The opening segment of the original Dark Knight with the Joker pulling off the bank robbery really was quite a remarkable sight.
I didn’t realize until later that director Christopher Nolan shot the scene in IMAX, which made the city of Gotham feel enormous, and it was clearly a terrific idea for Nolan to mix IMAX in the film.
As the director recently told DGA Magazine, he’s refusing to give up on shooting film where many of his peers are going digital, but also feels, “IMAX is the best film format that was ever invented. It’s the gold standard and what any other technology has to match up to, but none have, in my opinion.”
In fact, Nolan loves the format so much, The Dark Knight Rises is reportedly going to have over an hour of IMAX in it.
As Collider reminds us, The Dark Knight had about forty minutes of IMAX footage. Nolan was also quoted Nolan in the Wall Street Journal as saying:
“There was a huge irony that we were told it would be too difficult to shoot a Hollywood movie on IMAX when we had this gigantic camera department, grips, electric, hundreds of people working for us. These were cameras that had been to the top of Mount Everest, to the bottom of the ocean and into outer space, but people thought we couldn’t make a feature film. It was absurd.”
Nolan and Batman obviously proved everyone wrong, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how the IMAX scenes are going to look. Don’t forget to look for the new Dark Knight Rises trailer before The Avengers when it hits theaters on May 4.
