From nytimes, A DREARY office plaza at Wabash Street and the river, late afternoon. A mist blows in from Lake Michigan. Producers and idle actors huddle under a flimsy canopy; grips hastily unfold another over their high-priced gear. A few stories overhead, a stunt double in a familiar black-caped costume swings from a hoist, slamming into a window in a Mies van der Rohe tower that we shall imagine is Gotham City Hall. A noose is around his neck, a knife plunged into his heart.
The meaning is clear: Batman, or at least his döppelganger, is dead.
Christopher Nolan, the director of “The Dark Knight” — the follow-up to his 2005 franchise reboot, “Batman Begins” — is unperturbed by the rain, but a tiny detail irks him. “Hey, buster!” he shouts to the stuntman, craning his neck skyward and raising his voice for the first time all day (politely, as ever, but enough so he can be heard). “Could you turn yourself a little more to the left?”
In so many ways this isn’t what you’d expect of a $180 million Hollywood comic-book movie sequel with a zillion moving parts, a cast of thousands and sets from here to Hong Kong. Anyone else would shoot indoors, use digital effects or wait for clear skies; Mr. Nolan rolls with the weather’s punches, believing that the messiness of reality can’t be faked. Another filmmaker would leave a shot like this in the hands of a second-unit director, but Mr. Nolan doesn’t use one; if it’s on the screen, he directed it, and his longtime cinematographer, Wally Pfister, worked the camera. Stars on any other movie would have fled to their trailers to wait in comfort until needed again. Here, Gary Oldman is watching and shivering along with everybody else, cracking jokes to keep warm.
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