The Limited Use of CGI in “Batman Begins: While Nolan tried to keep everything in camera, a few scenes weren’t possible to do without a little help from CGI. At one point in the movie, Bale’s surrounded by thousands of bats. Nolan acknowledges he had to use CGI in that scene. “Yeah, well absolutely but we did shoot real bats as well. I mean what I’ve been saying is we shot - for everything that appears as a visual effect in this film we shot material to base it on, whether in the form of a stunt or photographing buildings and what have you or miniature photography. In the case of the bats we shot a lot of tests with real bats and some of that footage is in the film where you see close-ups of bats. They’re real, but then to multiply them out to thousands upon thousands that was CG, yeah.”
Nolan on the Decision to Keep Things as Real as Possible: “I just feel like…I mean that this sort of big blockbuster films I’ve been seeing the last 10 years or so have become smaller and smaller, and more and more like animation films or videogames and all this. And I just wanted to make an attempt to get back to the kind of grand scale filmmaking that I’d enjoyed watching when I was a kid.”
