Batman Begins (2005)

Because there is only one two-lane highway that runs through the country, the construction crew had to build a road in order to access the frozen lake and the areas used for staging the village and monastery façade. (A miniature set was utilized for portraying the full breadth of the monastery; only the entrance was constructed at full-scale to film Bruce Wayne’s arrival at the compound.)

“In the portion of the film that we shot in Iceland, you’ll see a raging storm,” producer Charles Roven says. “It’s not a pretend storm. It’s not a CGI storm. We filmed in 75-mile-an-hour winds. There were crew people who were literally blown off their feet. But with Chris, you never stop shooting.”

“Iceland was an incredible place to begin production,” says Nolan. “Our first day of shooting was out on a frozen lake, shooting the Bruce Wayne-Ducard sword fight scene, and the ice was cracking the way it’s supposed to in the film, which was very unnerving. It was it was a pretty extreme way to start a film like this.” In depicting Bruce Wayne’s global journey to achieve the means to rid Gotham City of evil, Batman Begins is the first film about the Dark Knight to portray Gotham from outside the city. “We get to see how people around the world view Gotham, and frame it in the context of one of the great cities like London, New York or Paris,” Nolan says.

Nolan describes his vision of Gotham as “an exaggerated, contemporary New York, an overwhelming metropolis that completely immerses you to the point that you don’t feel its boundaries.”

“We wanted the audience to feel that Gotham is a familiar yet dangerous place,” Crowley adds. To capture this essence of a “New York cubed,” as Nolan calls their concept for Gotham City, the filmmakers utilized real locations whenever possible, then blended them with the sets that Crowley designed. Visual effects were added in post to complete the entirety of the city.

Chicago was used not only as the basis for the design of Gotham, but also for filming scenes that depict many of the fictional city’s exteriors, including the spectacular chase sequence that features the Batmobile rocketing through an intricately choreographed ballet of traffic and crashing police cars.

The chase was shot primarily on Lower Wacker Drive in “The Loop” area of the city, just south of the Chicago River. Chicago’s Amstutz highway, a two-mile stretch of highway that was never completed and does not flow into public traffic, was utilized for the portions of the chase that take place on the Gotham freeway. “The cooperation we got in the city of Chicago was better than any film company has probably ever had in any city,” Franco says. “We closed down city blocks and did some extraordinary work with helicopters filming the Batmobile and police cars rolling over vehicles in the middle of the street.”

Miniature sets were used to complement especially tricky sections of the car chase, the biggest being a sequence in which the Batmobile jumps and drives across several rooftops, laying waste to everything in its path. “We built the miniature rooftop set at one-third scale, so the span was approximately 100 by 150 feet,” Glass recalls. “Working at that kind of scale, things behave very close to reality. So when the car drives across a roof made of tiles, they break and fall like they would in real life. This enabled us to shoot the sequence as if it were a full size action sequence.”

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