It did sting a little, but when you strike wood, because it is a table, the whole thing flexes, so there’s that give. We tried it first with a real table, and, I’ve got to tell you, I think the real table was a lot easier. Now, that was supposed to make it easier for the impact. The table that most of the takes were done on was galvanized rubber, so the table itself was fairly solid, and had this half-centimeter of rubber over the top. We did something like 22 takes over two days. If, for some reason, I didn’t get my hand in time, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. It was a little hairy, because the pencil’s stuck in the table. Jarman: I remember Christopher Nolan saying to me, “Look, we’re going to do a couple of shots where you need to be able to take that pencil away.” We did a couple of half-speed rehearsals just to get the hand action of my right hand sweeping across, taking the pencil as my body was going down, and my head striking the blank surface. We spent like a year on this Prestige thing learning magic tricks and how you do tricks of camera.
The previous film Chris and I did was The Prestige. There was nothing there when his head hits the table.Ĭrowley: At the end of the day, you just shoot it twice: one with the pencil and one without the pencil. There was no pencil when his head hit the table so there is no place it’s disappearing into. Wally Pfister (cinematographer): There was no trick pencil. Wherever possible, we tried not to do unnecessary visual effects shots because, digitally, you can never really re-create an IMAX image. But we shot it in IMAX, so you see it on a giant, great, big canvas. It’s not particularly difficult to build a CG pencil and track it in and kinda make it disappear out. Nick Davis (visual effects supervisor): I think even Chris assumed we were going to have to do some CG. Would the whole thing be a visual-effects gag?
Ryan: There was talk of it being a CGI pencil. Nathan Crowley (production designer): Everyone was like, “Oh, how are we going to do it?” There are always loads of meetings and people wanting to do prosthetic stuff. Richard Ryan (stunt coordinator): It was scripted that would slam the pencil in and then one of the henchmen would walk up, and Heath would slam his head into the table with the pencil going into his eye. But how did this deeply memorable, nanoseconds-long sequence come together? We caught up with an array of actors and filmmakers who worked on the scene to get the inside story of the killing blow. It’s hard to imagine an audience member expecting that idiosyncratic fatality, and anyone who saw the picture on opening night can likely recall the gasps that erupted through the assembled crowd when the Joker executes his move.