Transcription
[Music] Whilst I wanted the terms of the storytelling to be as realistic as possible, the expectation of this kind of epic film is that the action go as big as possible at the end. That you take things to as extreme and as large and as extraordinary a set of circumstances as can be achieved without violating the terms of the storytelling. So all of the action at the end is designed to push the envelope as far as possible but never abandon the grounded roots that we've tried to establish in the the tone of the storytelling.
Don't you have anything new? How about the idea is we'll try and shoot it first of all we'll try and do it practically we'll do a stunt we'll do special effects and only then when we exhausted those ideas will we try and turn to visual effects. So wherever we could do a stunt we meant painting out a huge amount of wires or a rig or something like that we'd opt to do that. It's a frame by frame laborious process. The benefit you get is you really get somebody doing the stunt. It's there. It's on film. Everybody can see it. Whereas creating the same thing digitally from scratch, you know, that takes a hell of a long time just to get it to that believability level.
That was something I really wanted to crack, getting the look of all this huge amounts of steam going off. And we spent a lot of time and research. [Music] And the whole of Cardington had a network of piping uh with massive great steam generators. And there were I think 20 manhole covers which we every single one was piped in with a 2-in outlet steam. And when we hit every one of those, the steam went up 150T. It reached the roof. So we would do a run, let it all off, and then Chris would shout cut. We would switch it all off and then it would like rain for about 20 seconds where all the condensed steam had gone up, hit the roof and now was coming back down. Quite bizarre.
Hey, what the hell are you doing? General, time to spread the word. The word is panic. [Music] I couldn't really see anything, but I thought it was so cool. I enjoyed it. I mean, I've I've had so much fun every day. Oh, yeah. We have the best of the best people working on this movie, so it's like, wow. Okay, what do I do now? You know, as we've always said that everything we can do on the movie for real, we will do. In this particular sequence, we've done a shot of him firing the gun and flying up to the train and a continuation of that where he's flying along under the train. [Music]
So, Steve Cwley, who's our wire effect supervisor, rigged up a system for us with computers and I think looks fabulous. You know, he's flying along. We've got him smashing through gantries as he goes along. By the time I get to that bridge, I think I'm hitting about 30 mph. We only did about a 15 20 mph rehearsal. Did it about 75%. But today we must have gone full speed. Someone must have had the meter bits this morning. [Music]
The relationship between stance and the special effect is very close indeed. You know, because ultimately, you know, Paul and I talk about what we're going to do in the scene and then we go away. We we design the rig, build the rig, but then we have to work with Paul's team to put them in amongst it and make sure they're happy with it. When he's flying along, his boys are watching all the time to see where the performer is, and they'll time it so that he's in no danger. But we can still have him coming through the steam. It's just making sure that he's missed by the manhole covers and things like that. That's working with a good special effects team who you can trust and aren't going to hurt your guys. You know, it's a big thing to get set up and to get going. But once you do it, you look at dailies the next day and you you've completed it. You've shot this amazing shot of Batman flying 800 ft across a city and you've done it in interior space during the day without the use of visual effects. That I think capsulizes Chris's philosophy of film making, which is let's do it for real. Let's put it down the way you would see it, you would believe it, and that'll give us the kind of credibility to bring the audience in.
I wanted their confrontation at the end to be true to the spirit of the rest of the film. So that the actual confrontation be on of the most human and almost benile scale possible. Action. The decision was made early on to do outside the windows 100% CGI. So we made the decision to build the train on stage and surround it with a green screen. Nanic, the visual effects supervisor, and Dan Glass, the other visual effects supervisor, really came up with all the mathematics to figure out how high off the ground the train had to be lifted in order to not see off the green screen when handheld inside the train. Action.
My approach to the train was I wanted to have kind of standard interior fluorescent lighting, but wanted to be able to flicker those lights a little bit as a real subway train would in a city. In addition to that, I used a series of 30 or 40 tracking lights with different color gels on them outside the train on a dimmer board and what they call a chase. So, the lights would go off one at a time. So, the effect is a flickering light on the face that looks like you're going past lights in the city streets. So when all those elements come together, you really end up creating an environment that I think is very realistic. It's taking all the technology just to go back to square one and create something naturalistic and and real looking.
At the end of the movie, it's a combination of digital train, digital city, and then as soon as things start to blow up when you really need all that kind of interaction and crashing, there's a switch over there gradually to using a miniature train colliding in a miniature environment. It still seems more feasible these days to actually do things with a, you know, real things blowing up at even a small scale than it does to do it digitally at this point. We've got a collapsing Montreal leg which is at the far end of the set which special effects have matched what we've built here and that's basically hinged. So as part of the end the finale it will tip over. 3 2 1 action.
How did it go for you? Very well. Very well done. Well done. You get it? Yeah. It was quite funny cuz um when we came to do the shot, I had a bet with Chris Nolan where it would land and we positioned the car and uh I think we had a bottle of champagne on it, something like that, where he thought it would land one place and then I knew it would land another place, but ended up where I thought it would land and also ended up where Chris thought it would land. So there was no settlement of the bet in the end. The ministry department made up the Montreal sections and it was a matter of hanging them up and triggering them to release, you know, when the leg fell away. You know, they had all the the ingredients there. We have a six scale miniature of the thing. And with the special effects guys and model guys, we will sort of realize the destruction of this thing as it plummets to the ground. The reason the miniatures are so big is we basically wanted to achieve as much reality as we could. Uh we're featuring all the usual stuff of fire and dust and uh sort of destruction effects. So in order to make them look as realistic as possible, we've gone for the biggest manageable scale that we could construct, which has turned out to be six scale. The train itself is catapulted down the rail uh the broken rail uh using a pulley system and uh gravity effects. Uh also the cameras are shooting at four times normal speed. So the train is actually slowed down on screen in order to give it sort of scale and mass and what have you. And I'm hoping to acquire a really sort of spectacular sequence out of it for for the film. 3 2 1 action. [Music]
Fortunately, because of the scale of a lot of the models we've got here, it's not just a simply a case of just going in and grabbing them and pushing them around till you get the correct positioning, what have you. They're so damn big that we have to use forklifts and and what have you to move them around. They're very cumbersome. So therefore, it's very time consuming to uh set up a lot of these effects. But ultimately, I think the end result's worth it. So, believe that was was probably one of the biggest miniature shoots ever. The great thing about this is we're actually getting the best of both worlds here. And that we've got miniature effects augmented with CG effects. And ultimately, the product should have a much more unique look better than it would have if it had gone completely CG. So, it's got a much more organic feel about it. 3 2 1 and action.
This can now be done on computer graphics, but it just involves a huge amount of chaos, explosions, dust, debris, crushed cars, crushing trains. It's just very, very complex. In this particular case, a mixture of models and CG is is the best way to go for everyone. WMO. Well, it actually likes the interior of the train as well. Very nice. Clean sweep. What do you want to do next? Another one. Again, him. Come on. We kind of take our queue from the action on stage and then work out how to build on top of that. So, so they'll film their live action pieces, be limited to a certain kind of scale, and then we cut to maybe digital shot or a miniature shot and go bigger than that. But take our queue from those
This shot was challenging for a number of reasons. First off was that the Batman animation had to dovetail with a practical stunt in the preceding shot where we actually see Batman exiting the train from inside the train. So here we have Wayne station pyrochnic elements added to it. We have now added the crash set at the bottom adding the foreground buildings, the foreground architecture. So now adding the train and the Montreal towers, debris passes coming out the back of the train, all the dust and stuff, and now we've added pretty much everything. We've got Batman in there. We make sure we can see Batman by putting lots of light on the buildings behind him. But at the same time, we can't just light everything. So we've had to dramatically add up lighters, little light sources, turn on some of the windows, add window reflections so that we basically create Batman as a silhouette. Constantly keep showing Chris where we're going with the shot. Keeps looking stuff, getting his feedback, getting his interaction there. And slowly the shot progresses and builds to the level where like, oh, we're reaching critical mass. It's looking like it might be done. And then of course it's not. We go and do it many more times until Chris is happy.
Whereas I sit here, having just finished the film, I'm extremely happy with what I've been able to do in my terms. That is to say, I've made the film that I said I was going to make. I've made it in the way that I wanted to make it. I've availed myself of all kinds of extraordinarily dedicated and creative collaborators and ultimately they've helped me to make the film the way I felt it should be made and uh there isn't a frame of the film that I don't claim as my own and that's uh that's very satisfying from a creative point of view. Thank you very much. Let's go downstairs.