At one point Christopher Nolan and his regular director of photography Wally Pfister wanted to shoot the whole of The Dark Knight Rises with IMAX cameras. A daunting and highly ambitious plan but for Nolan who likes to test himself further with every new project, it was the next logical step after shooting a couple of scenes in the format for The Dark Knight, noticeably the opening bank heist sequence with The Joker.

In the end, Nolan and Pfister decided it was simply impossible at this stage logistically to shoot the whole film in IMAX but they certainly shot as much as they could with Nolan revealing to The Wall Street Journal that The Dark Knight Rises will include over an hour of IMAX footage, making it the biggest use of the format in the history of Hollywood films.

Nolan has insisted on pushing the IMAX format in the marketing materials for the last entry in his Batman trilogy. Notably, he made sure that The Dark Knight Rises prologue would play along with true 70mm IMAX cinema showings of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (incidentally a movie which also had several scenes designed specifically for IMAX) and not in regular theaters, that is how much he was adamant that his film should be seen this way.

The Dark Knight Rises is due July 20th, 2012 and it goes without saying you should see it in IMAX if you can.

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