DF: Is there anything you want to add about the effects being seamless and fitting in with the overall naturalistic look of the film?

PF: Chris is a very interesting filmmaker in that he’s a young guy and he has a very hands-on approach to filmmaking. Now, Batman Begins is a very big-budget film, probably one of the biggest-budget films made this year. Quite often, in that kind of filmmaking, the director will spend a lot of time working with the principal cast and crew, but he’ll let stunt sequences and visual effects sequences be handled by a second unit. Well, with this film, there was no second unit. Chris and Wally Pfister, the director of photography, shot everything. Every frame you’re looking at there has pretty much been authored by Chris and Wally. They’re involved. Chris is involved in everything that went into the film. And what’s also very interesting about this film is that they’re very into the whole technology of filmmaking in the traditional sense, in that this film does not have a digital intermediate. It wasn’t taken to a digital lab. It’s all graded in the traditional way, in a film laboratory.

Chris Nolan’s control of the look of the film even extended to grading the film in a film lab instead of using a digital intermediate.

DF: How so?

PF: It was very important to Chris and Wally that all our digital work fit in seamlessly with that, so we had to prove at a very early stage that we were going to be able to faithfully mimic the actual photochemical filming process with our digital tools. And this set the standard for the way that we then have to work on the movie, because to prove something to Chris Nolan, who’s not somebody who’s done a huge number of digital effects in his previous films — what he would like to do is go out, film something for real and then go away and make a digital version of the same thing and put them side by side. And when he agreed that they both looked the same, that’s when we passed the test, that’s when he’s happy that the work’s going to go into the film.

It was this level of scrutiny that was applied to every aspect, whether it was creating the digital reproduction of the way that a camera actually captures the light, to the way that we had to prove that we could do convincing, photorealistic digital architecture to be able to create the digital cityscapes of Gotham City. We actually went out and we chose a suitably art deco building here in London and photographed it on a variety of different films and still formats, on an extremely cold day here in January about a year ago. We filmed the sun rising, so we were there before the dawn.

That was also an interesting foresight of what was to come, because we were perched on the tops of buildings, looking at this other building, in fairly precarious positions. And eventually we ended up in Chicago, standing on top of the very top ledge of the Sears Tower photographing the dawn rising over Lake Michigan.

DF: Tell us more about the lighting and modeling used to achieve the effects that you wanted.

PF: Well, Chris isn’t somebody who will come up with a whole bunch of storyboards and approve a whole bunch of previsualization animation, and say, “OK, this is what we’re going to do for the film.” He was very keen that this film should not be overwhelmed by CGI and end up becoming a cartoon. This extended all the way back to the pre-production process, where he didn’t want to produce animatics. He didn’t want to have, say, a story reel of the film, which he would then just go out and shoot. He likes to make a lot of his creative decisions when he’s actually on the set, because it might be that the actors respond differently to actually being in Chicago or something like that, and get some interesting things that you couldn’t predict were going to happen. If you’ve got this sort of predefined, rigid structure, which you’re going to shoot, then you can’t respond to that, you can’t make use of it. So he would often see things and say, “OK, this is a cool thing, this is what I want to get in the film.” However, we had to be able to plan for what we were going to do to be able to create the digital environments later on.

And so we went out in May for a two-week visual effects shoot, which is in advance of the main unit turning up in August in Chicago. We knew there were a variety of locations that were going to be in the film, and a variety of different types of environments that we needed to get, but we didn’t know exactly what they would be, and where the camera was going to be pointing and how the scene was going to be lit. So we developed a process that allowed us to photograph very high-resolution panoramas of the Chicago cityscape across a very wide range of exposure. This means that we could take environments that we’d shot under ambient Chicago city light conditions — in other words, just the lighting you would see if you went to Chicago this evening and pointed a camera at the buildings — and then, because we had this very, very high dynamic exposure range, we could then relight these images through the use of computer graphics so we could match the theatrical lighting, which Wally then put on the locations when the main unit showed up later in the year. They used some pretty impressive lighting rigs on the days when they were shooting stuff, particularly for the car chase sequence, when the Batmobile is on the rooftop of the parking garage just before it leaps off and goes into the crazy chase across the rooftops, which is all our work. We had to match all the environments around the miniature car chase sequence to match everything that came before that.

The other thing is that we had to build, for modeling, a very comprehensive library of Chicago structures, and also other structures that were hero buildings, like Wayne Tower, for example, which was an imaginary building which doesn’t really exist, obviously. Whenever you see Wayne Tower in the film, it’s an entirely digital creation. So that was something very key, to get it looking totally convincing and integrate it into the Chicago cityscape, to then create the landscape of Gotham.