Nolan's love for physical effects is well-documented, but not every one of his ideas can work in-camera. For one thing, even he can't fold up an actual city. Happily his visual set-pieces are pretty darn whizzy too: think of Gotham's slumlike Narrows or Inception's haunted limbo city, a visual that, remembers Double Negative's Paul Franklin, evolved from "something that looked like an iceberg version of Gotham City with water running through it" to a decaying Modernist monolith. "Our goal was to build on the existing reality that'd already been filmed," Franklin tells Wired, pointing to the film's relatively slim portfolio of 500 effects shots. Franklin, Chris Corbould and their team won an Oscar for their work on the film, although the celebrations were shortlived. "Unfortunately Chris had called a production meeting for The Dark Knight Rises for 10.30am the following morning. There were a lot of big headaches at that meeting!"