DARK KNIGHT RISES NEWS

Chris Nolan Says 'TDKR' to Have Up to 50 Minutes of IMAX Footage

by Alex Billington
December 9, 2011
Source: SlashFilm

Whoa. If that's not a headline to remember, than I don't know what is! To top off the amazing six-minute IMAX prologue to The Dark Knight Rises that I saw last night (video blog here), our friends at SlashFilm have picked up a very exciting IMAX scoop that's deserving of its own post. At the post-screening reception, they caught up with director Christopher Nolan, who mentioned during their discussion the potential amount of footage that was actually shot on IMAX that will make it into the movie. And it's up to 50 minutes of it. Holy crap! After seeing only six minutes, I can tell you seeing 50 is going to be phenomenal.

Nolan gave some specific quotes to EW.com about the length and how he tried to shoot as much as possible in the large-scale format, which is always great to hear. He even shot some dialogue scenes, which is quite a challenge, saying that "the cameras are so loud and so large, it wouldn’t really have been fair for the actors to make them do all the dramatic scenes that way." He goes on in detail about how much IMAX we'll see:

"We shot about twice what we did last time [on The Dark Knight], at least. Last time we were about 25 minutes [in IMAX]. Obviously, I haven’t cut [the rest of The Dark Knight Rises] yet, so I don’t know the exact running time, but I think we’ll be in the 45 to 50 minute range. Basically all the actions sequences, and some of the more large-scale other bits of the film that aren’t necessarily action. We even shot some dialogue scenes and some quite intimate dramatic scenes, which we haven’t done before. And so some of that will make its way into the film."

If you saw any of The Dark Knight in IMAX, you know how incredible it is to watch those full-screen IMAX scenes, they're breathtaking and immensely cinematic. But I can tell you he is ready to top that with The Dark Knight Rises, as the footage I saw, even a few glimpses of it, was truly spectacular. And the whole opening prologue with Bane - so awesome! Whether or not it's "better" than the Joker prologue from TDK is debatable, but it's a tease that will leave you ecstatic to see more, a whole 50 minutes more, come next July.

As SlashFilm says, to give you some perspective on just how much 50 minutes is, TDK only had 25 minutes as Nolan said, and Brad Bird's Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol only has 23 minutes of IMAX footage. I'm anxious to see an entire movie in IMAX, but even Nolan makes that sound a long ways off, reiterating the same "unless they could make an IMAX camera that was quiet enough to shoot dialogue scenes." As Nolan has stated, The Dark Knight Rises is an experience that, to truly feel the scope and scale of, you must see in IMAX. It may be a challenge to find a good IMAX theater nearby, but when this movie eventually hits July 20, 2012 next summer, there's no other choice than IMAX to experience the finale in full grandeur.

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Related categories: Hype, Movie News, TDKR News