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 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.

 

 

Recognizing Nolan’s Film Style: Part 1

Well, hello again everyone! I believe it’s time to bring this blog back to life. I’m not done talking about Christopher Nolan yet, and he’s working on new things now (who else is excited for Interstellar, eh? Anyway, more on that later.) 

I still haven’t really talked about Christopher Nolan’s personal style. I’m going to break this into parts and discuss each bit separately: his style, method and themes. He’s only directed ten films, but the world recognizes his style as easily as a Steven Spielberg or a Tim Burton film. Why? It honestly starts with how he taught himself. Remember, Nolan didn’t attend film school.  

“Being self-taught gave me a very organic approach to understanding all the different bits of the craft,” said Nolan in a rather excellent DGA interview. “I’m interested in every different bit of filmmaking because I had to do every bit of it myself—from sound recording and ADR to editing and music.” 

Christopher Nolan’s credits listed in a nice format on Wikipedia. Proof he is Mr. Boss of his films.

This hands-on approach continued throughout Nolan’s career. For most of his films, he serves as screenwriter, producer, and director, as well as delving into other parts of the craft, such as special effects, editing and sound. This makes it much easier to target and recognize films as “Christopher Nolan films,” and also to credit one man as the mastermind of a film even though the other members of the crew are also vital. Nolan is even compared with Hitchcock in the way that even over a relatively small body of work, he has established such a distinctive and recognizable signature style. 

Scholars like Dennis Maciuszek categorize Nolan’s style as film noir, or neo-noir, a style of filmmaking prevalent in the 1940s that tells “dark, psychological studies of ambiguous characters involved in big city crime and manipulative behavior, often using nonlinear narrative techniques that fatalistically build up to an unhappy ending.” Think about the most impressive scenes in Nolan’s films. Familiar, right? Most traits that Maciuszek describes are very much present in Nolan’s films: use of shadows, guns, night scenes, staircases, and mirrors (Batman, Inception); storytelling devices like voice-over narration (Memento); flashbacks, unhappy endings, and long third acts (Inception, The Prestige). Most especially, neo-noir themes include crime, criminal protagonists, good people corrupted, strong women, phobias and manipulation (literally all of them). 

Some of this might sound obvious, but it is the subtleties and symbolism of each of these filming choices that make Nolan’s films stand out. The way the story is told is just as important as what is being said and done. It’s something the audience will subconsciously pick up on, it’s that magic that makes you grin in the theater without knowing why. 

 

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).