Things take an ominous turn for young Wayne when he tumbles into a well on his property and is engulfed by a swarm of bats — an incident that scars his psyche and indirectly sets up the eventual murders of his parents. One evening, Mr. and Mrs. Wayne take their son out to see an opera, but the show features flying creatures that remind young Bruce of his traumatic encounter with the bats. He begs his parents to leave the theater, and when they do, they are slain by a mugger.

After this incident, Wayne’s life is never the same, and the tragic turn of events is reflected in the presentation of Wayne Manor. Exterior shots of the mansion were captured at an estate called Mentmore House, located in Hertfordshire. Key interiors were shot on stage at Shepperton. “When Bruce is a child, Wayne Manor is a big, wonderful place that he embraces,” Pfister notes. “Years later, when he returns to the mansion with Alfred [Michael Caine], the place has an eerie, uninviting feel. Nathan and Chris decided to cover all of the furniture and paintings with long, ghostlike sheets, and I decided to make the lighting very monochromatic, very sterile, especially during the scene in which Bruce and Alfred walk up the main staircase. I had a Lighting Strikes 100K SoftSun coming through the windows at Mentmore as the two men climbed the stairs.”

“The SoftSun was a really good choice for that location,” adds Evans. “I’m always a bit scared to use one large source, because if it breaks down, you’re stuck. You can always have a spare 18K on hand, but you can’t just ask for a spare SoftSun! But the SoftSun performed well for us. It’s small enough that we could rig it onto a fairly small crane, which was very helpful because access to the mansion was quite limited. The light from that unit bounced off the white environment and created a very pleasing look. The only other fixture we used for that scene was a 1.2K HMI to create a bit of fill.”

Pfister credits Evans for bringing his English ingenuity to bear on a later scene at Wayne Manor involving a birthday party for the adult Bruce. The sequence takes place in a large, open atrium, where the cinematographer wanted to soften some of his larger sources. “The room was about 50 feet square, and I had to light up the entire space because Chris wanted a lot of flexibility in terms of what we could see there,” says Pfister. “We brought in four lighting balloons — two tungsten and two HMI — to provide general fill, and they were probably about two stops under key. For the key, I used the balcony in that space to position 5Ks, 10Ks and Mini-Brutes to create edgelight. I wanted to soften that edgelight, though, so Perry and his guys clamped together several 4-by-8 frames of diffusion that we could either hang from the ceiling or position on stands. One great way to soften a light is to place the diffusion a great distance from the source. This atrium was so large that we could have a 10K up in the balcony aimed through a piece of diffusion hanging from ropes in the middle of the space, 30 feet from the source. We’d just lower our diffusion down until it was in front of the light.” Adds Evans, “In England, we bolt together those 4-by-8 frames all the time, but Wally had never seen that technique before, and he thought it was brilliant. You can just keep adding as many frames as you need to the whole arrangement. At one point, I think we had about six of them tethered up in the air.”

To add a finishing touch to the scene, Pfister used China balls lamped with 250-watt bulbs to provide eyelights. “When I operated for Philippe Rousselot [ASC, AFC] on Instinct, I watched him light tons of stuff with China balls,” he recalls. “I don’t use them very often, but they’re very handy for certain situations. In this case, we were far enough from the walls that they wouldn’t illuminate the walls as we brought them in. We sometimes dimmed them down or put them behind a frame of diffusion.”

Trekking to the “Himalayas”

After becoming disillusioned by Gotham’s downward spiral, Wayne journeys to a remote monastery in the Himalayas, where he meets a martial-arts mentor, Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson), and a ninja contingent headed by the mysterious Ra’s al Ghul (Ken Watanabe). Some shots for these scenes were filmed on location in Iceland, while others were filmed onstage at Shepperton. “Chris and Nathan scouted Iceland before I came onto the production,” says Pfister. “A lot of the picture takes place at night, so Chris was looking for a location where he could get some spectacular daytime imagery.”

Nolan offers, “What appealed to me about Iceland, as opposed to other mountainous locations in Europe, was the extremity of the scenery. It’s utterly bleak, with volcanic rock and glaciers. It’s so stark that it says something very extraordinary about Bruce Wayne’s [psychological state] and the place he’s at in his life. The location needed to have that almost surreal extremity.”

Pfister and his crew took full advantage of Iceland’s photographic possibilities. We did some helicopter photography there with my regular aerial cinematographer, Hans Bjerno, and we also staged a wonderful swordfight between Wayne and Ducard on real ice,” the cinematographer details. “I went out onto the ice with a handheld camera, and we put Steve Adelson on a Western dolly with the Steadicam. We all just kind of slid around for a day!”

The exterior of the monastery comprised several different elements: a real exterior in Iceland, which included several small buildings; a miniature used to enhance the scale of the place; and an exterior set built in Cardington that would be destroyed in a spectacular explosion. In addition, the production built two monastery interiors in Shepperton’s Stage C: a candlelit “Throne Room” where Wayne first meets Ducard, and an open, three-story courtyard where Wayne learns martial arts.

Crowley initially designed the Throne Room to have somewhat solid walls and a ceiling, but Pfister worked with him to retool the space to allow dappled “daylight” to filter through various openings. “We covered the open areas in the ceiling with our 4-by-8 frames, which we could move around,” explains Pfister. “We put pieces of diffusion over some of the holes but left others open to create random patterns of light.” Additional light in the Throne Room was motivated by lanterns and candles. “I wanted to find a careful balance in terms of both color and density while maintaining a very dark look,” says the cinematographer. “I also used smoke there because it was very well motivated by the lanterns. I don’t usually use smoke, and when I do, I like to have a reason for it.”

In the courtyard, Pfister wanted to create the feel of soft, ambient daylight to match the look that had been photographed in Iceland. Again, he worked on the design with Crowley to create platforms around the uppermost balcony and flexible openings in the sides to let in the light. A total of 16 quarter Wendy Lights were positioned on the platform, four to each side. “I wanted to maintain a bit of edgelight at one or two stops over key, and I kept my fill light about two stops under,” he says. “Most of the time, three sides of our [grid] were turned off. Depending on which direction we were going to look, we could maintain a soft backlight by just turning off one set of lights and turning on the next set. We also had frames of diffusion hanging from the grid that we could lower down to soften our sources as we tightened up the shots.” Additional lighting for the courtyard was provided by four 20Ks positioned on the platform, and 25-30 2K Blondes that were used to send light through openings in the walls. Evans also talked Pfister into installing some space lights overhead. “Wally was a bit loath to use those at first, but we never used all of them at once,” he says. “We could turn on some of them to provide extra backlight in whatever direction we were facing.”