Transcription
Opening film with an iMac sequence seemed just a terrific way to make an impression with the former in the audience, really throw them into the action.
When we came to shoot this, this prologue sequence, this bank heist, we'd never use the IMAX cameras before. We'd never use the technology before, so there are a lot of, a lot of challenges. The first six minutes of the film are what Chris calls the prologue. Chris had decided early on he wanted to shoot this in IMAX, so we all got really petrified that the very first thing we were going to shoot in the movie was this huge bank heist sequence with the Joker in full makeup and on IMAX.
On the top, you can see four frames of 35 millimeter, and of course, it goes through the projector up and down. And that's actually a breakdown of IMAX photography. And IMAX goes through the projector horizontally, and that's four frames of IMAX. It's about nine times bigger, so that's why you get incredible resolution in the IMAX format.
IMAX is an immersive medium, obviously. You fill that whole screen, and then you just get more impact to the audience. And not just visually, IMAX sound is amazing also. You feel the movie, and you see it. It's been used a lot on, on helicopters for Grand Canyon and all that sort of stuff before, so people weren't unfamiliar with it. But what we wanted to do with it, and where Chris was taking us with IMAX, was using IMAX as a dramatic tool, as opposed to a documentary tool.
Chris's perspective has always been, you know, think of the IMAX films that you remember. They're the ones where the astronauts have had the camera in space, they've taken the cameras up Mount Everest. So if they can do that, then surely we can shoot on the streets of Chicago with my Max camera. And so the camera team and the Grits, everybody had to really adjust the way they worked to work with these cameras.
We really wanted to maximize the use of the IMAX frame. So this rig where the Joker's men are sliding down the cable from rooftop to rooftop was something I really wanted to get a very dramatic, vertiginous view. So we did this very elaborate helicopter shot coming up on over to really use the IMAX format for what it's best at, which is really giving people the stomach a bit of a lurch as they look down an incredible drop. So we did a little rotation on the camera head as it went over, which was a, it was a complicated camera move to do.
When you see those guys going across the desk slide, that's two stunt guys doing that for real from two real buildings in Chicago. There's a whole lot of prep goes into something which looks so simple. It is just two guys sliding down a wire, but you have to get permission from the building to rip all the walls out so that you can attach wires to girders. So even for something simple like that, the preps are phenomenal.
"Three of a kind. Let's do this." No one knew it was going to be executed smoothly. No one knew whether you could shoot action sequences in IMAX, because if you think about it, IMAX is generally a couple of penguins walking across a snow field, or even NASCAR, but very long held shots, you know, with a camera on a fairly stable rig. You don't hand-hold IMAX, and we did in this, and the cinematographer will recover. I'm told the week that we spend shooting the bank heist sequence, the prologue, was IMAX school for all of us. We all learned what we're getting into with those cameras.
I immediately learned how to, to deal with the weight of it and operating with the camera, what I could and could not accomplish in operating that camera. One of our main fears was that the cameras are so heavy. Comes through the action the way you would want to, the way you would with a 35mm camera. With Bob Golic, Steadicam operator, tried flying the, the lightest IMAX camera, the MSM camera, and found that he could actually use it very effectively, use it very much as he would a 35 mil camera.
It was a five-day sequence. I think sometime after about the second day of using the Steadicam intensively, the arm actually sheared off, and it broke off the vest and dropped the camera. Luckily, Bob was okay, and the camera was okay. The film itself is extremely heavy, and then the camera around it is about five to six times the weight. With Steadicam, if you take the camera and just hold it out and put it on a scale, it might weigh 35 pounds. But when it's on a Steadicam, it's leveraged from your body, the weight increases, is magnified. So I would say the, the IMAX is close to, you know, it's over 100 pounds.
There's a different way you can pose for IMAX because you're putting it on a screen that's eight stories high. Your vision doesn't naturally go to the top of the screen. So we kind of throw away a lot of what's in the top portion of the screen. Focus is much more critical. It's shallower depth of field, so the focus pullers really got to be on his game. Keeping the actors in focus is much more difficult in IMAX. The area in the frame that the actor would be in focus is much more shallow. In a normal movie situation, if an actor is maybe 12 feet from the camera, you'll have an area that could be in focus of maybe one or two feet. In IMAX, I have an area that would be in focus of maybe four or five inches, if I'm lucky.
Fluid cameras are very important to, to Chris and telling the story in Wally. And of course, they were able to use the Steadicam not as easily as they could in a 35, but they can use it. Yes. The camera only has three-minute loads. Chris says, "Well, then I'll just have another camera standing by to move in." But if you want that quality, if you want that immersiveness, if you have the vision and you want to do it, it's difficult, but not impossible. And he wanted to do it.
"I'm betting The Joker told you to kill me as soon as we loaded the cash." Driver, bus, driving school bus coming through the wall at the end of the prologue was a surprise that we felt, you know, we really needed to have in that sequence. But it turned out to be actually one of the most difficult things in the movie. It's interesting because as a director, it's kind of thing that actually you think would be pretty simple. I don't think any of us really would take into account the logistics of, you know, how you get a large school bus inside a building.
It was actually inside a disused post office in Chicago. I think it was a listed building, so we couldn't just knock a wall down and get the bus coming through. So what we actually ended up having to do was build a false wall inside the building, and then we mounted the bus behind that, and then put the bus on a pneumatic jerk rig. So on a queue, we pressed a button, and it hammered the bus straight through the false wall. It was a little bit tricky because we only had a pair of double doors to get this bus through. So it was almost an assembly, about to cut the bus up into pieces, take it into the building, and then put it back together to get the shot.
"I believe whatever doesn't kill you simply makes you stranger." It's a vast canvas. It's a very different way of looking at a character because it's only what is head on. It's only when you look into his eyes that things really start happening. So part of the Joker thing was very much designed with being like a laser beam, which would draw you into the performance. But the IMAX thing, of course, gave me an enormous amount of room to have the audience be inside the sun. It gave this movie such a distinct personality from the other one.
We carved out the language of the score, really. And I think one thing Chris is very is maintaining a quintessentially disciplined approach. We, in some instances, used that the footage with the IMAX cameras, and Gary Rizzo, the dialect mixer, did a great job of filtering as much of that noise as he could out. In a lot of cases, we just scrapped the sound, but they weren't generally dialogue sequences, so we were able to just replace the sound. There's only a couple of shots in there where we used live sound. The rest is ADR and Foley.
That was a really, really boundary-breaking, revolutionary stuff, and it turned out very, very well and inspired us as well to go on and increase our IMAX components. Once we saw that big opening shot of the helicopter, we realized all aerials really have to be IMAX because it has so much punch and works so well from the get-go. He went to the studio, we all went. I mean, said, "Look, this is something that we want to do. We really want to try it. We think it'll have great value because as big an event as it's going to be, it's going to make it even a bigger event." And it does. It's fun doing things like that. It makes the filmmaking experience very fresh all the time, and it's really great to be part of.
I'm very pleased with the results of our Biomax photography. It's the world's highest resolution film format, and it creates an extraordinarily immersive image on the IMAX screen, which is a colossal, you know, eight-story screen. It throws the audience right into the action in a way that no other film format could.
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