Batman Begins Films On Thin Ice

The Frozen Lake

The filming story for the ice filming is actually fantastic. Nolan & team flew to Iceland In February for the shoot expecting snow — and there wasn’t a lick of it. They spent four days covering their landscape with fake snow.

First on the shooting schedule was the sword fight on the frozen lake. Cast members arrived on a Saturday, with Sunday scheduled as a rest day before filming started on Monday. Then local experts started predicting rapidly thinning ice the next day.”They couldn’t guarantee there’d be any ice there on Monday,” Nolan said. “In fact, they told us the lake could be melted by the next day, and so we made the decision to jump right into filming Sunday.”

It wasn’t a huge deal, actually. Christian Bale and Liam Neeson had their choreography memorized. Stunt doubles worked the wide shots, but Bale and Neeson did most of it themselves, in tense conditions as everyone’s ears perked for sounds of cracking ice.

“As we started banging and hitting each other and smashing into the ice, we’d occasionally hear the sound of a big crack, and we’d all stand still and wait,” Bale said. “Someone would say, ‘Get off,’ then they’d test the ice, and say ‘Okay, I think you’re good for one more take.’ Thankfully, we grot the whole sequence in that day…because by the next day, there was no ice whatsoever. It had become a lake again.”

Climbin’ the Mountain

Next up was the shot of Bruce Wayne falling through the ice — special effects crew built a tank with a wax top to simulate ice and tossed Bale’s stunt double Buster Reeves into it. Production shot glacier shots for the next few days, then heeded up a mountain for Wayne’s trek shots. By then, weather conditions had changed from “warming up” to 70 mph winds and colossal rainfall.”

“You can see in the movie there’s a huge storm brewing in those scenes,” said producer Chuck Roven. “Crew people were literally blown off their feet by the winds. But with Chris, you never stop shooting.”

Sliding Down Said Mountain

(Okay, this video isn’t in English but we’re not concerned with scenes here, it’s the way it was shot. The ice sliding bit is from 1:44 onwards)

The last days in Iceland had the crew filming Ducard and Wayne’s slide down the icy slope after the monastery fire.

Nolan’s first instinct was to have Pfister operate a handheld camera and slide down the hill along with the actors.

Not safely possible. Not a fast enough shot.

Nolan’s second choice was the Technocrane, a fifty foot sliding camera that had to be lugged up a mountain and chained down so that it wouldn’t fall off the icy cliff and take out an elk. For some shots, Pfister did grab a camera and sled down before the actors. But I guess you do what you have to do to get the shots you want.

And this wasn’t even the craziest thing they did while filming. Sheesh.

 

While We’re Talking About Hans Zimmer:

He’s a tricky guy. Check out the song titles for the Batman Begins soundtrack — they’re all Latin names of species of bats.

Now look at them again. #4-9. The first letters of the words spell…

Nananananananana… someone has too much time on their hands.

 

 

 

Batman Symbol Reinvented: Why Does it Stick?

 I’m going to show the people of Gotham that the city doesn’t belong to the criminals and the corrupt. People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy. I can’t do this as Bruce Wayne. A man is just flesh and blood and can be ignored or destroyed. But as a symbol… as a symbol, I can be incorruptible, everlasting.

Nolan attacked his new project with two big questions in mind: Why would the rich, luxurious Bruce Wayne go out into the mean streets of Gotham every night to confront crime and injusstice? And secondly, why a bat? Why not just a hood or cloak, why theatricalize it?

I passed this awesome car on the road one day. Even the old symbol is still relevant.

“The best explanation offered by the comics, and the one that was the most interesting to me, was the notion of him using fear against those who would use fear themselves,” said Nolan.  “It was the idea of becoming a symbol, and not just a man. A flesh-and-blood man can be destroyed. A symbol is much more frightening and intimidating. And so he looks for the most intimidating symbol he can think of, and he naturally gravitates toward the thing that has frightened him most since he was a child–bats.”

Christopher Nolan was the first man to ever design a batman origin story, something that had never been done in comics or film. In past films audiences see a little boy watch his parents die, and then fast forward twenty years to when he’s mastered his training, becoming Batman in montage form. In Batman Begins, Nolan takes you through Bruce Wayne’s journey, makes you feel it along the way. He makes the audience understand Batman as a symbol the way Bruce Wayne does because we see it happen. We see it all.

Throughout the films, the symbol is continually referred to. Gordon flashes the symbol into

The Norman tunnel at the University of Florida is a popular graffiti spot. This was put up more than three months ago. No one has painted over it.

the sky simply to “remind people he’s out there.” Criminals flee when they see it, families hope. They project their fear and despair and faith onto Batman himself, the icon, the protector of Gotham.

At the end of The Dark Knight, when Batman turns to being hunted, the destruction of the floodlight is more like a ceremony, attended by the high-ups in Gotham’s police force. They know that destroying the symbol is just as powerful as creating it.

In The Dark Knight Rises, we see Gotham struggle under the surface, without a Batman, without an icon to blame. But still there are whispers, hopes, tiny chalk bats drawn onto

The chalk theory in The Dark Knight Rises is perhaps the most powerful.

buildings by children and cops alike. Batman’s resurgence at the end, when he burns the symbol into the top of the bridge, is the most powerful of the whole series. It is as Nolan says. The batman symbol says, “I am here. I am watching. And I will protect you.”

The strength of this image is astounding enough in the films, but what is even more remarkable is the way people have taken to it in real life. People have it on T-shirts, hats, backpacks, jackets. It appears in college campuses, on cars, in books, in art. The photos in this post were all taken in the last three months. Even after the series ended, the power of the batman symbol thrives, and I don’t think it’s going away. People identify with it. They project. They hope and pray and aspire to excellence. They choose a cause and serve it. They know the power of dedication. As did Bruce Wayne.

“If you make yourself more than just a man…If you devote yourself to an ideal…then you become something else entirely.”

“Which is?”

“A legend, Mr. Wayne.”

Christopher Nolan Films: Budget vs. Gross

Here’s a good way to look at Christopher Nolan’s growth and success as a director–in money terms, at least. The films are in order from bottom to top. Following, Memento and Prestige have very small budgets because they were independently funded films–Nolan has his own company he runs with his wife, which will be elaborated upon later.

Nolan’s involvement with Batman has its own story for another time. For now we will just focus on the monetary aspect of it. Batman Begins was Nolan’s first foray with Warner Bros., who was rebooting a franchise that had just ended a scant five years before. Its success lead to a long-in-production sequel, a movie critics around the world agree is one of the best sequels ever made: The Dark Knight. Partly fueled by Heath Ledger’s incredible acting and untimely death, the film smashed a record, earning over $1 billion worldwide. To this day, The Dark Knight is still No. 8 on the All time Worldwide Box Office Grosses.

After Nolan’s success with The Dark Knight, Warner Bros. allowed him virtually unlimited creative freedom to produce a film that he had been working on for some ten years: Inception, which carried off the top of Nolan’s previous success. I argue it ought to stand alone, though, because that film was entirely Nolan’s brainchild, entirely original, entirely new. Not to mention it stayed No. 1 in the box office for over two months.

Now. The Dark Knight Rises had actually had a script going very early on, but Heath Ledger’s death threw a wrench in it. Rather than attempt to recast his iconic character, Nolan and his team scrapped the script and started from scratch, which was part of the reason for the four-year gap between films.

Nevertheless, The Dark Knight Rises also flourished, leaving Nolan with his most astounding accomplishment yet: not one, but TWO films that made over $1 billion worldwide.

To put that in perspective, only one other director in the world has accomplished this–James Cameron, with Titanic (No.1 worldwide) and Avatar (No. 2).