TheBatman cinematographer Greig Fraser on that spine-tingling Batmobile reveal: “That car reveal was talked about a lot. Trust me. Batman's iconic, but also the thing that he drives is pretty iconic as well.”
began before the director ever signed on to the comic book film. While in post-production on his “Planet of the Apes” movies, Reeves talked to the cinematographer about being approached by Warner Bros. to helm a new film adaptation of the Caped Crusader. “There was no job offer there, for him or for me, actually,” says Fraser. “It was more about ‘Ah man, could you imagine if Batman did this?’ I was loving hearing his take on what he thought Batman should be.
This is the Dark Knight. You can’t walk him through a supermarket or a pharmacy and see him in his all of his glory. Finding the right balance between darkness and lightness for him was the real challenge. Because we had such a beautiful suit and such an amazing actor inside that suit, we did not want to underlight him or take too much away from those elements. But we also wanted him to remain an enigma.
This film was probably the most complicated lighting job that I’ve ever been involved with, for obvious reasons. I was putting together a bit of a style guide of all the frames. I’d sit there and I’d flick through the frames half a second each, maybe less. But if I could tell what was going on, then I feel like we succeeded in our quest for simplicity of the frame. So I’ve watched this movie a number of times now flicking through on my iPad.
In modern filmmaking, often there’s a tendency to go a little bit “Bourne” style when it comes to handheld [camerawork]. The “Bourne” films were legendary when it came to action and set pieces, so there’s a tendency to go in that direction. But we actually went the other way. We went, “let’s try and see this in as few shots as possible.”
We were very lucky in the sense that we had a great previz. As in, we had the opportunity to previz a lot of these things. Matt is a very visual director. He likes to lead from the front when it comes to helping come up with the images in the movie. So having him as a partner there is really great. I’ve been fortunate in my life to have worked with some very visually competent directors.