The glistening, snot-like substance contains a small timed explosive. With a large, boxy rifle he fires a glob of gel at a window some storeys down on an adjacent office tower. Bruce Wayne is clad in black body armour, crouching on the ledge of a neon-tinted skyscraper. 'Otherwise,' as he puts it, 'why bother? It's an interesting motivation. ](/images/point.gif)![Heath Ledger as The Joker on set of The Dark Knight With Batman Begins, he rescued and reshaped a franchise with something that was arguably a comic-book-movie masterpiece. And, as everybody knows, sequels mean bigger, better, more, harder, faster – and of course, darker. Here, now, he's upping the ante like never before. We wouldn't have been surprised if Nolan had orchestrated that show, too.Īs you'd expect, the director isn't trying here to merely outdo his plastic-spaceship-exploding antics of yore during his last extended visit to Chicago. The day before, just hours after Empire's plane screeched down an O'Hare runway, we witnessed a tornado whipping into downtown Chicago, so immense and fierce it turned the mid-afternoon sky into a, no pun intended, dark night. It's a feat which involves the polite-but-firm diversion of irked locals ('Yeah! Move off your own streets! Chop chop!' barks one man sarcastically), delicate negotiation with, as one teamster puts it, some 'really angry po-lice', and the coordination of hundreds of extras who must cower and scream as thunderous rifle clacks echo around the brickwork. And today, August 24, 2007, he's cordoned off the busy LaSalle Street in the heart of Chicago's financial district to enact the elaborate panic and Brownian crowd-chaos of an assault on a Gotham memorial service (for whom? No-one's saying, but a wreath-framed picture gives the game away we'll just say it's someone important). He's also flipping an articulated, 18-wheel lorry, trailer-over-cab, in a genuine downtown thoroughfare. And this time he's blowing up an entire five-storey building, located on the city's outskirts, for real. He's back behind a camera - an IMAX camera, in fact, for certain key scenes of his latest larger-than-life opus. One toy-sized blockbuster, as the director remembers, involved blowing up his Millennium Falcon with a banger.Ĭlose to 30 years later, Nolan is back in Chicago.

It was while he and his family were living in Chicago, and he'd co-opted his father's Super-8 to film the stiff-limbed adventures of his action figures. CHRISTOPHER NOLAN PICKED UP HIS FIRST CAMERA WHEN HE WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD.

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