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.
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