First up, we have some words from Paul Bir­chard (via indieWire). Non-too reveal­ing, they give us another fas­ci­nat­ing insight into Heath Ledger’s por­trayal of this famous character:

As regards to how Heath Ledger *seemed* as the Joker, he seemed like he WAS the Joker, and didn’t need to let any­one know it — rather con­tained, but ready to explode at any moment in an unex­pected fash­ion. Men­ac­ing, but more because he seemed like he was prob­a­bly crazy, and maybe vio­lent, rather than that he was TRYING to scare you. (and by the way, all he did dur­ing the scenes I was in was sit in his hold­ing cell, react­ing and listening…so, he’s a very fine actor if I imbibed all this from just watch­ing him sit there…) He didn’t talk a lot between takes, but he also wasn’t “Don’t approach me!” in his man­ner — a real pro, in other words.

In short, he seemed just like the Joker SHOULD seem.

Before more Joker — I am going to slip in this lit­tle link, be an Extra on The Dark Knight. And here is an RFK cast­ing call. (links via our friends at Bat­MovieNews)

Spoil­ers after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Film Rota­tion are report­ing a sus­pected time that we may see our much antic­i­pated Bat­man trailer, precisely,

The first of THREE full length the­atri­cal trail­ers for Christo­pher Nolan’s The Dark Knight will debut in front of the much-anticipated Will Smith apoc­a­lyp­tic action-horror, I Am Leg­end, in late November/early Decem­ber this year.

Cat­e­gorised as a rumor.

Mary Jane has sent in this tid­bit of news for us,

Begin­ning Sat­ur­day, August 11 and con­tin­u­ing through Sat­ur­day, August 18, prepa­ra­tions for and film­ing of a fea­ture film cur­rently dis­guised as “Rory’s First Kiss” is sched­uled at 330 North Wabash. The film­ing takes place in the lobby, thir­teenth and third floors as well as the exte­rior south plaza. The actual film­ing dates are: Sun­day, August 12 in the lobby (south­west side), Wednes­day and Thurs­day, August 15 and 16 on the 13th floor, and Fri­day and Sat­ur­day, August 17 and 18 on the 3rd floor and exterior.

Next up, after the break, check out the image of the Joker Semi that Eric sent us and some Har­vey Dent spoil­ers… Read the rest of this entry »

Warn­ing — Beware of Spoilers.

Thanks to Nites­tar Productions.

And some more footage from this weeks film­ing, from the early morn­ing of August 4th:

Today at Bliz­zCon 2007 we have heard our first solid and inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion with regards to the War­craft, or to some, the World of War­craft Movie. This movie will be big, huge, EPIC even — in fact, Thomas Tull (pro­ducer of 300) stated a bud­get of over $100m would be com­mit­ted, with a pro­jected 2009 release date. Leg­endary Pic­tures are 100% com­mit­ted to this project, it shall be a “tent-pole”, some­thing to stand next to and say “we did that!” — whilst remain­ing true to the game and fan base.

The plot for the film will take place approx­i­mately a year before the start of World of War­craft, includ­ing races you have played and lands you have wan­dered in, where lots of plot arcs are melded into a two and a half hour story. The film itself will revolve around a ‘badass’ new hero, with a theme towards con­flict and cul­ture — being a War Movie rather than a quest movie, from an Alliance’s per­spec­tive.

“It’s actu­ally not like the great adven­ture. It’s not so much a quest movie. It’s more of a war movie. Well, okay, it’s absolutely a war movie. Cul­tures grind­ing up to a hor­ri­ble moment where it just all spills over and gets out of con­trol. Less of an adven­ture party quest-type sit­u­a­tion. More of an armies build­ing to an inevitable con­clu­sion type situation.”

And w.r.t to the Alliance:

“While my heart lies with the Horde and Thrall’s an inter­est­ing char­ac­ter, from a movie mak­ing stand­point, a block­buster movie its a lit­tle rough to try and tell it from the per­spec­tive of this green look­ing dude.”

No direc­tor or cast have yet been assigned to the project and Tull stated that rec­og­niz­able actors to play main roles was not a necessity:

“We are start­ing those con­ver­sa­tions. We’re going to be look­ing for some­one of Zak Sny­der (300) or Chris Nolan (The Dark Knight, Bat­man Beings) calibre,”

The not so good news — seems they are aim­ing for PG-13 con­tent which claims to be a com­pro­mise. I per­son­ally miss the days of old when action heroes swore blindly.

“I can tell you that this is the one thing about run­ning a stu­dio and mak­ing these things that’s hard. You want to not com­pro­mise and have the right level of inten­sity. The story and the director’s vision is what’s ulti­mately going to dic­tate that. Per­son­ally one of my favorite movies of all time is Lord of the Rings, which has a PG-13 rating.”

The film is still in its script­ing process, but Tull stated that they are cur­rently work­ing with some­thing that they are very happy with.

And now for the first piece of con­cept art of the Teldrassil:

Other Q & A info:

Classes will be in the movie, but can’t give details since still in script­ing process, not exactly clear and we don’t know yet, but we want many famil­iar ele­ments in the movie as possible

What races will be rep­re­sented? Not very easy to answer con­sid­er­ing the time­line we’re talk­ing about, so they are not sure about if the For­saken have yet joined the Horde But not every­one can be in the spot­light in the first movie anyway

War­craft has a lot of strong char­ac­ters, would you con­sider going back to do another movie on Arthas? I would con­sider that, sure, but we haven’t talked about what other films might deal with. We have to get the first movie right first before you deal with franchises.

This is based on two or three major moments in the games, so it isn’t rad­i­cally apart from the con­ti­nu­ity, so it really holds together. We want it to taste like the World of War­craft world. but it’s also really fresh. I under­stand the fear that you don’t want us to screw up the story, but we will be respect­ful of the con­ti­nu­ity but will hold up as a killer 2 hour movie. It is a lit­tle mod­i­fied.
There’s so much in this world to deal with, so you use that as a jump­ing off point to tell a kick ass story. They want the play­ers to enjoy the movie expe­ri­ence, if they are too much a slave to the story that won’t be the case. They want to respect the world, but to trans­late it to the screeen and is great on film.

And here is an after-video from IGN:

We’ve heard some infor­ma­tion about an animé filler between Bat­man Begins and The Dark Knight, now a leaked doc­u­ment (is it true? No way to val­i­date the info yet) has informed us that this will take the shape of six short films, much like the Ani­ma­trix, each with a dif­fer­ent screen­writer (Josh Olson — His­tory of Vio­lence, David Goyer — Bat­man Begins, Brian Azzarello — famous comic book writer). They will intro­duce a num­ber of pop­u­lar char­ac­ters from the DC comics whilst con­tin­u­ing plot arcs from Bat­man Begins. Expected to be PG-13 rated and geared towards core fans, this col­lec­tion shall bere­leased 2–4 weeks prior to the movie.

To take a gan­der at this doc­u­ment, which has its valid­ity put into doubt by the mis­spelling of Olson as Olsen — (or just a typo that escaped), check out the page here.

Also, here’s a fun Gotham flag as seen on Fight­ing the Sub­urbs (guy stand­ing in the pic­ture ruth­lessly cropped out!):

My Fox Chicago are back with more can­did videos and pho­tog­ra­phy from this week’s filming.

And for the videos, the first shows the scene being shot in the above images and can be found here. The sec­ond video is from a slightly dif­fer­ent angle.

“We’ve got more behind-the-scenes footage from the ongo­ing pro­duc­tion of Bat­man: The Dark Knight going on right now in Chicago. These are from overnight last night into this morning.

In these clips, you can see Heath Ledger dressed as The Joker prepar­ing for a scene, and in the link after that, video of the scene being produced.”

Thanks for the heads up Steve.

A “reli­able stu­dio insider” revealed to IESB​.net that the direc­tor of both the Gears of War Movie and the remake of Escape from New York would be Len Wise­man.

Don’t recog­nise the name? This was the fel­low that cre­ated both of the Under­world fea­tures as well the fourth Die Hard film, Live Free or Die Hard. He is also the lucky hus­band of one Kate Beckinsale.