Transcription
We blow up a lot of different things in this film, and I, I said to Chris Cobalt when we started the film that I wanted to blow up more things than anyone I'd ever blown up before. Felt like that was really the key to the Joker, that was really the key to destabilizing the audience and making them feel like anything could happen in the film.
And with our major explosions, I was determined to do one of them for real, not through miniature work, not through computer graphics, but to, to really destroy a building. Just left the thing alone and allowed it to be this combination of real demolition with wonderful dressing of special effects explosions from Chris Corbel and his guys.
We've been rigging this for about three weeks now, and we've been testing stuff before then off-site, but yeah, it's about a three-week rig, all for about 30 seconds on screen. Chris didn't just want it to flatten, he wanted to come down a very sequential way, which is not typical of a typical demolition. Normally they're just demolishing it, it drops like a pack of cards because that was too easy for Chris. He wanted to look different, so I work with Control Demolitions, who've done a lot of films, work very closely with them to look at how we can make it a little different. And they came up with a, you know, sequential way. We went across like a wave.
What we've done is we've really cut the building into two specific parts, and we're only taking down about two-thirds of it, and we're leaving the back third. So it does look like a bombed-out structure, but we're working in very close conjunction with Chris and his crew, so they'll have their special effects going off, and it won't interrupt our demolition charges. You all are standing in the portion of the building that's going to remain standing, where all the part in front is going to be demolished. We had to come in on every floor and pre-cut it. We pre-cut it in an irregular fashion so it'll look like it's bombed.
This is one of the key supporting columns that we have in the building. We have exposes loaded on the top and the bottom. All of this material is to prevent any debris from flying out of the building when we blast it. These are Chris's charges. This is prime cord, and what that's going to do is break the window. Then behind, you can see all these uh 55-gallon drums. These are where they're going to have either fire mortars or debris mortars that are going to be going off in conjunction with our building coming down. There's a debris strike, which is purely the glass going out. And as you see here, soft cork, which looks like the building's blowing up the second time around. There's going to be flames going off, so every other pot has a flame. We're talking two or three gallons of fly out the window, as you see, go all the way around on each block.
It's a very small visual effects component to what we did, which is we had to put the top two rows of windows into the building because between the time when we got the agreement to demolish it and were able to actually go film, somebody came in and stole all windows of this, this building and all the metal frames, which was a little frustrating for us because I'd wanted to use the negative in camera and not have any manipulation to the image at all. But Nick Davis and his guys were able to very subtly just put in some window reflections and match the, the real row of windows that we had.
Chris and his guys working very closely with the demolition team, they were able to come up with a scenario in which Heath could actually be walking out of the building. What Chris worked out is if we put in a little beat where the first set of explosions stops, as if something's gone wrong, and the Joker just takes a second to look around, surprise, like the audience is surprised. Then the major demolition comes in, and he jumps straight into the school bus. In that way, he was able to come up with a practical scenario in which we could actually take a principal act and walk him out of a building that's about to be destroyed and literally drop the building to the ground.
We rehearsed endlessly with Heath that morning. We walk him out, got him do exactly what he was going to do with Chris Cornwell calling the explosions where they would take place. We rehearsed it, I think about 12 times. I think we literally walked him out, videotaped the rehearsal, looked at it from all different camera angles. And Heath was such a perfectionist and managed to be so precise in what he was doing, which was essential because this was obviously a one-take thing. And the angle I knew that we really needed, despite getting all the other cameras we set, we really needed that close shot on him walking out to work perfectly, perfectly. He did it very, very precisely. I don't know how he resisted looking back, you know, all the cork explosions and lightweight material that the special effects got a bloke behind him. I think he wound up with bits of cork in his hair at the end of it, so close he was to everything that was going off. But he never looked back, he never betrayed any sense of, you know, worrying about what was behind him and all the rest.
Once he jumps into the school bus, there's an angle that we actually didn't use in the, in the final cut. We mounted a camera in close-up on him in the school bus once he's in and sat down, and you see him never look back, never look at the building that's collapsing, you know, immediately to his, to his left. It was a pretty marvelous angle, but it didn't quite work for what we, the sequence we wanted to keep the sequence very simple in the end to really show the, the fact that we've done it for real and that he's done it for real. So we wound up just using two shots. The Leve head shot that precedes him and walks with him as he gets out of the bus, and then we cut to the high-angle helicopter shot to show them the enormity of, of the destruction.
We had a lot of other great angles on the scene, but it's one of these things where less was more. And if we'd used all the different angles, I think it would have started to feel a little fake and faked up, and you'd start to feel the double cuts and so forth. Because what worked for me about what Heath had done was the, the simplicity of it, the simplicity of the shot, just walking out with him and seeing her, seeing a building truly just, just collapsed behind him.