Christopher Nolan Talks About BLADE RUNNER's Influence on BATMAN BEGINS

Last month marked the exact ten year anniversary of the release of Christopher Nolan's seminal superhero origin film Batman Begins, which was the movie that really catapulted him to the status of one of the world's biggest (and some would say best) filmmakers. We already wrote about a documentary you can watch to revisit the making of the movie, but now Forbes has a new interview with Nolan looking back on the legacy and impact of the film ten years after it came out, and one part in particular caught my eye as something I don't think I'd ever heard before: apparently Ridley Scott's Blade Runner was an influence on Nolan's movie.

It’s hard to say what was conscious homage, and what was my analysis of why Blade Runner was so convincing in its production design and in the way it uses its sets. From a pragmatic point of view, Blade Runner is actually one of the most successful films of all time in terms of constructing that reality using sets. On Batman Begins, unlike The Dark Knight, we found ourselves having to build the streets of Gotham in large part. So I immediately gravitated toward the visual treatment that Ridley Scott had come up with, in terms of how you shoot these massive sets to make them feel real and not like impressive sets. And immediately we started looking at the rain, the handheld cameras, the longer lenses…

So myself, my designer Nathan Crowley, and my cinematographer Wally Pfister, we started to throw all of that into the mix of how you can help the look of something, how you can create texture, as Ridley Scott has always been the absolute master of. Creating a texture to a shooting style that maximizes the impact of the set, and minimizes the artifice — the feeling that this world has edges to it that you would see at the edge of the frame. Blade Runner is one of the examples of how you can take a camera and get down and dirty… and really envelop your audience in the atmosphere of the world you’re trying to create. We definitely tried to emulate that style, and I think in doing so we actually created homage, particularly where we used the rain very much.

The whole piece is worth checking out if you're a fan of Nolan's work. I wonder what cool bits of info we'll learn about The Dark Knight on that film's tenth anniversary in a few years.