The Dark Knight: To IMAX Or Not To Max

Posted by Kevin Carr (kevin@filmschoolrejects.com) on July 14, 2008

Ahhh… that is the question.

There is a world of difference between a movie shot specifically for the IMAX screen and one that it simply blown up to fit the format. It’s like the difference between watching an old Super8 movie reel and a big-budget summer blockbuster.

So many elements of The Dark Knight have become news stories in themselves. Sure, there’s all the Heath Ledger angles, but the IMAX angle is also intriguing. Right now, getting a more expensive IMAX ticket for the midnight opening is harder than getting a front row seat at a Miley Cyrus concert, so this clearly makes a different to the moviegoing public.

And it makes a difference. Trust me. It does. And the sequences that director Christopher Nolan shot in IMAX help make The Dark Knight a unique cinematic experience.

The hero shots and the wide establishing shots of Gotham and Hong Kong are just dropped in here and there. Unless you’re watching the aspect ratio or can immediately spot the sudden clarity of an IMAX clip, you might just be so lost in the movie that you’ll not even notice.

But more importantly, there are some key sequences that are shot in IMAX. These shots practically sell the film itself. What makes it most interesting is that these are action sequences, which are normally not done in IMAX due to the unwieldy nature of the camera, it’s two-minute shooting limit and the fact that with such a large format, the movement on screen sometimes gets lost to the viewer.

At a recent press junket, Nolan explained how they got around the challenges: “We did a lot of preparation with it, and we found ways and we planned ways of getting around.” One way to do this was to keep loaded cameras in the ready for when the film rolled out. “Generally with action sequences which is mostly what we were shooting you really rarely roll for more than ten seconds for example so it tends not to really be a factor,” Nolan said.

What was a factor was the weight of the camera. Still, cinematographer Wally Pfister managed to get in some handheld shots with the significantly larger rig. “We do a lot of the film handheld, and he made it very clear to me from the beginning he wasn’t going to try and handhold an IMAX camera because it’s too heavy,” Nolan said. “But right towards the end I finally convinced him to do it.”

Ultimately, with IMAX, the action sequences don’t always pose the biggest challenge, but rather the dialogue scenes. “Shooting a dialog scene with an IMAX camera would be a bigger challenge because of the noise of the camera and the short length of the loads and so forth, but we got better and better at it,” Nolan explained.

The standard 35mm gear used on the film actually held up to the abuse of an IMAX action sequence. “They’re built to withstand enormous abuse, so they can take the weight of a much larger camera,” Nolan said. “It was quite possible to do what we would have done with 35 mil cameras with these IMAX cameras, and as the film progressed I think we got better and better at it.”

So, yeah. We get it. Shooting the whole film in IMAX would have been a real pain in the butt. Still, how cool would it have been to shoot the whole damn thing that way?

For more on The Dark Knight, visit our Official Guide to The Dark Knight.

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