00:00When you go back to the Dark Knight, which I think turns 15 years this year, I wonder
00:09what you look at there in the IMAX that you and Wally were dealing with at that point
00:13and now with Hoyt and Mahir, I'm just curious what you see over that time span and how IMAX
00:19has expanded.
00:20I mean, a lot of changes.
00:21When we did the Dark Knight, Wally and myself and everybody involved with that, it was the
00:26first time a feature film, you know, a two-hour feature film, Hollywood feature, had used
00:34the format.
00:35It had always been used for 40-minute films that were shown in institutions, but the DMR
00:41process that had come along that allowed us to take Batman Begins, for example, and blow
00:45it up from 35 mil, but play it in IMAX theaters, had led to this proliferation of Hollywood
00:51movie-playing IMAX theaters around America and other places in the world.
00:58And so we, sort of in tandem with that, that showed me an opportunity to say, okay, I first
01:04saw that format when I was about 15, 16 years old at the Museum of Science and Industry
01:09in Chicago on an Omnimax screen, you know, one of their dome screens.
01:13And as an aspiring filmmaker, my first thought was, why isn't Hollywood using this format?
01:18Why aren't we making films that can be as viscerally impactful, you know, as these documentaries
01:25are?
01:26With the Dark Knight, we got to do that, but it was very experimental, really, and we had
01:32a lot of planning, we had a lot of uncertainty about how much it was going to cost, how difficult
01:37it would be, how we would deal with the long reload times on the cameras, the noise of
01:42the cameras, all these sorts of things.
01:45But it worked very well, and it was, I wouldn't say it was easier than we'd expected, you
01:49know, I mean, the first time we mounted an IMAX camera on a Steadicam, it broke, it sheared
01:53off and broke the arm and stuff, so, you know, okay, we need a stronger Steadicam, you know,
01:58that kind of thing.
01:59But over the years, we've refined things, and so, you know, we built, Wally and I built
02:04a lens for the Dark Knight that at the time was the only IMAX lens that could open up
02:10to a T2, so it was very valuable for shooting night scopes, that's why we built it, for
02:15the night work on the Dark Knight, and, you know, all the filmmakers used to fight over
02:20this lens, because it was the only one that existed, and, you know, I would lend it to
02:23J.J. Abrahams, and he would send it back, and it would go to Zack Snyder, you know,
02:27whatever, and then over the years, IMAX started making more and more lenses, we got Panavision
02:32involved, collaborating with IMAX, and so, Hoyter has been able to make all kinds of
02:39interesting demands on what those lenses can do, and what sets of equipment we're able to take.
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