Yes, Hunger Games and Avengers are currently the most anticipated movies of the year, but the last installment of Dark Knight is absolutely going to be a big deal when it hits theaters on July 20.
The film is wrapped up and ready to go, now all we have to do is wait, and hope the Chris Nolan directed Batman trilogy rounds out well.
Director Nolan first broke into prominence with Memento, a film that had an innovative story structure.
Nolan’s first foray into working for the majors, Insomnia, was also a good thriller, and he thankfully resurrected the Batman series, bringing it to an unprecedented height with The Dark Knight.
What’s also remarkable about Nolan’s style is how much he eschews CGI, not to mention he’s not abandoning film, and wouldn’t do Batman in 3D either. It’s certainly refreshing to see a director stick to his guns and keep his shooting style old school.
As he told DGA Magazine, “I feel a responsibility to the audience to be shooting with the absolute highest quality technology that I can and make the film in a way that I want.”
Nolan also shoots with one camera, and only storyboards tricky action scenes, saying he keeps track of everything “in my head. I’ve always been able to visualize what I want mentally, and I can lie there at night and cut the film in my head.”
Nolan adds that Warner Brothers “would have been very happy” if The Dark Knight Rises would be in 3D, “but I said to the guys there that I wanted it to be stylistically consistent with the first two films. I find stereoscopic imaging too small scale and intimate in its effect. If you’re looking for an audience experience, stereoscopic is hard to embrace.”
Interestingly enough, Nolan also said, “The way I shoot film is actually very conducive to converting to shooting 3D because I’m always thinking of the camera as a participant.”
One shot that many cinema fans loved in The Dark Knight was watching the truck getting flipped over, because it was a real truck, and the effect was done without CGI.
Nolan told writer Jeffrey Ressner that CGI can be “an incredibly powerful tool for making better visual effects. But I believe in an absolute difference between animation and photography. However sophisticated your computer-generated imagery is, if it’s been created from no physical elements and you haven’t shot anything, it’s going to feel like animation.”
Certainly a refreshing change of pace for someone directing blockbusters, which is why you’re supposed to bring in a director like Nolan in the first place, to give Batman a different perspective. And true film fans like myself absolutely love him for it.
