The Realism of Christopher Nolan (Behind the Scenes)
Warning: This article contains SPOILERS!
Who wouldn’t have heard of the magnificent films of Christopher Nolan? Who wouldn’t have seen Memento, Interstellar, or The Dark Knight trilogy? But if these titles don’t ring the bell and you don’t know what I’m talking about, Inception is sure to be familiar to you too.
I think that the reason I love Nolan’s movies is their twisty, mind-blowing plots. If the characters aren’t always perfect, the plot is always brilliant! And I should mention one more brilliant thing: the visuals. Nolan loves doing everything for real instead of using CGI or green screens. And the result is always breathtaking.
The Dark Knight trilogy
The second part of this trilogy is Nolan’s most known film about Batman. It was his fourth feature film, the one which introduced the late Heath Ledger as the Joker to the world. It was Nolan’s first attempt to use the IMAX format. Its use was problematic for various reasons, but Nolan insisted. Thus, they managed to show the real action scenes in a more spectacular way to the audience.
In Batman Begins in which Christian Bale first appeared as the superhero, Nolan used more computer supported scenes than later on. Gotham City had an elevated railway line which would have been difficult and expensive to build physically, so it was put into the film in post-production. But it wasn’t entirely computer generated. The scene when the train crashes was only supported with CGI. The crew built a part of the railway and the city in a studio and shot it in camera, making it more believable to the audience. They followed the method of using CGI for long shots and then cutting to closeups which were done for real in the later films too.
There is a scene in The Dark Knight in which a truck is flipped. Most directors would have used computer tricks to achieve it, but Nolan did that practically too.
So did in the case of the car chasing scene. That was shot on IMAX and in addition to cars, one IMAX camera was also ruined during filming. Before the shooting only four of these cameras were available in the world, but only three left when it ended.
Four years later our beloved Batman rose and Nolan celebrated it with more complicated action scenes. The Dark Knight Rises starts with a plane crash. Of course, it was done for real, but it was too dangerous, so the crew used the same method like before: They supplemented the moments shot in camera with the scenes they made in a studio. That is how they created this:
Inception
The movie, everyone knows and most of them loves. Of
course, the filmmakers used a lot of CGI because of the dream sequences, but
for instance the hospital in the end was built physically and then blown up for
real. The passage of the hotel where Arthur fought was constructed in a studio
and was rotated to achieve the zero-gravity experience.
Interstellar
Okay, Nolan loves building real sets and doing everything for real. But what does he do when he shoots a sci-fi? Going into space? No. (But don’t worry, Tom Cruise will.) Nolan used miniatures in the case of the Endurance which is a spacecraft in the movie, but he built the rangers in 1:1 ratio. C.A.S.E. and T.A.R.S., the two robots, were also built physically and were moved by people behind them. The crew also went to real locations. They needed a farmhouse for Cooper’s family and instead of searching for one, they built it on an area they had bought before. They also needed a cornfield for some scenes, so they grew hundreds of acres of it. (After finished filming, they sold the crop and they even made some profit.) They went to Iceland to achieve the look of Dr Mann’s and Dr Miller’s planets. They shot on a glacier in freezing cold and even in really strong winds.
Dunkirk
World War II, four
hundred thousand men on the beach, aircrafts, and battleships. Nolan’s next
challenge. He hired extras of course. Not four hundred thousand just six
thousand. They filmed on the beach of Dunkirk and on open water. They had the
chance to rent a battleship used in the world war and they shot the dogfights
in the air with the actors in the cockpits.
Tenet
The latest movie of the director and the most
spectacular of all. It’s an extraordinary, action-packed, tense, and
breathtaking cinematic experience. And it’s all real. Actor John David
Washington (Protagonist) did all the stuntwork himself, he didn’t need a body
double. He even fought forwards and backwards in time. The crew shut down a
highway for weeks to shoot a car chase scene. They also crashed a real Boeing
747 into a building filming at a working airport. Besides these, there are many
other action scenes in this movie I don’t want to spoil. It’s worth a watch on
the big screen! (If it’s presented again after the pandemic.)
The filmmaking method of Nolan definitely brings the
action closer to the audience. They became more impressive and according to the
director it’s much more fun to do.
“It’s dispiriting when you turn up to work and there’s just a green screen with a couple actors in front of it. The magic is not there. So we are trying to do everything for real, trying to use real locations. There’s a feeling of reality,” Nolan said.
(Source: IMDb)
Comments
Post a Comment