Transcription
You know, we went into The Dark Knight knowing that we could, we could really push it to the limit and do fantastic jumps. I mean, you know, we went straight into the action with confidence, which was nice.
Normally, we would do at least two takes, and normally three takes in case they wanted to change camera angles or but it didn't go quite right for whatever reason. And on this occasion, we were so full on, I just said to Chris, "Look, we'll do it, but let's on the basis that we do one shot, and if we have a disaster, then you just have to two weeks later come back and do it again."
I mean, it's literally a very high-pressure nitrogen piston which pushes the van from a stationary position into the air, really. I mean, that particular shot was quite complicated because it wasn't only us firing the van, but also we had a helicopter in the air that was coming up the river and had to be timed, you know, exactly the right time to be in shot with the helicopter, you know, and holding all the people up on the river so they weren't in shock.
The whole thing is that set piece was complicated, but it went very well. Tried to use our aerial work to just expand the scope of the film, to pop out and every now and again see, see the city. And so with our big stunts like the SWAT van, you know, being shoved by the truck out into the river, we wanted to just pop out and see it, sort of from the point of view of the police helicopter who's following the chase.
Chicago is built on these different levels, and so you have these subterranean streets and at the river, you can see the different levels. So that seemed an interesting opportunity to sort of show how the chase going on down below stopped the helicopter following me out.