By Peter Sciretta/Aug. 25, 2009 9:00 pm EST
First up is Ain’t It Cool News, risking it’s geek rep on a rumor that Christopher Nolan is planning to shoot the entire third chapter of his Batman series with full IMAX cameras (no, not the fake digital variety). While we don’t have any idea if this is true, the idea shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, as Nolan has said that he’s wanted to shoot an entire film using IMAX for years.
Before The Dark Knight, he even shot a couple test shots on The Prestige using the IMAX camera to get a sense of that the issues were going to be. And for The Dark Knight, Nolan originally planned to shoot five of the scenes in IMAX but he kept increasing the use of the cameras through out the production. But working with IMAX cameras aren’t easy. The cameras are much heavier, and normal camera equipment had to be modified to be able to handle the weight. Also, the cameras only allow for a maximum of two and a half minutes film load. Another big problem, made obvious by Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, is the amount of design and render time to get the visual effects to look as clear as the rest of the 70mm image. Here is a quote from Nolan from our roundtable interview at The Dark Knight junket:
Dialogue scenes would definitely be the biggest concern, but I’m sure solutions have been explored since the production of The Dark Knight. Of course, this is all but a rumor. Everyone involved in the production has recently insisted that no deal has yet been signed for a third Batman film. But that might just be the company line, who knows?
We found ways and we planned ways of getting around for example, the short load-times which is you know, we would just swap one camera for another when it ran out of film and that kind of thing," explained director Christopher Nolan. “Generally with action sequences which is mostly what we were shooting you really rarely roll for more than ten seconds for example so it tends not to really be a factor. Shooting a dialog scene with an IMAX camera would be a bigger challenge because of the noise of the camera and the short length of the loads and so forth but we got better and better at it, we had a terrific crew, a lot of our camera mounts and things were 35 millimeter they were ones they’re built to withstand enormous abuse, so they can take the weight of a much larger camera.
Ellen Page and Marion Cotillard make up the female leads in his latest film Inception. Cotillard won an Oscar, and Page was nominated for one. Maggie Gyllnhaal might have been the weakest link in The Dark Knight’s main cast, but she’s critically acclaimed and has been nominated for two Golden Globes and two Independent Spirit Awards in the last six years. And The Prestige featured Scarlett Johansson in a time when she was nominated for four Golden Globes in the period of just over two years. Point is, I don’t believe that Nolan would even consider someone like Megan Fox, who is great to look at, but not much more.
I don’t believe that Nolan has even signed on to Batman 3 at this point, nevermind picked characters or begun casting, so I doubt that any of this is true, at this point. But for fun, lets go over the scientifically accurate estimated odds that some of these crazy rumors could actually happen:
