By I think we all know that The Dark Knight Rises is going to be huge. Really, really huge. But if Christopher Nolan’s recent statements about the film don’t turn out to be hyperbole, then we are in for something absolutely insane. But I doubt it.
In an interview with IndieWire, Nolan said: “I think this is the biggest one I’ve done. The biggest one anyone’s done since the silent era, in technical terms … It’s not what you’re used to seeing. I don’t know when someone last did a film with 11,000 extras in a real environment.”
There are two movies I want to point to that have, in fact, had that number of extras in a real environment: the Korean film My Way and the biopic Ghandi. My Way, which premiered in South Korea last December and got a release over here in April, featured over 16,000 extras. That being said, not all 16,000 extras were in the same place at the same time, and I don’t know the actual breakdown. So I guess I will give him that on a technicality.
Where I know he is wrong is with Gandhi. That film currently holds a record for having 300,000 extras in a single scene (the funeral scene). Seriously. Three hundred thousand. For a point of reference, that is more than twenty-seven times the number that Nolan gave. Eleven thousand extras is a lot, but let’s be realistic here. Nothing will ever top Gandhi in that regard.
Even Bruce Wayne couldn’t pull that off.
[Empire, via IndieWire, via Vulture]