Fernando Gros

Holy Helicopter Blades Batman!

It’s not unusual to hear heli­copters in Hong Kong — they are every­where. But the noise level that inter­rup­ted me this after­noon was unusu­ally loud and as I looked out, there was a heli­copter, uncom­fort­ably close to my window. It hovered there for quite a while, then turned to circle over Cent­ral. The cul­prit was part of the film­ing crew for the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, cur­rently being shot on loc­a­tion over the fra­grant harbour.

Of course, the harbour’s unique aroma appeared to be too heady for the pro­duc­tion and a rewrite was required to remove the scene that would have had Batman jump­ing into the har­bour. Appar­ently sal­mon­ella, tuber­cu­losis and the other nas­ties that make up the chem­ical cock­tail in Hong Kong har­bour were too much much for this masked avenger.

Fur­ther con­tro­versy was sparked when the film’s dir­ector, Chris­topher Nolan (of the last Batman film, Batman Begins and the very excel­lent The Prestige) asked Hong Kongers to keep their lights on all night to aid in the shoot­ing of the night sequences for the film. One can under­stand the dir­ector want­ing to get the best shots pos­sible of what is (pol­lu­tion per­mit­ting), on the most stun­ning night-time city­scapes in the world. How­ever, Hong Kong is a city strug­gling to get the mes­sage of energy con­ser­va­tion and envir­on­ment­al­ism, so the request could not have come at a worse (or more volat­ile) time.

That said, I did manage to get some brief snaps of the heli­copter, when it returned at sunset to buzz around IFC 2, the tallest build­ing in Hong Kong.

Tech­nor­ati Tags: Batman

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 9:30 pm. It is filed under Expatriate, Film Theory, Hong Kong. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.