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.

 

Hans Zimmer to score Batman vs Superman

Hans Zimmer to score Batman vs Superman

This is a little bit of a detour but worth mentioning. Composer Hans Zimmer, who has famously worked with Nolan on all of his big-budget films, is going to reprise his work for Zack Snyder’s Batman vs. Superman in 2016. Zimmer also recently worked on Man of Steel and The Amazing Spiderman 2, so we can expect to see a lot of new material coming from him soon (as per his normal working pace).

Zimmer says he is anxious about making Batman vs Superman stand out away from The Dark Knight Trilogy. What do you think about the new possibilities for Batman scores? Will you go see Batman vs Superman out of curiosity? 

Batman vs Superman comes out on May 6 2016 and will feature new characters such as Gal Godot’s Wonder Woman, Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor, and Jeremy Irons’ Alfred Pennyworth. 

 

 

Stunt Double Say What?

You’ve seen the movies. You know the stunts. The Joker and his knife, Batman and his quick hand-to-hand combative moves, Catwoman with her roundhouse kicks.

Remember Nolan’s “do it for real” rule? It applies to his actors too. They aren’t hired unless they can perform the stunts themselves. Let’s take a look at some of the detail work these guys went through.

Christian Bale: Batman

Bale’s stunt double, Buster Reeves, is a jujitsu world champion. He’s the one who suggested Keysi as a fighting style for Batman. The team wanted a new, visual fighting style for him, one that didn’t just have him doing kicks and leaps because they looked cool. Keysi uses what the opponent has and manipulates surroundings to your advantage — see the frozen lake fight scene, or the burning mansion fight scene, or even the fight in Bane’s lair in The Dark Knight Rises.

“Once I had the moves down, it was instinctive, so I felt natural going into them,” Bale said. “There’s a great difference between really acting the fighting scenes and just fighting in them.”For each fight, Reeves would block out the moves, then teach it to Bale, who would learn it in half a day. The next day, they would film him doing it slowly, and then he’d do it full speed, straight away.

Heath Ledger: The Joker

While Bale’s moves were all choreographed and methodical, Heath Ledger’s approach echoed his chaotic character. He let his emotions drive the fighting, making it up as he went along as opposed to being told what to do. It was repeatable though, which made filming easy. The Joker is quick, erratic and quirky, and loves his knives. You never knew what he was going to pull next.

Tom Hardy: Bane

Bane and Batman were evenly matched. One guy trying to save the world, one guy trying to destroy it. The team went back to an idea of extreme brutality for Bane’s style — yes, Batman fights brutally but Bane thinks brutally, and this came about beautifully in the lair fight scene when Bane breaks Batman’s back.

“It’s very difficult to come across with something that has been depicted in comic books,” said co-stunt coordinator Tom Struthers. “It has to read well on screen, without making the audience disgusted by it — and I think we achieved that. It’s pretty gruesome, but I don’t think we completely turned off the audience.

Anne Hathaway: Catwoman

Nolan sat Hathaway down when she got the part and explained that she would be expected to do the stunts herself — and to be strong enough to do them for hours or days on end. She got to work twelve weeks before filming started with her stuntwoman, Maxine Whittaker, developing an aggressive street fighter style deviating from the 90’s whip-cracking, sexually-tinged feline style.

“A lot of people in this business just show up,” Struthers said. “But that doesn’t work on a Chris Nolan film, and I think he chooses people, including actors, whom he knows will work hard. I think part of the reason he chose Anne for this was because he knew she’d put everything she had into it — and she did. Anne worked exceptionally hard, and she continued to train and work hard until the very last day of filming.”

Joseph-Gordon Levitt: Blake/Arthur

Levitt learned the Nolan drill when he worked with him on Inception — he’d received the same message Hathaway had. Levitt would be expected to perform the hallway fight himself, and that he’d have to be in good enough shape to do it over and over for however long it took to film. Levitt scored beautifully on Inception, and he worked with the same stunt team for The Dark Knight Rises as well.

“They trusted me,” he said. “They knew that I could do it and make it look good. That was really nice because you alway have to establish that trust between actors and the stunt team. They knew that I wanted to do this stuff, and that I didn’t mind getting a title bruised up. I was like ‘Put me in the game!’ They knew I’d play.”

“He [Nolan] has…

“He [Nolan] has the best ears of anybody I’ve ever met. He will hear something in the mix that nobody else hears—and then, when we isolate the sound, we find that he was right. He’s like that with everything, really. He has a laser focus that he aims at every component of this huge, vast undertaking of making a movie. He doesn’t let anything slide. It’s very intense working with Chris because everything has to be exactly right—and what that means for me is the constant search for the perfect sound.”

-Sound Designer Richard King

Let’s Do It For Real: Nolan’s Top 5 Craziest Shoots

If Christopher Nolan had a catch phrase to his directing strategies, it would be “Let’s do it for real.” He is always searching for a way to do things realistically, avoiding CGI whenever possible. The bat-call at the end of Batman Begins was tested with thousands of real bats multiple times before they finally had to scratch it for CGI. He used to have a stuffed bat on a string that he would toss into the air to see how it flew. What a nut. What a genius.

Let’s take a look at some of the craziest shots Nolan has accomplished (in no particular order) by scrapping any sort of CGI and finding a a way to film it life-size:

5. The Dark Knight Rises Chant

100,000 separate voices were digitally recorded to create this chant. ‘Nuff said.

4. The Destruction of Wayne Manor

When Michael Caine and Christian Bale pile into that elevator and barely escape the fireball engulfing the hallway, they literally barely escape being engulfed in real flames that were shot their way. No stunt doubles, no tricks. Just lots and lots of fire.

3. The Hospital

From :23 to 1:11 is one continuous shot. Nolan tracked down a building in Chicago that was scheduled for demolition and just…blew it up.  They had one take to get it right, and an anxious team because of how close the building was to a commuter rail line. In a production known for big shoot days, this was the biggest one. Most of the crew gathered to watch it happen; those standing some five hundred yards away still felt the heat blast on their faces. And the explosion stalling wasn’t planned; Heath Ledger messing with the remote was ad-libbed, and turned into one of the coolest scenes in the film. The Joker strutting casually away from an exploding hospital and then climbing in a bus. There is something in even an untrained audience eye that notices when things are done correctly. This is one of them.

2. The Truck Flip

This was the shot that had me bouncing up and down in my seat the first time I saw it. Nolan’s cinematographer, Goyer, and his production team worked for ages to come up with a way for the truck to flip over itself. They squeezed five enormous cameras on the street as well as one on the truck itself , and less than a foot of leeway on either side of the truck. If it didn’t flip exactly straight, they would destroy buildings. Once again, they only had one shot to get it right. I’ve heard many people assume that these things were done in CGI, simply because they couldn’t believe it to be real. Nope.

1. The Inception Anti-Gravity Hallway Fight 

This is a behind-the-scenes video depicting how the team filmed the anti-grav fight in Inception. They didn’t have actors on strings, oh no. They build a gigantic, rotating hallway out of welded steel and tumbled it. Joseph Gordon-Levitt only had two weeks of rehearsal for the scene, every move of which had to be choreographed to a T. If he fell in the hallway, it wasn’t too bad because only 8 feet won’t kill you. But the hotel room? A 20-foot fall hurts a lot more. No stunt doubles, no mattresses to break falls. Just practice, practice, practice and lots of talent.

What are your favorite shots from Nolan’s films? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

The Big 9: Christopher Nolan’s Gang

They call it the garage gang.

All the planning for The Batman Trilogy and beyond started in Christopher Nolan’s garage. And what happened in the garage, stayed in the garage. Anyone who wanted to see the script — studio heads, producers, anyone — had to come in person. (The exception to this was Sir Michael Caine, who asked to see a script and had Nolan show up at his house, hand him the script, and sit there and wait while he read it to decide if he wanted to be in the series or not.)

The team works together so flawlessly that Nolan, much like other director-producers, returned to them when he wanted to make more movies. This is another reason it is easy to trace consistent styles across Nolan’s movies –his team stayed the same:

• Emma Thomas: Producer

 Christopher Nolan’s wife and producing partner:

“The garage was fantastic,” she said. “It was just brilliant having David Goyer in one room working on the script, while Nathan [Crowley] was in another room coming up with the look of the film. There was a synergy having them both in the same place, with Chris flitting between the two. It advanced our progress considerably. It felt very normal for us, as well, because that’s how we’d always worked…so this felt like a very organic, natural thing for us. The only difference was that instead of a low-budget, independent film, we were doing Batman.

• Chuck Roven: Producer

“I call him a producer-spoiler,” said producer Chuck Roven. “It’s very rare that you work with a director who has a vision and then does everything to execute that vision the way he’s told you he’s going to. Chris always did what he said he was going to do—or killed himself trying to do with he said he was going to do.”

• David S. Goyer: Screenplay and Story

When Nolan first contacted Goyer about working on Batman Begins, he was in the midst of his first feature-film directing assignment, Blade: Trinity and very busy. Nolan persisted, their visions coincided, and Goyer said yes. He worked on Batman Begins in the mornings and his own film in the evenings until it finished. A lasting relationship was formed, and Goyer helped Nolan storyboard the rest of the trilogy and then went on to work on Man of Steel. 

• Jonathan “Jonah”Nolan: Screenwriter

Christopher Nolan’s brother and co-screenwriter. The brothers worked together on Following, Memento, The Prestige, and all the Batman movies. Seven drafts into Batman Begins, Jonathan joined as an extra brain on task. Most of Nolan’s work would not have been possible without him; it is important to credit him where credit is due. Way to go, Jonah!

• Wally Pfister: Cinematographer

Pfister actually worked with Nolan on every one of his filmed minus Following. Their minds work together, and it is his eye that provided some of the stunning camera angles and shots that made Batman special (see: rooftop flying scene, car flip, hospital explosion).

• Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard: Composer

The trilogy was the first time Zimmer and Howard had worked together. Nolan gave them free-reign, working the music into the story as it was being written rather than waiting for a finished product to slap it onto. The result was happy composers with more freedom than is usually allowed them, and seamless connections between the music and story.

“I believe a composer has the duty to inspire his director—not just vice versa,” said Zimmer. “The more toys I could give him to play with at an early stage, the better it would be for him.”

• Lindy Hemming: Costume Designer 

Hemming worked on all three Batman films, faced with finding the balance between comic-book brightness and the realistic and edgy world that Nolan had created. She was responsible for redesigning the bat suit as well as the Joker’s crazy makeup so that it wasn’t too crazy. Hemming also credited her garage gang days for their help:

“I became an honorary member of the “garage gang” and I loved it,” Hemming said. “It was wonderful to have those early months before it actually kicked into high gear. Later, when Chris was preoccupied with other things, I could still keep working on ideas I’d gleaned educing that development time. Even if things changed later, I still had that basic ‘I remember what we talked about from the garage, which was underneath everything.’

• Richard King : Sound Designer 

Nolan prefers filming on-set dialogue rather than using ADR, so King had to work with him on the first day of shooting till the end. He was responsible for things like mixing out the natural sounds of outdoor shoots and making sure all the fake weapons sounded like real weapons.

“He has the best ears of anyone I’ve ever met,” said King of Nolan. “He will hear something in the mix that nobody else hears –and then when we isolate the sound, we find that he was right. He’s like that with everything, really.”

• Nathan Crowley: Production Designer 

Crowley was in charge of designing the new aesthetic for the trilogy: he came up with the Batmobile “tank” design, weapons design, Batpod, Gotham’s look and more. He had to balance the old, familiar Gotham feel with a newer look, something that reboots often fail at doing. I would argue that his contribution to the dark but sharp sets added much of Gotham’s magic to Nolan’s series. His work is incredible, and he’s also worked with Nolan on five films. (Remember that Nolan has only directed 10 films, and and this is a lot more impressive)

[All information for this post came from the fantastic book The Art And Making of The Dark Knight Trilogy by Jody Duncan Jesser and Janine Pourroy. I highly recommend it; it taught me most of what I know about Nolan. If you’re interested in learning more about his team, this is where you should start!]

Everyone Wants To Be Christopher Nolan

..and I’m laughing about it so much. It started with Warner Bros, remaking Superman so much in Nolan’s image that they got him to be executive producer of that trainwreck of a film. Then they decided to add a sequel: the whole Batman vs. Superman thing, effectively rebooting Batman just a scant few years after Nolan’s fantastic trilogy ended. You’ve seen the uproar; you’ve laughed over Ben Affleck, you don’t need me to explain this to you.

But why are studios doing this? Maybe because the film industry is a tremulous place nowadays. If you can secure a franchise, preferably one based on a decently long book series or comic series, then you’re set to make hundreds of millions of dollars if you do it right. It’s been a scary world since Harry Potter ended. Billions of dollars to Warner Bros, there– but now it’s over. What happened next? Marvel slam-dunked The Avengers in everyone’s faces; Lionsgate got crowned with gold for capturing The Hunger Games. Columbia rebooted Spiderman, so they’ve got that franchise to milk for the next few years. You know. New team, new cast, new news for them. Kudos.

The re-emergence of the hero started with Robert Downey Jr’s redemption with Iron Man in 2008. Since then, “gritty and emotional” hero arcs have become increasingly popular. Iron Man and Batman both went through similar transformations. And with the success of these franchises, others are trying to copy it. I thought it was just funny until now. “Hey look, Christophe Nolan has a good thing going there with the darkening and quickening of old heroes, let’s try and copy him and then pretend he’s just inspiring us! Great!”

And then I read Screenrant’s article about Zorro. Apparently, Sony executives “want a bigger piece of the box office pie,” and have hired a new writer to reboot Zorro in the gritty, emotional style of The Dark Knight.

Zorro? The Mask of Zorro? Are you telling me that film isn’t emotional and gritty? Screenrant’s Ben Moore makes good points here:

It should be pointed out that the last good iteration of Zorro – as in, The Mask of – also had an emotional core. (16-YEAR-OLD SPOILER ALERT.) Anthony Hopkins, the original Zorro, watched as his wife was killed and his baby daughter was taken from him, and he was subsequently thrown in prison for two decades a la The Count of Monte Cristo. Likewise, his successor, Antonio Banderas, was on a mission of revenge to find the man who murdered his brother. Which is all to say, it was not a completely fluffy affair.

I don’t know. I personally think The Mask of Zorro was an excellent film that should not be messed with, but in the age of reboots and remakes it may just happen. The Amazing Spiderman turned out to be better than all the last three put together, so maybe we’ll be surprised, but for now, I will approach anyone attempting to be Christopher Nolan with a raised eyebrow and slow clap of sympathy.

They say imitation is the highest form of flattery, but sometimes…not so much.

The Power of the Voice In Nolan’s Villains

“Are you watching closely?”

The first words in The Prestige, uttered by Michael Caine’s character Cutter, basically speak for the whole film. In a movie about stage magicians, the words they utter to sway their audiences are vital. This pervades all of Nolan’s work actually. The power of the voice is insurmountable and, when put to the right use, can very easily change what people think.

In Inception, Cobb and Ariadne’s words and visions can create entire worlds. The Joker uses his words to twist the ethics of the Gotham police force, to make even Batman question his methods. He uses nothing but his words to push Gotham’s “white knight”, Harvey Dent, into his descent to madness. Bane has massive physical strength, but his dominance is expressed almost exclusively through his voice. His mask distorts his voice, separating it from his body and letting it stand alone as a weapon. As long as Bane remains a figure of pure voice, Batman cannot defeat him, which makes his destruction of the mask near the end all the more important.

By separating and objectifying the voice, Nolan can fashions it as a symbol in itself, and it’s a technique he favors, especially obvious in his gratuitous use of voice-over to begin and end his movies.He also often employs voice over to introduce his villains– the Joker, Bane, and both magicians in The Prestige  all use their voices to hype up a crowd before a grand entrance. In a world where many, many characters are masked, the voice becomes even more potent. Batman and Catwoman wear literal masks– Harvey Dent, Miranda, Angier, Borden and Blake all wear figurative ones. No one is really who they seem. You have to dig through to their hearts to find their true character. You have to listen. You have to unmask them. Strip them of their power. Of their voices.

The Hero and the Villain: Nolan’s Double Act

Villains in comic movies often mirror or photonegative the heroes of the story. I could spend all day talking about Batman and the Joker. The interesting thing is how this idea actually pervades much of Nolan’s other storytelling as well. Dormer echoes Finch (Robin Williams), Borden one-ups Angier, Wayne fights Ras-al-Ghul, Batman circles the Joker. In some of these films, the “villain” embodies more of the ethics of the story than the hero does, as critic Todd McGowan claims.

“Even the most ethical superheroes occupy a position outside of the order of law simply by virtue of their heightened powers,” McGowan says. Because the superheroes are not bound by normal codes of honor, their ethical values become even more vital. Both Batman and the Joker guard exceptionality for themselves though they have no inherent right to it. As long as they occupy these positions outside the law, others will be drawn to it.

Dower struggles with the rules of his self-proclaimed exceptionality as well, until he finally tells his protégé not to hide the truth she has uncovered. Throughout the Trilogy, Wayne is searching for someone to take up his mantle, a “hero with a face.” Even in The Prestige, which focuses on the give-and-take between the two magicians, Borden and Algier’s contest eventually reaches its peak and end to their exceptionality too. Each hero’s fate echoes his antagonist’s fate; they play off of each other all the way to their symbolic endings. The red line of fate connects them both. Like in Harry Potter – neither can live while the other survives – so too does this apply to Nolan’s characters. Dower had many opportunities to reveal his secret and chose to take it to his grave.  Batman had a clear shot to mow the Joker down with his motorcycle…he didn’t take it. The Joker actually describes the doubling phenomenon quite well:

            You just couldn’t let me go, could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You truly are incorruptible, aren’t you? You won’t kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness…and I won’t kill you because you’re just too much fun. I think you and I are just destined to do this forever.

His last monologue wraps up their relationship neatly and ties it with a bow: the tainted white soul of the recently fallen Harvey Dent, who Nolan has described as the true protagonist of The Dark Knight. The character that changes. The one who suffers. 

You can either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

Now which are you? 

 

Recognizing Nolan’s Film Style: Part 3

Every kid, at some point in English class, has written a paper about the theme of a book. But how often do we stretch that thought to films? Nolan creates his movies with specific themes in mind, and when you realize this it becomes obvious what they are. He uses his characters to explore every aspect of each theme, often playing off of whatever film came previous. 

Think about it. Memento explored memory; Insomnia, the sleep-deprived character evaluations we give ourselves. The theme of Batman Begins was fear; The Dark Knight studied chaos, and The Dark Knight Rises drew on pain. Inception delves into the subconscious and the blurred lines between dreams and reality.

In all of these, what you choose to believe is much more important, which brings ethics into the mix. By making his characters question how far they are willing to go, if they are willing to lie to themselves to be happy, and why they might give up their identities, Nolan also throws these personal and ethical questions out to the audience to ponder. Though the themes in each film vary, Nolan is consistently psychological with the motivation of his plot and characters. 

As Bruce Wayne once said:

As a man, I’m flesh and blood. I can be ignored. I can be destroyed. But as a symbol I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting.

Symbolism is ingrained in the Nolan universe. It is only in the mind and heart than any peace or logic can be found. This is the theme that Nolan returns to again and again, whether it’s in one of his smaller films or a blockbuster Batman. Only when his protagonists accept their failings and fears and decide on a reality will they find peace. Bruce uses his fear of bats to his advantage; Cobb defeats the dream sequence by finally letting go of the memory of his wife. The parallels go on.

It is the way Nolan tells his stories that show us this. In addition to character parallels, theme parallels and style parallels, he uses the same narrative and filming techniques as well. Memento boasts a backwards-narrative structure with lots of flashbacks, giving the appearance of a giant mosaic puzzle that makes no sense until the last piece is set and stepped away from. Nolan created a film with a single character: thought. 

And though his other movies are told forwards, Nolan employs flashbacks heavily in all of them, along with crosscut parallel action to raise the stakes at the climax, most obviously in the third act of Inception when the audience follows the team in four different levels of a dream at once. His films — with the exception of the Dark Knight Trilogy — also begin with a scene from the end of the film lifted out of context. This acts as a hook and instills a sense of deception in the audience that will not be lifted until the end of the film – and sometimes not even then. 

Nolan does say that however chaotic his films appear they are always based on a definitive truth. Insomnia, memory, fear, chaos, pain. The question Nolan has been asked more than any other is if the spinning top fell at the end of Inception, a signal that what Cobb was experiencing was real. But Nolan refused to answer, save one comment:

The most important emotional thing about the top spinning at the end is that Cobb is not looking at it. He doesn’t care.