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.”

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).