The practical effects were critical to Reeves’ vision — he was influenced by ’70s-era action films including “The French Connection,” which also placed the audience in the middle of a car chase. “I wanted it to be a practical thing that felt like a ’70s chase,” he said, “like The French Connection or Bullet. I wanted hard mounts, because when the car shakes, I wanted the camera to shake, and I wanted it to feel solid and locked to it.”

What also helped Reeves craft the shot was VR technology, which he used to set up a myriad of shots that ended up shaping the final chase scene, with Alonzo helping him to place the various cameras around the Batmobile’s engine.

“And [Alonzo] took me through every single possible place, and we took- we had scanned in the route, and we could play on a kind of loop, what the path of the Batmobile was, and I could look at the shots in VR before we ever shot them, and I set all of these shots basically beforehand, and we made this crazy storyboard that was made of screengrabs from VR, from the lenses we had found. And so, it was an incredibly involved process.” 

At the very least, Reeves didn’t have to goad his cast and crew into making the shot, unlike “The French Connection” director William Friedkin.