The $500,000 mistake in ‘The Dark Knight Rises’
He may have been an early adopter and staunch proponent of using IMAX cameras in feature films, but as The Dark Knight Rises proved – not even for the first time in his career, either – Christopher Nolan might want to be a little more careful with the bulky and expensive equipment.
The conclusion to the filmmaker’s epic trilogy may not have lived up to the lofty expectations set by its predecessor, but that didn’t stop it from racing to a box office haul north of a billion dollars and winning plenty of praise for the immersive, richly-detailed, and sweepingly epic action sequences.
Of course, plenty of issues were voiced over its approach to plot, story, and character, but from a purely visual level, The Dark Knight Rises was a thing of beauty. Upping the ante and leaning into IMAX-shot footage to a much larger degree than he had previously, the increase in its prevalence naturally created a bigger danger that things could go wrong.
Unfortunately, that’s precisely what happened when Nolan was shooting the climactic showdown between the Gotham City Police Department and Bane’s army of rogues. Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman played a pivotal role in the scene, but the star’s double garnered the unwanted accolade of wrecking a costly IMAX camera.
The stunt performer was riding Batman’s customised motorcycle down the staircase of a building when she got a little too close for comfort, leaving the camera operators with no time to get the hulking rig out of the way. She careened right into it, and while nobody was injured as a result, the $500,000 IMAX creation was nonetheless shattered beyond repair.
Incredibly, that wasn’t even Nolan’s first time breaking one of the cutting-edge cameras. In The Dark Knight, when the Joker and his goons are engaged in a running vehicular battle with the local S.W.A.T. team, Nolan broke what was just one of four IMAX cameras in the world at the time when the film’s showstopping truck flip ended up with the rig falling directly on top of the exorbitant kit.
Has Nolan since learned his lesson and become increasingly careful when it comes to using IMAX cameras on his sets? Considering that yet another one bit the dust after being used for just a solitary scene of shooting on Dunkirk, it would be fair to say that no, no, he hasn’t.
Strapping the camera to a plane and then crashing it into the sea was always going to present its own set of risks, but even though there was a protective casing built around it to withstand the impact, the weight of the IMAX camera sent it sinking to the bottom of the ocean where it lay for 90 minutes before being retrieved.
