00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 - When you go back to the Dark Knight,
00:06 which I think turns 15 years this year,
00:09 I wonder what you look at there in the IMAX
00:11 that you and Wally were dealing with at that point,
00:13 and now with Hoyt and Mahir,
00:15 I'm just curious kind of what you see over that time span
00:18 and how IMAX has expanded.
00:19 - I mean, a lot of changes.
00:20 When we did the Dark Knight,
00:22 Wally and myself and everybody involved with that,
00:25 it was the first time a feature film,
00:29 you know, a two-hour feature film,
00:31 Hollywood feature, had used the format.
00:34 It had always been used for 40-minute films
00:38 that were shown in institutions.
00:40 But the DMR process that had come along
00:42 that allowed us to take Batman Begins, for example,
00:44 and blow it up from 35 mil,
00:46 but play it in IMAX theaters,
00:48 had led to this proliferation of Hollywood movie
00:52 playing IMAX theaters around America
00:56 and other places in the world.
00:57 And so we, sort of in tandem with that,
01:00 that showed me an opportunity to say,
01:02 okay, I first saw that format
01:05 when I was about 15, 16 years old
01:08 at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago
01:10 on an Omnimax screen, you know, one of the dome screens.
01:13 And as an aspiring filmmaker, my first thought was,
01:16 why isn't Hollywood using this format?
01:17 Why aren't we making films
01:19 that can be as viscerally impactful,
01:23 you know, as these documentaries are?
01:26 With The Dark Knight, we got to do that,
01:28 but it was very experimental, really.
01:32 And we had a lot of planning,
01:33 we had a lot of uncertainty about how much it was gonna cost,
01:36 how difficult it would be,
01:37 how we would deal with the long reload times on the cameras,
01:41 the noise of the cameras, all these sorts of things.
01:44 But it worked very well,
01:46 and I wouldn't say it was easier than we'd expected.
01:48 You know, I mean, the first time we mounted an IMAX camera
01:51 on a Steadicam, it broke, it sheared off,
01:53 you know, broke the arm and stuff.
01:55 So, you know, okay, we need a stronger Steadicam,
01:57 you know, that kind of thing.
01:59 But over the years, we've refined things.
02:01 And so, you know, we built,
02:03 Wally and I built a lens for The Dark Knight
02:06 that at the time was the only IMAX lens
02:09 that could open up to a T2.
02:12 So it was very valuable for shooting night scopes.
02:14 That's why we built it,
02:15 for the night work on The Dark Knight.
02:17 And, you know, all the filmmakers
02:19 used to fight over this lens,
02:20 'cause it was the only one that existed.
02:22 And, you know, I had lent it to J.J. Abrahams
02:24 and he would send it back
02:25 and it would go to Zack Snyder, you know, whatever.
02:27 And then over the years,
02:29 IMAX started making more and more lenses.
02:31 We got Panavision involved, collaborating with IMAX.
02:34 And so, Hoyter has been able to
02:37 make all kinds of interesting demands
02:40 on what those lenses can do
02:42 and what sets of equipment we're able to take.
02:46 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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