After six months of shooting, production finally wrapped on Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises this week. One of the odder stories that circulated around the production was that the Occupy Wall Street protests at Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park might serve as a shooting location. It turned out that they didn’t shoot there and now Matthew Modine, who has a supporting role in the film, talked about the reason why in an interview with IndieWire –
The wisdom of Christopher Nolan and his incredible team was that, while it seemed like a good idea to give [the protestors] an opportunity for work, to give them money, it would send a terrible message. At the end of the day, we’re making a movie. What’s happening down there is more important than that. To co-opt what’s happening there and around the country… we didn’t want to trivialize it. It was more important to respect what they’re doing than to do anything that could potentially trivialize the political situation downtown.
Of course, not every film has kept a hands-off stance towards the protests. They did turn up in A Very Harold And Kumar 3D Christmas. Granted the script had a protest scene already in the script and so they were lucky enough to capitalize it with just a few tweaks.