture a single song, staggering the rolls to cover each song completely: eight were used to capture the concert. However, longer magazines were developed making it easier to capture the longer songs. However, it still required cameras to overlap the performances.

“Tony Myers, who was the editor, did a heroic job putting all that footage together and pleasing Mick and Keith, and making sure they each got their allotted amount of screen time”, reminisced Neilson.

Fascinatingly, the movie was edited on an EditDroid, a pioneering non-linear system from Lucasfilm that let editors assemble the footage. The system was later sold to Avid, the company that still dominates the market today.

IMAX cameras are renowned for being too loud for quiet dialogue scenes in movies so I asked Neilson if that noise interfered with filming the concert. “The music overpowered any camera noise that was there,” he said. “There was just no way over that the dB level coming out of those speakers that you could manage to hear a camera running,” said Neilson.

Too close?

In a pre-screening audio intro, the film’s director, Julien Temple, recalled that back in 1991, the band had a mixed reaction to seeing their faces writ large on the huge IMAX screen. “As it started to play, the first thing that happened was I heard shocks and gasps of anxious intakes of air. And actually, Ronnie Wood howled out and ran out of the screening. He couldn’t take what they were seeing in terms of the close-up!”

Temple said that he used close-ups even though IMAX at the time advised them not to do so. I asked Neilson why this was the case.

“In the second IMAX movie, Man Belongs to the Earth, there was a shot — it was just like a head-and-shoulder shot of Chief Dan George — which scared everybody. It was not well handled. They didn’t know how to handle it at the time. And as a result, they sort of made a rule that you don’t shoot close-ups. And it took us a while. The Stones was really the first show that we really kind of broke that rule. And so it was that fear of getting that jarring close-up.”

How things have changed. The intense close-ups on Cillian Murphy’s face were a standout feature of Nolan’s Oppenheimer but as Neilson says, “Chris knows how to handle it for sure.”

Having worked with IMAX as far back as the 1980s, and a friend of Graham Ferguson, one of the founders of IMAX, I asked Neilson what he thought when Nolan finally started using it for feature films in 2008 with The Dark Knight.

“I was extremely happy that Hollywood was picking up the camera. This is something that the founders of IMAX wanted to have happen. He would be ecstatic to learn that Chris has just shot Odyssey completely in IMAX. So, I was very happy with the fact that they were bringing it out into the mainstream.”

A Huge

Having enjoyed seeing the Stones in all their glory, I was surprised to learn that IMAX didn’t become a common medium to capture big pop and rock acts. Neilson admits that, despite the groundbreaking use of IMAX film, the movie was not a huge success at the time. He suggests that this was primarily down to the fact that back then IMAX wanted to maintain its exclusivity and did not allow for a standard 35mm print to be made for wider distribution, so it could only be seen in true IMAX film at “institutional theaters”, as in museums and science centers.

IMAX In Space

IMAX film cameras have famously been up to space and were used for classic IMAX documentaries such as Space Station 3D and Hubble. Neilson was the person who coordinated this and trained astronauts on how to operate the IMAX cameras.

While the weight of the large cameras would not have been a problem in micro-gravity, I had to ask Neilson about the challenges this presented. He observed that, unsurprisingly, the astronauts were fine with the technical side of filmmaking but struggled more with the aesthetic side of it. “The mechanics of all of it they grasped that really quickly, but it’s the shot composition, shot length, movement: the visual storytelling aspect of filmmaking that was probably the hardest part of it.”

Neilson said that while he gave them a shot list of what they needed to capture, they had flexibility in case anything unexpected turned up. “We always said, ‘well, just because photographing E.T. is not on the shot-list doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it if he shows up!’”

In the movie Armageddon, oil drillers were, absurdly, trained to become astronauts, which, as the movie’s star Ben Affleck pointed out in the DVD commentary in legendary fashion, was somewhat ridiculous as it surely would have been easier to train astronauts on how to use a drill. Inspired by this, I had to ask if Neilson ever hoped that, similarly, he would have been forced to go into space just to ensure the IMAX shots were right?

“I would say I was the only DP that has had to train their first unit how to shoot — and then couldn’t be on location with them! But it’s funny, a big majority of the crews, when they came back, said, ‘Why didn’t we just fly you?’” Oh, so close.

Rock Star Danger

Neilson is currently working on a nature-themed documentary for IMAX that involves going up close and personal with alligators, and in a space-related theme, sending an IMAX camera into the Aurora Borealis.

Neither of these, however, seems as scary to him as the memory of dealing with rock star egos. “Charlie whacked me with a drumstick one night,” Neilson chuckles, reporting that it wasn’t accidental. “We were doing pickups for the finale, and we wanted him to chuck a drumstick, and I said, “hit the camera”. But he hit me with it!”

And then there was the time Neilson made the near-fatal mistake of mispositioning the large IMAX camera. “I once got between Mick and the audience by mistake — and I tell you, if looks could kill, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. You don’t want to block Mick’s access to the audience…”

Further reading:

David Gilmour Live At The Circus Maximus, Rome, Astonishes In IMAX

Prince’s ‘Sign O’ The Times’ Shows Why I Adore Concert Remasters In IMAX

‘Sinners’ In IMAX Is ‘An Out-Of-Body Experience’ Says DoP Autumn Durald Arkapaw

Why Hans Zimmer And IMAX Sound Are Perfect Partners

Drake Reveals That Music Video For His Hit Nokia Was Shot On IMAX Film