Transcription
The sequence where Batman jumps off the building in Hong Kong. We've found this amazing location and we had planned, and I'd very much pushed, to do the stunt itself for real. Paul Jennings and his guys came up with a way of tethering a stunt man to a helicopter on a bungee so he could actually jump off and then be carried away from the building. Logistically, it was a very, very tricky thing to work out, and they had to rehearse it in Chicago, but they actually got it working incredibly well.
I have a static line attached to my back, and then on an action, I have to jump out almost like a swan dive until the line catches me up, and then just do a giant pendulum underneath the helicopter. That was a hell of a pendulum that was going to take me back to where I just came from. So as I, as I hit the bottom of the pendulum, the pilot just took all my momentum out and then just swung around. That's something one that I've never really seen done before. Until you know, I've never done anything quite as hairy as that. Is because, um, you're jumping into the unknown. That's the closest I've actually felt to flying because you get the wind in your hair and everything, and it's, it was a rush.
Recording all of this to look, you know, when Batman does do a jump in Hong Kong, how would he drop? How would he fly? How would it work? At the end of the day, bureaucratic difficulties of filming in a major city with helicopters to do that stunt for real on location proved to just be too impossible and would have restricted all the other things we were trying to do in Hong Kong. So we wound up adopting a visual effects approach instead for that.
For what we basically did was that we shot IMAX tiles and digital stills of the whole landscape of Hong Kong. And having shot those, we then went back to Cardington and we built enormous green screen, an enormous green screen airbag down below. And we did a descender dive with one of our stuntmen, Buster. Buster was jumping about 120 feet on the Scag. So even though it's a visual effect, there's still a major stunt component to it.
But when you see Batman standing on top of the tower in Hong Kong, that's actually Christian standing on the tower for real. That's not a CGI shot. There's not, no trigger at all. And Christian absolutely wanted to be the person standing there, and he didn't, he didn't phase him at all, actually.