We already know that The Dark Knight is going to break every box office record, Heath Ledger’s going to win a Supporting Actor Oscar, and the damn trailer already won the 2008 Golden Trailer Award — but did you also know, the film also has the most impressive score in cinematic history?
It’s a radical concept for a film score, a technique more likely to be found in a Wagner opera… Zimmer and Howard gave Nolan an iPod filled with 10 hours of music cues based on just the script, which Zimmer contends the director memorized on flights to and from Hong Kong.
The score, which includes pieces composed prior to filming, has elements culled from Bach and hard rock in addition to the minimalists, and, listened to on its own, manages to get the heart palpitating.
Think that’s impressive? Consider these other aspects of Dark Knight that are also more impressive than anything ever done for any film:
– The lighting on the film was provided entirely through moonlight captured and reflected through hardened bat guano, fashioned into prisms, designed to give the film an authentic ‘batlike’ glow. Each guano prism cost nine million dollars and an incalculable amount of aspiring-zoologists-in-Madagascars’ lives.
– The caterers on the film provided intricately thought-out fruit plates for Christian Bale that were a bit more composed and deliberate, whereas the food for Heath Ledger was arranged in a more frazzled, chaotic, Joker-like fashion. Also it was the best food ever.
– All of the Production Managers lost 80 pounds for their roles on the film.
– The Foley Artists recorded all of the sound effects for the film in an 8×8 foot glass chamber suspended upside down from a tree, filled with three dozen bats that had been painstakingly trained to remain silent so their shrieks didn’t keep ruining the sounds.
– In preparation for his duties as Production Associate Producer, Karl McMillan constructed his own Batcave, Batmobile, and Batman costume, and actually acted as a masked vigilante crusading on behalf of a crime-infested metropolis, eventually squaring off against equally-committed Film Editor Lee Smith, who was wearing Joker makeup and committing random, whimsical acts of murder. Then they both lost 80 pounds.
