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THE STORY GOES like this: during The
Dark Knight’s most explosive scene, in which
clown-faced chaosmonger the Joker (Heath
Ledger) blows up Gotham General Hospital
— and director Christopher Nolan demolished
an entire building for real — something went
wrong. As Ledger walked out of the building
with plumes of fire and debris bursting through
windows behind him, everything unexpectedly
fell quiet. The building, actually a derelict factory
in Chicago, wasn’t collapsing as planned.
Knowing it was a one-take deal, and figuring
the SFX guys would fix it, Ledger improvised
a ‘what’s up?’ gesture at the building before
jabbing at his detonator. Suddenly, BOOM.
The charges blew, surprising the actor, and
the building came tumbling down.
Good story. But it’s not true.
“Yeah, I’ve heard that one many times,” says
special effects supervisor Chris Corbould. “But
no, it was all meant to be.” At the start of the
shoot, Nolan had told Corbould, “I want to
blow up more things than anyone’s ever blown
up before,” to reflect the Joker’s personality.
However, for this shot not only did Nolan want
to bring down a building for real and capture
it in a single, Joker-centred take (with only
a cutaway to a crowd reaction and an aerial shot
at the climax), he also wanted his principal actor
to be walking out of the building during its
initial, fiery paroxysms. During pre-viz,
Corbould realised that meant splitting the
explosions into two distinct phases.
“The first part where he’s walking out of
the hospital is cosmetic stuff — directionally
controlled film effects,” says Corbould. The
second part was when “the proper demolition
started”. This was arranged in close
collaboration with a professional building-
toppling firm, who had vertically cut the interior
of the factory into segments, meaning it would
fall in a more visually interesting left-to-right
wave, rather than straight down.
“So we very consciously put that dead
moment in there just to provide a safety factor,”
Corbould says — to give Ledger time to clear
the site and jump into the safety of the school
bus, which the supervisor had ensured was
“bulletproof ” with “armour-plated glass” (and
in which Corbould himself crouched, ready to
run out and rescue Ledger in case he tripped).
Ledger’s reaction remains as impactful as
the real-life fireworks. That initial pause aside, he
doesn’t once risk a peek over his shoulder. “He
was so cool and calculated,” marvels Corbould
of the late actor. “Heath sold the whole thing.
He was absolutely perfect, bless him.”
STORY
OF THE
SHOT
THE DARK
KNIGHT
WORDS DAN JOLIN