Let's Find Out - The Dark Knight Trilogy: Behind the Scenes | ASMR [soft-spoken, page turning, Batman]

Episode Date: June 24, 2019

Every so often in the library, a book jumps out and chooses me. I enjoy learning about what goes into films and everything behind the scenes that the movie itself doesn't directly reveal. Let's find out what this artful and insightful book has to say about one of the most revered comic book adaptions in history. Thanks for watching and thank you all for your continued encouragement. As always, constructive feedback is very welcome. #ASMR #Batman #Joker ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ►socials... The podcast (audio versions) of my content: ▸🎧 Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2u11T58 ▸🎧 iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/letsfindoutasmrs-podcast/id1448116527?mt=2 ▸📧 Email................... [e-mail] ▸📧 Instagram........... @lets_find_out_asmr ▸📧 Twitter................. @Glycoversi ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ►Support for the channel... ▸Shop on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/2LnNXd6 ▸PayPal ......... https://www.paypal.me/LetsFindOutASMR ......... [e-mail] ▸Patreon ........ https://www.patreon.com/LetsFindOutASMR Want to just give a gift? ▸📩 Wishlist (for the channel): http://a.co/9vUJ8eF ▸📪 If you'd like to mail me something: Let's Find Out ASMR (Rich) P.O. Box 1582 Palm City, FL 34991 Or do you transact in nerd? ▸₿ Bitcoin: (A scannable QR code) ........ http://i.imgur.com/wKIsPIB.png (wallet address) ........ 1XPhPoyeqc3Xf1uktCPXCzfdEdi9PA7Xh

Well, it's good to see that. Good old-fashioned clickbait still works. I want to learn about bat caves and the animals that live in them today. Many caves are cold and damp and often lie below ground. The animals that live there have to cope with complete darkness. I'm just kidding. We're taking a look into, so I was hoping I could intercept you, given that this is Christopher Nolan's. trilogy. I'm a

amateur, amateur, amateur. Obviously stories, but film, too. I don't know anything about it, but I love watching those YouTube channels like stories of old and every frame, a painting. And there's...

It just aren't coming. But just like these phrases, Christopher Nolan himself, devoted himself to an ideal, then you become I didn't time that right. The legend, Mr. Nolan. All three movies were impeccable. They were fun to watch. And I think the realism is what really raptured me.

I loved Batman Begins. Because it was a great hero, traditional hero story. I'm a big fan of martial arts. So I loved how they incorporated Eastern, some philosophies and martial arts in that. We have all three, when you call them. Movie poster logos, I guess. As you can see this book is really thick,

so no doubt we're gonna miss some gems. But for the most part, I just wanna scroll through it and see what kind of interesting insights and behind the scenes and maybe philosophies and I don't know. Let's see what we can find out, you know. The spirit of exploration. I'm just going to try to tackle the whole book.

Pre-production, production. Post-production. It's cool to be able to look at and consider what it took to make a movie this complex. Not just the material dollar sets in these gigantic really surreal sets, I mean, from the football stadium to the underground layers.

You know, there's a real art that really is, that goes into the character development, the screenplay, and, you know, having Nolan and these other guys, having thought out, you know, who these characters are, writing actual people, and making them believable. or in real lives go through real trauma. So, yeah, I guess I'm just amazed at the level of competence and skill of the actors and, of course, Christopher Nolan. Michael Kane has a little introductory paragraph here, or page. He says, to point out the versatility of Nolan's talent, look at the opening scene.

sequence, the action sequence, when the bus is in the bank, the bank heist, robbery, and, um, you know, with Joker, also watch speeches by Heath Ledger that won him an Oscar, post-U-Mus Oscar. It takes, it takes a really talented guy to be able to have an action yet, thoughtful, a script, and to see it through to the end. And it's also cool him as a person. He works with his wife, Emma Thomas.

Who Kane wittingly uh, wittily I guess remarks that she's the producer of these trilogies and of his four

children. David S. Goyer was a producer, I think, as well. That little bit, I I guess he went into a comic book shop in Los Angeles and the owner started grilling him

because he was kind of a local and started recognizing that he was picking up a lot more Batman books than usual. So the guy had to lie when he asked him if he was writing a new script in the early 2000s. He had to say no.

Because I got to I guess Nolan, from what I read, just glancing at this, is very, very protective of his intellectual property. So you can't blame him. I mean, I think it was a brilliant script, and it would have been a shame to see it get leaked. Oh my God, this is not your father's Batman film. He says he knew Batman's story was bigger than could be fit in a single film. but we never really sat down specifically to plot out a trilogy

but we had we did have a notion shape were we were we to make three films even from the first one come up with the first film we had to have some idea of what Bruce Wayne's life story could be he'd always

add an aversion to what he calls sequel bait there's considerable risk in what Nolan was doing because you had... Oh man, that's bright. There we go, that's better. We had Tim Burton doing the original Batman live action movies in the 80s and 90s, and then the Batman and Robin, Mr. Ice with Arnold Schwarzenegger,

was produced or directed by Joel Schumacher, who made it much more of a, you know, a very, very simplistic, unrealistic, unrealistic, very caricatured, very cartoonish, um, that George Clooney and Chris, Chris something, played Robin, more gritty,

der Rich, direction. Like I said, I love the... Talking about filmmaking, and my lighting is terrible here. Sorry, guys. But yeah, I, uh, I watch all these film analysis channels on YouTube all the time.

I really love them, like, For me, it's interesting to watch someone, these film school students, I guess, to hear their insight. I guess it's maybe part of the appeal of why, you know, if I explain a math problem or a physics problem to someone who's never really taken physics, if I do a good job, it makes it interesting because you don't have to do any of the legwork. you just get to see the result of, you know, a year or a semester of learning something, and you get to consume it passively. Learn a lot of tricks and interesting, you know, interesting ideas that we use as tools in the craft of whatever it is. Maybe it's math and physics in my realm or filmmaking here.

And I love the insight that, this whole trilogy really it wasn't the original but it uh you might think of blade or the matrix certainly came before this but certainly this one um took the mainstream superhero

like Batman and set the trend set the pace for the antecedent Superman and Ben Affleck Batman films which I've honestly really didn't see. I like the first man of steel, but I didn't really watch any of the others after that. And Bruce Wayne, standing alone at a window of Wayne Manor, filled a gap in Goyer.

Three-year-old John F. Kennedy Jr., saluting his father's casket, informed Nolan's characterization of the young Bruce Wayne. So that was a good good example of why this movie is so realistic because Nolan's a great character writer from, you know, what I understand, my little amateurish take on it. There's also a lot of YouTube channels out there that informed me about the real depth and sophistication of comic books that I never realized what existed. Yeah, comic books They are a source of great art that I really hadn't considered before.

I was never really a huge aficionado as a kid. I only got handed down a few old comic books, and I consumed them, enjoyed them, but never really pursued it beyond that. this uh you know the new revival batman in the marvel universe is it's eye-opening to realize and watchman i was a huge fan of that movie um it's impressive just how sophisticated comic books can be and then nolan goes even deeper and i guessed in the traditional canon they were going to see when um Bruce watches his parents get murdered. After a stick-up, they're going to see the mask of Zorro elevated it.

He elevated it to the next level. Or at least, I think, added a layer of sophistication to it by having them go see a play called Mephistophily, which Mephistophily is the antagonist. He's basically the devil. in Gertes' 1700s novel called Faust, in which Dr. Faust is a brilliant intellectual who makes a deal with the devil for his soul. In that play, there are a lot of, he said the, it was an opera house. It was an opera, I guess he was seeing with a lot of dramatic bats

and shadowy figures, which, of course, psyche. Yeah, so they went back and tapped into a lot of the rich, deep literature of Batman. Frank Miller's darkly-toned Batman Year 1. It's a gritty yet noble portrayal of an overseer, the watcher, the protector of a grimy, of a grimy cityscape in the background. wanted to feature a Batman villain that had yet to have been portrayed in the films.

They already had Jack Nicholas. Nicholson? I always forget who's the actor, who's the golfer, but Jack Nicholson as Two-Face. Jim Carrey is not the Joker, but the Riddler,

Schwarzenegger, the scarecrow. The Older of Arkham Asylum Administrator Dr. Jonathan Crane. It says Nolan was intrigued by the character, but a little bit put off by his mask. Until a logical reason for it could be written in the script. And he used it as a psychosis inducing. It could scare people into submission. Kind of like brainwashing in a way.

scare people into, you gaslight them into believing that their own reality is faded away. And then the end of Batman begins the first movie, they had a Joker, not a reveal, but a suggestion. It was cool. I didn't, I actually forgot about this because it's been a while since I've seen it. But here on the asphalt you have a dirty old, almost antique Joker card. with a little bit of green in the corner and it said that the studio didn't even realize they were um he was

going to drop the joker card but the executive at Warner Brothers said it's difficult to get Christopher Nolan Chris to talk about anything while he's on set in the process

in the midst of production in his own world he's created. So the Joker card at the end of Batman Begins was, was frankly a surprise to him. It was very elegant and a delicate moment that allowed a sequel, but didn't guarantee one. It was certainly a suggestion of where it could go. DC Comics first introduced the Joker in Batman number one, 1940. Shown here is page 33 of um, um, The Killing Joke, written by Alan Moore.

In 1988. Of course, we got Two-Face over here. So this is, uh, yeah, this is all the, the precedent, the groundwork out of which, fertile soil, the fertile background of rich backstory that Nolan was able to grab out of. They said he's a lesser, lesser known, um, lesser known anti-hero than the riddler of the penguin, but the perfect archetype for the severity and extremity of the world-destroying plot of the third movie in the trilogy. Conceiving action sequences that would be emotionally, oh no, sorry, exponentially larger in scale and would consume considerably more screen time than those in the first two movies. and they said it grew

It wasn't action for the sake of you know masturbatory effects like you see in the Transformers movies where it's just really explosions for the sake of the spectacle

these grew out organically grew out of this story which I can really appreciate it was the third movie was definitely my least favorite so I'm not I'm not I'd much rather be taken back by a plot twist, in-depth character, you know, an emotion, a realistic portrayal of a trauma in a dialogue than portraying it through, you know, explosions and car chases.

But, you know, he was trying to appeal to a broad audience and by this, you know, the fame and popularity of the darkness. night, he certainly had a lot to, you know, to live up to in terms of being appealing to a broad audience. Underground layer that was kind of Baines, domicile under Gotham City, and then Batwoman production and design into the meat of the book. This was a scale model of the Batmobile. I was personally really, really impressed with the Batmobile. It looked, yeah, it looked very militaristic, futuristic, stealthy, sleek for its size.

Overall, it just portrayed a sense of sheer might and power, yet technology that Batman's known for. So it said, because Batman wanted a real car out on the streets rather than a computer-generated one, as realized in the previous Batman movies, the special effects team working with a crew of custom car builders, and to translate the Tumblr Batmobile design into a practical vehicle. showing here top and up here we got the skeletal chassis the framework for it

it's awesome there was a realistic and actually um drivable car your images as the script and process evolved

of Batman looking over Gotham begin to transform in this something fresh they say yeah I was I guess you know in hindsight I'm reliving the experience specifically of

Batman begins because I remember the underground gritty part of the city when Bruce before he was Batman was riding with Rachel and went out to go shoot or

maybe he was by himself but went out to kill the main mobster guy and that was just such a real Like, I didn't feel like you're watching a, you know, a superhero movie at all. You felt like it was a, it was like a gangster movie, and it was very gripping. The Price's boardroom right there. Bad Cave Man with a running waterfall in the stream.

So these were Cardigan Sheds. And they say Sheds, but they're really airplane hangers the size of a football field. And 60 foot. That's why these movies are really so great. An Icelandic glacier stood in for the Himalayas where Bruce Wayne's journey to becoming Batman begins. Nice little play on the title there. This is Wayne Manor was played by Metmore Towers, built by the Rothschilds in the 1850s. Mentmore Towers served as both interior and exterior.

Wayne Manor. Very interesting connection there. Maybe I'll do a history of the international, the rise of the international banking system. Motorcycle, that thing was, I mean, everything they did was top-knock. And this underground layer, uh, maybe these lights. Let's see if we can learn about it here. It says here, just a testament to Nolan's storytelling ability.

He reveres the archetypal. heroic journey and he respects it and it pays off because Batman Begins is a beautiful beautiful example of that to depict the epic hero's journey aspects of the first film Nolan and Crowley had set much of Batman Begins in a natural scenic setting the film had featured slow pans cross-s splendid Himalayas, pullbacks on the lush gardens, trees, and rolling lawns of Wayne Manor, and wide shots of natural, not-man-made caverns beneath the Manor's foundation, alive with rushing streams and waterfalls. Contrast the Dark Nights storyline suggests to the filmmakers, suggested to the filmmakers, was a much more architectural, industrial, modernist aesthetic.

We had this chaotic Joker character who was trying to destroy the city that Batman had cleaned up and put in order. Explained Crowley, to portray that orderly, orderly Gotham, we wanted it to have a hard line, to have hard lines in clean streets. We started asking, what if Gotham City Hall was like a modernist Meese

Vendera building and we continued in that direction deciding that we would create this very structured ordered environment and then the

Joker would introduce anarchy into it and that's exactly what this these scenes these settings these sets I guess

portray with his underground bunker where he was he could park is the entire ceiling is nothing but lights such a futuristic tangible um palpable setting you know it doesn't feel like you're in a movie set there at all realistic here's a brilliant example of why i wanted to show you guys this book here's the the stepwells this is the set for baines undergris ground lair.

He, I mean, it's cool that they had, it's the, or it's the prison, 100 foot, deep prison. When Chris first mentioned that he wanted an underground prison, I asked him if he'd ever seen

Indian step wells, which are these crazy geometric shapes, um, geometric steps leading down to the water that ancient cultures in India built. Originally we thought maybe we could shoot that, but then it became too much in Rajasthan, India. But it became, they decided it would have been too labor intensive,

to build the infrastructure to be able to set up an entire recording. That's what crowns it to reality and makes it so realistic and because they use real ancient locations. natural settings. A little bit of trivia that to me was interesting was that Nolan was so secretive about his scripts that he gave them aliases which I guess isn't that unique to him I'm sure a lot of big, I'm sure Avengers Endgame. But the originally entitled The Intimidation Game is its alias the code title for Batman begins was changed to Flora's first.

No, no, sorry, Flora's wedding. Flora's wedding. And while Rory's first kiss stood in for the dark night. That's pretty funny. Here's Nolan in the Batcave. I'm pretty sure it's from Christian Bale. Sounds like something you would say. At the end of the day, Bruce Wayne's just a guy who does a lot of push-ups.

So I guess Nolan actually had his eye on Christian Bale. If you guys would have seen the movie The Machinist, but it was 2003 or 4, came out, I guess. And Christian Bale plays this insomniac guy who is a factory worker who starts having hallucinations because he doesn't sleep and he doesn't really eat until he gets super thin. Christian Bail actually lost a lot of weight for that movie. and it says that he put on 75 pounds. Let me get the numbers right. Oh no, I'm sorry. It's 30 years old when he was playing this.

That makes me feel like a piece of trash. Gotham City slums, man. So a 30-year-old actor, Bail was extremely thin, having lost nearly 70 pounds for his role in the machinist as Trevor Resnick. Bail assured the director that he could regain the weight in time for the screen. test eight weeks later and so he'd regained over 70 pounds in like eight weeks this actually gives a lot of

insight into the manifestation of the batman we know in the final product of all the movies there's a dialogue between bail and nolan says in addition to packing on weight bail had prepared for this screen test by engaging nolan in a number of in-depth conversations about his take on the character and the story. Quote, I picked his brain so much as he would let me, recalled Bale, and found out as much as I could, so that I could be confident going into the screen test where he has to act in front of people in, like, a room, which has got to be the most awkward thing. I said to Chris, I don't want to waste time here, you know, if we're going to do a screen test,

I don't want to guess. I had to know if we're on the same wavelength. As clear as Nolan's vision for the character as he could be, as clear on that vision as he could be without giving access to the script. Bale gave the screen test all he had, wondering as he did so if he was giving it too much. I really went for it, he said, I knew it might be a little more extreme than they would like,

that they might look at me and think, what the hell is he doing? There's no way he's going to be in our big-budget movie doing that, but that had been a feral, frightening, almost freakish take on Batman. An interpretation that had bail speaking in an animalistic growl, and was precisely what Nolan. When Christian was playing Batman, Nolan recalled, of the performance. He communicated a lot of intensity through his eyes and mouth.

He was also very controlled and specific in how he portrayed the aggression of this character. The animal-like quality. He talked a lot about Batman, Batman crouching in the shadows or on rails or by the sides of buildings. Very much the way he does in the comics. When he was playing Bruce, he had the same intensity, a fire in the eyes that made you believe that this was an ordinary man who could make himself extraordinary, simply through self-discipline, because, and this is our quote, I thought it was Bale saying it, but I guess it's Nolan. At the end of the day,

Bruce Wayne is just a guy who does a lot of push-ups. It looked like the start of a very, obviously, fruitful relationship, but said that Nolan expected expressed the expectation that Bail would have to gain a lot of weight, gain a lot of muscle, obviously, to fill the suit.

Unfortunately, Bail did gain the weight, but not the muscle. And they say with characteristic self-discipline, though, well, the crew said, bloody hell, Chris, what are we doing here? Batman or Fat man?

But the characteristic self-discipline, which I really admire in bail, I mean, to be able to drop weight, gain it, really mold his whole body for a role. You know, beyond the body, the demeanor, personality, his, you know, his acting, obviously. It, you can tell he throws, he lets the role consume him. and that's that's super i don't know it's just very impressive that you can immerse yourself in a role because it's extremely believable i really liked him as batman bail transformed his physique through an aggressive training in diet regime he maintained throughout the whole shoot didn't really start eating until he knew he wouldn't have to take his shirt off again was alfred and Lucius, Lucius Fox.

You from the 1978 Superman Surrounding Bail with High Calibur actors. Wow, I didn't know these people were in... Jesus. Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Ned Beattie,

and Glenn Ford. All these great actors around Christopher Reeve, I felt that Batman deserve similarly epic treatment. That's awesome. This is some... Listen to this.

this insight from Michael Kane playing Alfred Alfred's good at that kind of thing he's the human touch amongst all this and Bruce Wayne keeps going back to him to see if he's done wrong this time I think Alfred understands that if

Batman turned dishonest he would be a terrible villain he'd be worse than the Joker and said by the time Michael Kane had returned to the Dark Night Rises. He'd been in, what was it, Inception?

What was the other movie? I know he was in Interstellar. I don't know if that was before or after The Dark Night Rises. They referred to him as their lucky charm. But he said it's actually the opposite. I mean, it's like great art. It's like being, you know, I love these behind the scenes because truly great film, music, painting.

architecture, whatever it is, is the mind child, the creation of one or a handful of truly great people, you know. So it's always compelling for me to find out more about who they are, how they act in real life, you know, with other, amongst other people, and to really get a well-rounded grasp of their true character. You know, some people are bad, but they, you can still enjoy their art, but it's informative. It's an educational exercise, certainly for me to learn about these great people. It says that Michael Kane said about Christopher, Christopher Nolan. He's quiet on the set. He'll just come up to you very quietly to make a suggestion. the sign of a great director

and this happens with Chris is that when he makes a suggestion you go, why didn't I think of that? He's also right there on the front lines too. He says a lot of directors probably go in a back room and watch what's going on through through a monitor.

But he said Christopher Nolan's right there right behind the camera. And then Gary Oldman of course. Katie Holmes. Of course Liam Neeson. I forgot. Got how many brilliant actors are in here. And the other guy from Inception, Sillian Murphy, Two-Face.

Sorry, Miriam. Joseph Gordon Levitt is The Future Robin, Christopher Nolan directing each actor. So now we move on to the actual costume design. I remember one famous point was that didn't have nipples, like the past uh George Clooney version did they just wanted to make it again

more realistic I appreciate so much that they didn't use computer generated imagery for me that that takes away so much I'd rather see someone look a little bit less believable

well you can't say that because as soon as something go to CGI. Like, um, like the, uh, the Sith guy who, Kylo Ren cuts in half. That guy should have been an actor in makeup, I think. Even though it was really well done. Who else was?

Yeah, the famous, the white, what do you call him? The Evil, The Hobbit movies? That guy should not have been CGI, the one with the, the middle, prosthetic sword coming out of his arm. I just think it looks... It just almost takes you out of the movie. At least with a real person, you could believe that...

No, you at least associate it with a real individual. When it's computer generated, it's just like another layer of... of... I don't know, just falsity. I just don't like. like that. And so you can see it's labeled the intimidation game right there. These are mock-ups of the first bat suit. It says here that it took 14 separate pieces

to that Christian bail had to wear to put on the suit every time he appeared on film in the bat suit. Night's suit called for the molding casting of more than 100, into a suit. individual sections compared to the simpler silicone the dark night's suit called for molding the molding and casting of more than 100 individual pieces compared to the simple silicone in the oprene bat suit from the original film or the first film I remember this too along with the nipples the neck wasn't malleable so Christian Bail had to turn his whole body every time he wanted to turn and look side look to the side called it the bat turn the scarecrow and razzalgoole I think all the costumes were were amazing so amazing attention and detail was crucial including something as simple as the sleeve length and button placement or scarecrows, iterations to arrive at that design.

I always forget that Liam Neeson, he is in so many different roles. He's almost like a Samuel L. Jackson. He was in the Phantom Menace. And so the lady, given that Razal Ghul was very much influenced by Eastern spiritualism. the costume designer wanted to make sure she didn't tap too closely into the monastic influence that would uh... wanted to suggest a monastic influence without too closely resembling the the monkish appearance of quigonjin from the Jedi master that he played in Phantom Menace only a few years earlier, Ledger in his makeup

Pretty damn good makeup. The costume design said, To find a common language for defining the Joker, Nolan turned to Francis Bacon's study after Valesquess' portrait of Pope Innocent the 10th as a reference point. Frighting painting, actually. If you look at that, realism, general aesthetic of the film,

they actually wanted Joker to be a trendy, trendy guy, trendy young gentleman. means face mask alterations. Black lines mean they were actually going to put... Well, I guess that just means the straps. Yeah. Problems with claustrophobia. Initially when Tom Hardy did, when initially wearing the mask,

but towards the end, he just wore it all the time. He became quite attached to it, I guess. Sort of helped him to act. I felt like he was adopting a new person. Halloween woman suit. designed stealthily to sell the sexiness of Anathaway's body without actually revealing it. A reptilian. These are all the rescue workers and the football outfits really drew me to.

Batman Begins for sure and they didn't look like their own movie sets for the most, you know, most part when he had to train in Nepal. It's so awesome. And he's really, you know, really out there on the edge of that cliff. Again, another interesting insight into the filmmaking process. Christopher Nolan says he didn't want to have two separate crews, him manning the primary crew of dialogue in the main actors and a secondary crew simultaneously filming the action sequences that required only, you know, stunt doubles and...

Um, no dialogue, I guess. Wanted to film. Wanted to be in control and behind the camera. So it took about half a year. Over four months of filming, which says, um, that's an unusually long even for a large budget movie, which I didn't realize. I thought they usually take that long to film.

I love this quote by Liam Nason here. They were actually filming a film. flight sequence on on ice on an actual glacier Liam Liam Neeson says I'd never

It was quite amazing I'd never seen a glacier you know let alone up close before and uh to film at the foot of this glacier moving that was moving about a meter every week was remarkable

a remarkable way to jump in it was the first film, the first scene, I guess, that they had filmed. Every so often between setups, we'd see ice crumbling at the head of the glacier, reminding us all that this was a big living force moving towards us. It was a beautifully dangerous and strange, it was beautifully dangerous and strange to be in a section of the world

where there wasn't a tree or a bird anywhere. It was like a gorgeous becket wasteland. Local experts warned that the ice was rapidly thinning. In fact, they told us that the lake could be melted the next day after shooting for a weekend. So we made the decision to jump right into filming. That's pretty awesome. Terry Sim was built.

Walls of simulated rock and stone. in the visible foundations of Wayne Manor the cathedral-like Batcave set was constructed in the largest sound stage at Shepperton in London they use a 50-foot telegram telom meaning extendable or the word telemeans

from a distance so telephone telemetry telegraph telescope stuntman and this was filmed in Iceland

real scene and again really Bruce Wayne as himself and taking the hero's journey as a broken young adolescent

just wandering off to find himself and put himself willingly in the most you know threatening positions is what made his transformation into Batman for me the most satisfying. If it was just kind of glossed over,

I don't think I would nearly have been as invested as it was when he willingly chose to become Batman at the end. It was awesome to see him as Bruce fighting, you know, before he was Batman, and how he was trained in the martial arts. To be a warrior. Very cool. So realistic. The was building in Chicago, I guess. So the Tumblr's race through the streets. A five-minute sequence. And look at these action shots. Flipping. Here we go. Chapter 6, the shoot. That's really cool. They, um...

So they, they actually shot the open. sequence, Heath Ledger's Joker Bank Heist, so that they can leak it, put it out as promotional material for the movie well before anything else was actually shot. I wouldn't have noticed is that the aesthetic of the Dark Knight was meant to look really clean and you notice it says here in the first few minutes of the film The Dark Night declares a declared its departure from the darker Gotham of Batman begins through the architecture in lighting the bright

clean streets, bright daylit no steam, no dirt the buildings or even you know a brighter color they're not dark and dingy. So in your ledger during the shoot I'm gonna pass that up because the legend ledger

The historic farm low building in London, Heath Ledger and Christian Bail gear up for the scene in which Batman interrogates the Joker. The site was used for Gotham City Police Station interiors throughout the trilogy. It's amazing that that's, I want to speak to something. It looks like a real border. Highly reflective 80-foot table, 80-foot table. 80-foot glass table provided filmmakers with a striking graphic image for the Wayne Enterprise Boardroom set. The 13th floor, no, yeah, 13th floor of the IBM building, a Chicago skyscraper designed by the architect Mies van der Roe. The drastic transformation, this was the boardroom from Batman Begins.

So it certainly makes it modernized. expanded. It says Lake Michigan doubled as the Caribbean for a scene in which Bruce Wayne dives off his yacht to board a sea plane, the one when he was going to Hong Kong. Final stages of the semi-truck flip executed as a practical, meaning real non-CGII, LaSalle Street. It was a LaSalle Street, too. I just happened to read the caption to the caption to the one before filming. In this, he might have been strapped in here, but I don't know if he was. This is actually Christian Bale. I think the, if not one of the tallest. Okay, so it was a, it was the Sears, Sears Tower. Is that in Seattle? He says he, uh, Christian likes to challenge himself physically. A full shot for us. Him standing there on the ledge when we drove a helicopter at him.

very fast to get that image I guess nowadays they would use a drone which is pretty wild to think we're beyond helicopters for scenes like this

they make a lot of thrust no doubt I don't know if I would do that one strong gust if you're not strapped in you're gonna become part of the pavement pretty soon and then here I want to

wanted to go back, really because the Heath Ledger Joker scene when he's walking out of the exploding building, that to me was an astounding special effects. I said bail four went, because he was in the batten outfit, it could have been someone else, his stunt double. And you could see right there, that's his stunt double. but it said that bail actually wanted to go out and step on the edge the Sears Tower. So Heath Ledger showed similar nerve

at the end of August when filmmakers shot the explosion that brings down in Gotham, General Hospital. Rather than create the effect through miniatures or computer graphics, Nolan Trude a character had insisted on shooting a real building

collapse and had set his crew to finding a building that was slated for demolition. After much effort, location managers found the soon-to-be-destroyed Brock's Candy Factory worked with demolition experts to bring it down. For Corbel, the anxiety of collapsing the building as cameras rolled had been ratcheted up by its proximity to a Union Pacific and Metro commuter rail line. Freight service and transit schedules afforded the filmmakers only a two-hour window in which to execute the demolition. They were within five minutes of blowing the whole thing, of ruining the whole shot because of being behind schedule. Hospital demolition made for an

unusually big day on a set that was known for its big days. In most of the crew, there's fail again, gathered around to witness the event. At a rush, recalled Smith, Heath walked out of the building and then the whole thing collapsed on itself. In the most spectacular fashion,

Heath never even looked back, which is just incredible. It was all time down by the special effects guys, and they had a load of fail-safe mechanisms, but still, if someone asked me to walk out of that thing, I'm not sure I'd do.

it. He said, the explosion was so powerful that, uh, even standing 1,500 feet away, 500 yards, they still felt the heat of the blast. He said the temperature must have risen 20 degrees for a few seconds, and then they felt in the actual shockwave, was the CGI, which I definitely wasn't, uh, I don't know why, I mean, clearly it would have taken a lot of, time, effort, makeup to put that on, but I really wasn't very impressed with the CGI. I feel like

he would need some, a lot of eye drops. The costume designer, wanting to avoid possibly illogical in separate two-faced costume, incorporated a red lining into Harvey Dent's gray suit, classic gray suit, to dramatize

the characters, to sense, into madness. Oh, this is the one I read. As he had with the Sears Tower, Christian Bill had had insisted upon standing on the ledge of Hong Kong's tallest building, IFC, too. God, that's, I personally wouldn't do that. I went to the, um, Toronto's, is that the Sears Tower? A thousand foot drop. Just you and a couple inches of glass. And a thousand feet below, you could see little tiny people. Can't even hardly make out what they're wearing.

It was frightening. I did it once for a picture. And that was it. I'm deathly afraid of heights. Burg and August? What are you thinking? This in Rajasthan. And this was a hanger.

Look at that. That's really tall. And then they had the, I guess, pretty much Baines sewage system headquarters under there. If you look at the, just the sheer scale, they have, there's got to be hundreds of gallons of water flowing right there. That fuselage scene was pretty amazing as well. This set right here, keep you guys a close up. These are the Indian well replicas, ancient Indian well replicas. I love how when they made the replica they made it, they put in safety rails.

I guess I love that in India, they don't have safety rails. It's awesome. It's just an impressive set design ridiculously. involved. It's the staining, so impressive I rises. Looks like these, they actually, when I read, they took over the whole stadium, filled it with extras. They had a real Pittsburgh Steelers football player. It's his name, uh, Heinz Ward, I guess. And stunt doubles actually fall through the holes. Everything else was CGI, I guess, but they, They built a raised platform right here that they filmed on and filled the rest.

The actual sod of the football field, they left it alone. Here's how the Batmobile, whatever they called it, the bat, the flying bat, was done. He just had it sitting on top of a car driving through downtown Pittsburgh. Here's Sillian Murphy, the peaky. blind to himself, reprising his role as scarecrow, an adjudicator, an artistic, and here's a guy, mapped out, mapped out a chase sequence with toy cars there. Christian Bailin, Mr. Tom Hardy, Chapter, what are we on, Chapter 8, Special Effects and Stunts, quote, let's do it for real. This is pretty phenomenal right here. That my truck flipping.

the crowning achievement of the special effects team's work on the Dark Night trilogy, determined to shoot the unprecedented truck flip from the moment he'd first conceived it. And he said, like all good visionaries, he had to persuade the special effects team that it was a good idea to do it. And he said, all right, well, if we'll test it once, do a preliminary test, and if it gets anywhere near flipping over, we'll go ahead with it. And they said they installed a piston on the back that would spring up. They said right away, we did the run, pressed the button, and it just sailed over.

They said, my God, I can't believe it's done that. The only problem is if it deviated even like 10 degrees, it would have flipped right through a storefront. the ears on these choreographed. It is always fun to watch in a really, really big choreographed fight. It's kind of, it's all or nothing because if you go back and you're really trying to, you know, split hairs and nitpick,

you can only see some extras in the background fighting and really not selling it. That's pretty funny. I'm not sure if this movie, these trilogies had that, but I've definitely seen it before. The Joker, Hill's fighting approach was more methodical. Ledgers was a lot more improvisational in keeping with his chaotic character. Interesting. Heath let his emotions drive the fighting.

He would deliver kicks and blows whenever he wanted as opposed to being when he was told to. He said in a straight fight, Batman would beat the Joker every time. But the Joker is a clever, erratic, quirky fighter who uses his street knowledge to give himself a fighting chance. And he loves a knife. Keith Ledger performed the Joker's fall from the Pruitt Building himself, wearing a harness attached by a wire to a decender rig. the actor was dropped 110 feet I'm impressed

I wouldn't have done that and post-production during which time Nolan and his collaborators attended to editing sound mixing and scoring the film Batman begins code title code title changed

from the intimidation game to Flores wedding like we said we wanted to make it sound like a romantic comedy said Emma Thomas Nolan's wife and producer of the film. And that was actually their daughter's name, but she said,

luckily, no one caught on to that technicalities of filmmaking. But it says the picture quality is stunning in IMAX because of the size of the screen and the stability of the projector. And because we did all of that testing and prep beforehand, We were fairly confident it was going to work. So I guess they shot the geist prologue to Dark Night in IMAX, and then they tied it in with the rest of the film. So IMAX is actually much more like Instagram resolution or ratio,

and so they actually had to cut the top and bottom off to make it fit a standard ratio, aspect ratio. The music composition Han Zimmer teamed up with James Newton Howard who's done the Sixth Sense, Waterworld, the fugitive, and interestingly

the Clooney television series ER. Han Zimmer has done Gladiator, Pearl Harbor, Black Hawk Town in The Last Samurai, among others. They are working at the console. So they had a live orchestra and added to it with electronics.

Speaking of electronics, look at this setup right here. That looks amazing. It'll be a thousand different knobs right there. Sticking his head out the window. Visual effects. Pretty amazing right here. And we could see the lead design model of the full-scale Batcave.

Oh, that's was Gotham. Rose Gotham Cities Island Slum, home to its criminal underbelly. Underbelly. It's amazing how they're able to shoot and seamlessly blend in CGI to real cityscapes. In the Batmobile penetrating the waterfall, they used a high-pressure nitrogen catapult to launch a full-scale driverless version of the Tumblr through the waterfall. Stunning. And up here, real bats proved ineffective.

The animation of digital bats was assigned to the Moving Picture Company. And down here, Christopher Nolan wields the freeze-dried bat on a stick. Wow. So they're real bats? To obtain the onset visual effects, lighting rations. reference just during post-production. So they can just look at the reflection of light off the actual bat's skin to give them an idea what it should.

Going out of the scarecrow's mouth, that's... They did a really good job of keeping it pretty subtle. They didn't go overboard and... It was a lot more believable to me at least. Gotham City. Gotham City's skyline an amazing sequence. Flying squirrel suits

doing that maneuver through the actual city skyscrapers the CGII backdrop and it's a double negative which is a post-production company built digital fairies

models based on New York Staten Island fairies composited them into a background shot at Navy Beer in Chicago And then look at here. And this is a map. This is an amalgamation of New York, Chicago in Hong Kong.

And they made like an actual, legit-looking map with the Atlantic Ocean to the south, when the river Liberty flowing out through it. It's pretty amazing. And then one last little extra effect, explosion right here. Cool effect. Composited, I guess is the word, what they use, into a real shot, I think. And this is the cutout. This is a miniature... miniature pyrotechnics were detonated to blow up the corner of the building. Now they did, they were actually pretty awesome.

A hard to market to the mass audience and the die-hard Batman fans. Tapping into the Zyke guys did a whole new way in writing on the wave of exploding social media. Such a new wave marketing ideas were less forthcoming for Batman Begins, which came out before Facebook and Twitter had made a big stamp on culture. They said Batman Begin was, Begins was actually a bit of a gamble. They didn't know if it was going to pay off, but it did. It only was big at the box office, but it also crossed a particular Rubicon, being a positive reaction from both the fans and mass appeal.

I think the goodwill we got from the fans was a product of the realization that we were striving to make the best possible film and that we took the characters seriously. It is true, like the, um, at least the George Clooney versions of Batman. George Clooney and Bell Kim versions were very much like sarcastic and really unoriginal humor and they're very light

lighthearted overall because you know we can't of course you can you'd be hard pressed to stay on both hands to stay under 10 if you were trying to count the number of awkward and cringy

jokes that Arnold Schwarzenegger cracked just his role as Iceman It looks like the campaigns for the movie were really widespread and successful and somewhat grassroots. Not entirely, but they definitely piggybacked on the 2008 election between Obama and was it Romney, I think, or was that McCain? It might have been McCain. And I believe in Harvey Dent.com. why so serious.com

ha ha ha times The Joker was the biggest draw to Batman to the dark night I would definitely say at least creating strategies for the dark night were inspired in large measure

by Heath Ledger's singular take on the Joker shown by the poster art above but images were also developed to reflect the film's modernist style, and Christopher Nolan's conceptual departure from Batman begins. That's pretty cool. In the afterwards, charisma as natural as gravity, but Christopher Nolan.

One night as I'm standing on LaSalle Street in Chicago, trying to line up a shot for the dark night, a production assistant skateboards into my line of sight. Silently I curse the moment that he, Heath first skated onto our set in full character makeup. I'd fretted about the reaction of Batman fans to a skateboarding joker, but the actual result was a proliferation of skateboarders among the younger crew members, skateboarders. If you'd asked those kids why they had chosen to bring their boards to work, they would have answered honestly that they didn't know. That's real charisma.

as invisible and natural as gravity. That's what Heath had was bursting with creativity. It was in his every gesture. He once told me he liked to wait between jobs until he was creatively hungry, until he needed it again. He brought that attitude on her set every day. There aren't many actors who can make you feel ashamed

of how often you complain about doing the best job in the world. And Heath was one of them. One time he and another actor were shooting a complex scene. We had two days to shoot it, and at the end of the first day, they'd really found something, and Heath was worried that he might not have it if we stopped. He wanted to carry on and finish.

It's tough to ask the crew work late, when we all know there's plenty of time to finish the next day. but everyone seemed to understand that Heath had something, something special that we had to capture before it disappeared. Months later, I learned that as Heath left the set that night, he quietly thanked each crew member for working late, quietly, not trying to make a point, just grateful for the chance to create that they had given them. Those nights on the streets of Chicago were filled with stunts.

These can be boring times for actors, but Heath was fascinated, eagerly accepting our invitation to ride in the camera car as we chase vehicles through movie traffic. Not just for the thrill of the ride, but to be a part of it, of everything. He brought his laptop along in the car, and we had a high-speed screening of two of his works in progress. short, short films he'd made that were exciting and haunting. Their exuberance made me feel jaded in Latin. I've never felt as old as I did, watching Heath explore his talents. That night I made him an offer, knowing he wouldn't take me up on it, but that he should feel free to come by the set when he had a night off. So he could see what we're up to.

When you get into the edit suite after shooting a movie, you feel a responsibility to an actor who has trusted you. And Heath gave us everything. As we started my cut, I would wonder about each take we chose, each trim we made. I would visualize the screening where we'd have to show him the finished film, sitting three or four rows behind and watching the movements up. of his head for clues to what he was thinking about. Now that screening will never be real, I see him every day in my head hit sweet.

I study his face, his voice, and I miss him terribly. Back on the South Street, I turn to my assistant director, and I tell him to clear the skateboarding kid out of my line of sight when I realize it's Heath. Woolie hat pulled low over his eyes Here on his night off To take me up on my offer I can't help but smile

Thanks for watching guys Sleep well I'll see you next time