One of the major architectural additions was the Wayne Tower.

DF: How big an adjustment was it for Nolan to work digitally?

PF: Chris, I think, was kind of worried that we would obscure everything behind technicality. He was slightly suspicious that the digital visual effects guys might try and pull the wool over his eyes, and steer the film into a direction they wanted to take it in. So we had to make sure that all of our tools worked in a way that was understandable to people who are involved in the business of going out and shooting pictures and who talk in terms of traditional cinematography.

Now, basically, our 3D lighting toolset was designed to mimic the way you would work on a real set, instead of working in arbitrary values of intensity of light and things like that. You can do things in a 3D universe, which are completely non-naturalistic. They don’t obey any laws of physics. And this was the sort of thing that Chris objected to. He would say, “Well, as soon as you start breaking the rules, then the scene inherently loses its believable look. It starts looking like a cartoon. It starts looking like a contrivance.” So we were very keen to make sure that our office would always talk in terms of photographic stops. And so they would say, “OK, so you want to raise the exposure on this scene?” Rather than just, “Make it brighter, increase the intensity by this amount,” you actually talk in terms of photographic stops. And so if Chris would say to us, “OK, that needs to be two stops brighter,” I could say to my 3D artists, “Make it two stops brighter,” and it all meant the same thing to everybody. We all used the same language. That was quite conscious. So it was more about making the digital environment user-friendly.

DF: It’s the way a computer interface becomes simplified. You don’t need to know all sorts of code to use it.

PF: Exactly. One of the key things is also that it means that our artists are also thinking in a more creative, more artistic fashion. They’re not looking at everything through the interface of all the technical layers that get laid on top, and they start thinking more about, “What is it I’m actually doing here? What am I actually doing with these images? How am I making these images so that they evoke an emotional response, that they fit with the feeling of the live-action photography, and that they tell a story?”

DF: What was gained by using a virtual city, albeit one based on real places, instead of simply going on location in an actual city?

PF: One of the key places where Batman Begins really goes into the realms of the fantastic is that the sheer scale of Gotham City is way beyond anything that you could ever see in a real city. Now, Chicago is incredibly impressive. If you go up to the top of the Sears Tower and look out, you think, “This is quite an incredible landscape.” Especially compared to anything we have over here in Europe. I mean, London’s an enormous city, but it just doesn’t have that sheer gargantuan size at the center of it that big American East Coast cities have.

At the same time, Chris really wanted it to feel like Gotham’s a city out of control, sprawling in all directions, a true mega-city. There’s a moment quite early on in the film, where Bruce is returning from his sojourn in the Himalayas, and he’s flying back into Gotham with Alfred on board the Wayne Enterprises private jet. Bruce looks out of the window and he sees the sun rising over Gotham City as they fly in from the sea, and the sun is glittering off the sea — that’s an entirely computer-generated shot. There’s no live action in that shot. Everything that you’re looking at there is computer-generated. But it’s always based on a reality. All of the buildings in the city are based on Chicago originals, and the look and feel of it is inspired by the way that New York is broken up into islands. The lighting design is based on the photography that I did from the top of the Sears Tower, watching the sunrise over Lake Michigan. But the scale of it is enormous.

DF: So Wayne Tower is the only made-up building in the thing?

PF: Yes, although, obviously we have things like the monorail system, which is a non-real thing. That was inspired by the Chicago El train, but it’s been taken into the realm of the fantastic by suspending it 150 feet up in the air with these incredible sort of mid-twentieth century ironwork structures. It has this almost sort of Victorian, industrial revolution feel to it.

DF: Was that based on actual designs, actual buildings from the Victorian era?

PF: What they were all based on was the actual structure of the Cardington, the building that was used here in the U.K. as a studio, which is a vast hangar, which was built just after the First World War to house an airship called the R-101, which was the size of the Hindenburg — 800 feet long. The building is quite incredible. It’s a single structure, one giant room, which is about 200 hundred feet high and about 200 feet wide, and a quarter of a mile long. But it’s supported by this unbelievable grid structure inside of it, the girder structure that supports the roof, and that was the inspiration, I believe, for the monorail towers.