Mon­day July 21st was the UK and Euro­pean pre­mière of The Dark Knight, Chris­t­ian Bale, Aaron Eck­hart, Mag­gie Gyl­len­haal, Chris Nolan, Michael Caine and the tum­bler were all at hand to sign auto­graphs, greet fans and attend the shindig.

Below is a 17 video playlist of tele­vi­sion fea­tures, video inter­views and can­did shots of the Bat­mo­bile, cast and crew. YouTube is play­ing silly bug­gers and not let­ting me edit this playlist so the order of the videos may not be too great for the moment. Enjoy.

Images from out­side by Samuel Judge:

Images from inside by Ben30:

Not mean­ing to sour the joy­ful occa­sion and cel­e­bra­tion that is The Dark Knight, but it looks like Chris­t­ian Bale has been caus­ing trou­ble, as reported by the BBC:

Bat­man star Chris­t­ian Bale has been bailed by police after being ques­tioned about alle­ga­tions he assaulted his mother and sister.

The 34-year-old was arrested and held for more than four hours after ear­lier attend­ing a cen­tral Lon­don police sta­tion by appointment.

Mr Bale is alleged to have lashed out at his mother and sis­ter in his suite at London’s Dorch­ester Hotel on Sunday.

He has been released on bail until Sep­tem­ber pend­ing fur­ther inquiries.

Flickr user Peter­Punker was lucky enough to be invited to one of Th Dark Knight’s pre­mieres in Europe. He has posted some pic­tures to let us know what we are missing:

Kotaku had a chance to quiz head of Microsoft Game Stu­dios Phil Spencer and vice pres­i­dent of Strat­egy and Busi­ness Devel­op­ment Shane Kim at E3, try­ing to draw out of them as much Halo infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble — touch­ing on the movie in the process.

We con­tinue to be in dis­cus­sions with var­i­ous poten­tial part­ners. We’re so excited about the idea. We don’t have any­thing spe­cific to announce but I can tell you that their con­tin­ues to be tremen­dous inter­est. We wanna make sure, when­ever we trans­late it to the big screen that its going to be a movie wor­thy of the IP. So we’re going to be very care­ful about how we pro­ceed there.

AICN’s Quint has had a chance to speak with Rainn Wil­son, and in the con­ver­sa­tion the topic of Trans­form­ers 2 appro­pri­ately popped up along­side work­ing with Michael Bay:

Quint: So what are you work­ing on now? You have some stuff com­ing up?
Rainn Wil­son: Well, I just did a very small cameo in TRANSFORMERS 2.

Quint: Cool.
Rainn Wil­son: That was kind of a blast. I got to work with Michael Bay and I was a big fan of TRANSFORMERS.

Quint: I spent a few days on the set of the first movie and some­thing I noticed was that Michael Bay, I think he has an AD, but he doesn’t need one.
Rainn Wil­son: He does every­thing himself.

Quint: He does every­thing and he’s not afraid to be the task mas­ter on a set.
Rainn Wil­son: I saw him and he was lit­er­ally giv­ing the focus puller notes. The focus puller was like “No, you have to do it like this…” and Michael Bay is like “No no no, do it like this and hook this here and you can turn this here and you can get the focus this way…” Some­how I believed Michael Bay knew more than the focus puller. He even ran cam­era a cou­ple of times. He did his own cam­era work.

Quint: That must have been fun. I don’t imag­ine that you are in any scenes with any robots, but it would still be fun.
Rainn Wil­son: No, I wish I would have had scenes with explo­sions, but yeah the only other thing is I have a bunch of film irons in the fire out there.

Whilst Megan Fox recently spoke to IGN about TF2, I’ve extracted the inter­est­ing bits:

Q: How is Trans­form­ers 2 going?
Megan Fox: It’s going good. It’s gigantic!

Q: Com­pared to the first, you’d say it’s way big­ger?
Fox: It’s twice the bud­get, so yeah.

Q: Can you say where this movie picks up for your char­ac­ters?
Fox: It’s two years later, so when it comes out it will be present day. Shia [LaBeouf, who reprises his role as Sam Witwicky] and I have been dat­ing for two years, so it’s kind of like old news. There’s no big love scenes or any­thing like that – you kind of get into the cou­ple bick­er­ing now. That stage, like the old mar­ried cou­ple. That’s all I can say!

There’s also another inter­view with Megan Fox by Scifi​.com

The fel­low at the Don Mur­phy forums have pro­vided some new shots of the Trans­form­ers fleet in prepa­ra­tion for trans­port — the Chevy Beat, Chevy Trax, Opti­mus Prime, Ratchet, Iron­hide and most impor­tantly cap­tur­ing our first clear shots of the slick sil­ver car we saw at Fair­mount, thought to be a Chevy Corvette ZR1 or C7, though the rear pan­els on both of those do not fit with this model. The lat­est rumor puts it as a rein­tro­duc­tion of the pop­u­lar Chevy Stingray, with the styles and aura of pre­vi­ous incar­na­tions. What­ever it is, it’s very sexy.

Con­tribut­ing Source: TLAMB

In a post on Don Murphy’s mes­sage board, writer Roberto Orci stated that Trans­form­ers 2 shoot­ing has been tak­ing place “all week and last week”. It was pre­vi­ously thought that TF2 had ceased film­ing in antic­i­pa­tion of the SAG strikes.

Michael Bay has con­firmed this in an inter­view with Enter­tain­ment Weekly, where they spoke to Michael Bay at a remote air force base.

Matthew Mars­den plays a lead role in Revenge of the Fallen as SAS Gra­ham, this is his first inter­view since that announce­ment. The inter­view is all rather generic — giv­ing away no secrets or even lit­tle teasers, very lit­tle prob­ing done by the interviewer.

“I’m part of a multi-national force. What’s going on right now is I’m a British Spe­cial Forces offi­cer that’s attached to Lennox’s team. Well, there’s two of us ini­tially. And we’re bat­tling the bad guys.”

[…]

I just try to be real. My char­ac­ter is not an amus­ing char­ac­ter. He’s a sol­dier, so all the stuff that I did is very much rooted in real­ity and what I know from the expe­ri­ences of my friends [who are in the mil­i­tary]. So, it’s just very real and noth­ing über-spectacular.

We went to Penn­syl­va­nia and shot at the Beth­le­hem Steel Plant, which was really amaz­ing. We had this scene where it’s, like, ‘That’s where he is!’ and you have to shoot at him. ‘He’s going that way!’ It’s quite a far dis­tance away, so we had to use a laser pointer [to stand in for the robot]. It’s all fun; I love that stuff.

There are bad guys there and we have to go and get them. That’s basi­cally it.”

[On Shia and Megan Fox]

“They’re work­ing with the Auto­bots, [so] they’re def­i­nitely going to know some of the strengths and weak­nesses of dif­fer­ent robots. So, if they’re work­ing together with an alien life-form, which they didn’t ini­tially, then obvi­ously they’re going to know more. In the first one, they were actu­ally find­ing out what they were because they didn’t know. … Now they’re aware of what they are, and we’re part of the task force specif­i­cally to go and deal with them. … I just know that I’ve got a big chunk to come, and I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of action in it.”