‘Dark Knight Rises’ director Christopher Nolan talks IMAX, 3-D, shooting style
Christopher Nolan is the director behind the Batman franchise as well as “Inception”, “Momento”, and several other box office successes. The Directors Guild of America landed a great interview with the director who discusses his preferences of film over digital, IMAX versus 3-D and why some decisions have been made.
“The Dark Knight Rises” will comes to theaters on July 20th in IMAX, but not 3-D, and Nolan offers an explanation.
“I think 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. . . 3-D is a misnomer. Films are 3-D. The whole point of photography is that it’s three-dimensional. The thing with stereoscopic imaging is it gives each audience member an individual perspective. It’s well suited to video games and other immersive technologies, but if you’re looking for an audience experience, stereoscopic is hard to embrace. I prefer the big canvas, looking up at an enormous screen and at an image that feels larger than life. When you treat that stereoscopically, and we’ve tried a lot of tests, you shrink the size so the image becomes a much smaller window in front of you.”
Nolan addressed “Rises” more specifically:
“Warner Bros. would have been very happy, but I said to the guys there that I wanted it to be stylistically consistent with the first two films and we were really going to push the IMAX thing to create a very high-quality image.”
The “Insomnia” director is unorthodox by not using a second unit; therefore, shooting every scene, every establishing shot, every pick-up shot – all have Christopher Nolan behind the camera. This is unheard of for large, big budget Hollywood films.
“Let me put it this way: If I don’t need to be directing the shots that go in the movie, why do I need to be there at all? The screen is the same size for every shot. The little shot of, say, a watch on someone’s wrist, will occupy the same screen size as the shot of a thousand people running down the street. Everything is equally weighted and needs to be considered with equal care, I really do believe that. I don’t understand the criteria for parceling things off. Many action films embrace a second unit taking on all of the action. For me, that’s odd because then why did you want to do an action film?”
Christian Bale returns as Batman, joining Nolan for the third and final film to complete a trilogy. Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, all return as well. Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Joseph Gordon-Levitt headline a cast of newcomers.
Christopher Nolan on set of “The Dark Knight Rises” with one of the IMAX cameras
