Here is a weird story about consequences, politics, history and Chris Nolan films.
This is a photo of me as a Gotham Police Officer, an extra in The Dark Knight Rises. They were out of my uniform size. Pic secretly taken during the shoot by a friend. His name is Adrian Hong...
This is a photo of me as a Gotham Police Officer, an extra in The Dark Knight Rises. They were out of my uniform size. Pic secretly taken during the shoot by a friend. His name is Adrian Hong...
You can see Adrian in The Dark Knight Rises. Here he is, close to Matthew Modine, about to charge Bane's militia.
A few odd details about shooting this scene of the Dark Knight Rises: the staging area was 23 Wall Street, a building that still bears scars from a bombing of Wall Street in 1920, possibly committed by Anarchists...
At the same time as shooting The Dark Knight Rises was going on, Occupy Wall Street was happening blocks away at Zucotti Park. You could walk from a multi million dollar superhero simulacra of an urban uprising to a real one. Tourists asked me for help in my Gotham cop uniform...
About halfway through the first day, the massive team of Assistant Directors had to relay to all 1000 extras that we had to stop smiling and laughing while fighting. In IMAX it would be visible on screen...
Adrian Hong was a Tae Kwon Do blackbelt, his father was a grandmaster. They wanted ex cops, military & fighters to be extras. He asked me to join, knew I had some martial arts training. I wanted to spy on Chris Nolan working and it paid better than the bike shop I worked at...
While waiting in bitter cold the first morning, I remember some ex NYPD cops excited to discover we were supplied with their old style police batons, and demonstrated laughing how they used to use them for chokeholds or pinning a throat against a wall...
I actually wiped out during one take of the charge as another extra fell around me, so somewhere Chris Nolan has IMAX footage of me eating shit on the sidewalk. I hope it looked like Bane's militia mowed me down...
Adrian had been a devoted activist to liberate North Korea. He had been arrested and jailed in China for smuggling exiles, and had founded a group called LiNK that even briefed US Senators on N Korea...
I knew him as a devoted family man with a newborn, a beautiful Jindo, and who would borrow Xbox games from me on the reg. He became frustrated that the US political apparatus had no desire or capital to do anything about N Korea, and left the group he founded...
We lost touch, part of the natural drift with friends in NYC, with an occasional chat on Signal about things he was up to, questions he had about filmmaking. I went from the bike shop and being a cop extra to getting my first movie made. And then...
In February 2019, the N Korean embassy in Madrid was raided, led by an ex US marine and former Gotham City cop Adrian Hong, who gained entry by posing as a businessman to make deals in N Korea. It went sideways and Adrian fled the scene in an Uber under the name Oswaldo Trump...
Adrian returned to the US met with FBI agents to hand over material from N Korean laptops. During the Trump presidency's love affair with Kim Jong Un, he realized he was going to be thrown under the bus. His accomplice Christopher Ahn was arrested... nypost.com/2022/05/10/us-…
So, Adrian Hong vanished, leaving behind his wife and daughter. His life under threat of assassination by N. Korea. Mysteries that he was a CIA asset who got burned. His group continues his work. And there he is, every time I watch The Dark Knight Rises. newyorker.com/magazine/2020/…
Did not expect this small story about lives intersecting with films become a trial of Adrian Hong. It’s interesting some want to reduce it to whether I’m saying he’s good or bad politically or personally, but missed the part about real NYPD ex-cops on set of a superhero movie…
Adrian isn’t an abstraction, he’s a person. There was what I knew about him and what we all didn’t. People are complicated, contradictory, full of secrets, motivated by intentions they assume to be good, subsumed by forces greater than them. Sometimes they break into embassies…
Weirdly enough, this is exactly why I sincerely believe Oppenheimer is truly a great film. It’s exactly about the liminal moral spaces brilliant, daring, mistaken people who want to effect change often occupy at multiple points at once & the gravitational black hole of politics…
Sometimes you see it very close up sometimes in art. It could be any of your friends. The choices we make are dangerous & consequences always unforeseen. We need complex stories about people, desperately.
(And for the record, Adrian went into hiding to protect his wife & child)
(And for the record, Adrian went into hiding to protect his wife & child)
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