Finally, after posting six other interview pieces with eight different people we get to the top of the totem pole with co-writer/director/producer and all-out Dark Knight mastermind, Mr. Chris Nolan. Meeting Chris Nolan was something of a treat considering I love Memento, enjoyed The Prestige and am a fan of Batman Begins and loved The Dark Knight. Nolan is a different kind of a film director in more ways than one, but when it comes to comic book adaptations he has changed the game. His vision of Batman Begins inspired to bring together heavy talent for comic book movies instead of cheap B-list actors. His Batman is the reason we have Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man and Ed Norton in The Incredible Hulk. He proved that treating a comic book movie as more than just a comic book movie and making adult audiences respect it as a movie outright breeds respect. I thank him for that.
With The Dark Knight Nolan had a tough task and a lot to live up to. Sure, there were detractors of Batman Begins and if you sit me down I will even point out some of the major flaws of the film, but overall I think it is a comic book adaptation that is widely loved by many and the thought of a sequel, especially a sequel featuring The Joker was going to require some work.
Nolan brought back Christian Bale as Batman as well as Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and Gary Oldman from the first film, but his big additions were that of Aaron Eckhart and Heath Ledger. Along with them he added size and scope like you have never seen before by filming six scenes with IMAX cameras. To say he was biting off a lot is an understatement, however, he proved it wasn’t more than he could chew.
Sit back and enjoy the final interview in our long series of Dark Knight interviews, as we sit down with Christopher Nolan.
What were the biggest logistical challenges you faced on this film?
Chris Nolan (CN): Logistically the challenges were shooting in three different countries and moving back and forth between those countries – more than you would normally. I really wanted to put together a core group of people on the film and then have local crews where we were shooting. So we scheduled them a bit unusually.
We started in Chicago for week, and then came back to London, and then came back to Chicago, then London again, then Hong Kong. It’s an unusual way to make a film, but it’s what we needed to do to really get the size and scope we needed for the film. To be shooting as much as possible in real places, on real locations. Not just the city streets, but some of the interiors – the mayor’s office, the conference rooms, things like that – we wanted real views out of those windows. We wanted to make the film more real world scale.
Not to give anything away, but you have an interesting cameo early in the movie, was that decision something you needed to wrap-up from the first film or was it just something fun for the audience?
CN: It’s a bit of both really, and it’s also the desire to take advantage of the fact that in a sequel you can jump in with a fully formed Batman and you really want to see him in action, but you don’t want to be artificially tying up all of your story that’s coming in and then this story. So, the fact that we had a bit of a loose end with Scarecrow from the last film, it seemed like an ideal way of diving into the story of Batman without treading too much on where the story was going to go in the next two hours.
And the IMAX? How was that?
CN: The IMAX was not bad, we thought it would be very cumbersome, very tricky, very time consuming, but a lot of careful planning and attention went into it. So, by the time we arrived on set we had it pretty well worked out how to use it. As the film progressed I think we got better at it and could use those cameras for more and more things.
CN: What I wanted to do was shoot as much of the main action of the film in IMAX. It felt very important that the first action set piece be done that way and that action set piece being the introduction to The Joker I had always intended, and indeed we did, take that opening sequence and we released it in IMAX theaters six months before the film came out to just give people a taste of what it was we were trying to do technically and introduce people to Heath’s interpretation of The Joker in a manner that was very, very grand and perhaps a little overwhelming. I love the idea of creating cinema on the grandest possible scale. I think I am always trying to get back to that feeling you have when you are little kid and you’re just watching a much larger than life escapist entertainment. I really wanted to get that visceral thrill into this film since it is a sequel to a film we’ve made; it is something we were trying to expand the impact of the film.
I thought that was interesting because most sequels tend to think they need to blow things up in order to go bigger, but in yours you made the film itself bigger.
CN: Well we did make the film bigger, but we did blow a lot more things up.
Yeah, but that worked inside of the story…
CN: It does, we did blow a lot of things up. We really blew up everything we could in the film, but we did it so that when something was threatened of being blown up, at different points in the story, you really believed it might happen. We wanted to get genuine threat into the different narratives in the film. When we’re dealing with somebody who is an anarchist, somebody who is dedicated to chaos, I think the most visceral way of representation of chaos is an explosion.
Christian Bale kept referring to you whenever we would ask him a question. He would say we would have to ask Chris Nolan that. He basically said everything that happened was a construct of you, what room do you give him now that you have done three films together?
CN: To be honest I think that as a writer/director I’m able to work with my collaborators on the script – we spent a lot of time trying to get the script right – and I’ll generally do the last bits of writing myself as I am moving into the directing phase. So, we tried to give Christian as much information to work with on the page. He is a very precise actor, he’s much like Heath Ledger actually, he’s somebody who will go away and construct the basics of what it is he is going to do with a character and bring that to set. He’ll have a very precise idea of how he is going to work. Michael Caine is exactly the same. These are actors who are capable of being directed, they’re capable of doing anything you want them to do, but they do come to set with a very specific idea of how they should be doing their job and I think they see it as their responsibility.
Can you speak of Heath and working with him?
CN: Well, working with Heath was terrific. I needed somebody truly fearless to take on such an iconic role and Heath was an extraordinary actor, but he is also very bold with his choices and had been in the past. When I saw him in Brokeback Mountain, for example, that’s an extremely moving performance that is very, very dangerous for an actor. That is to say he plays an introvert, he plays a lonely person that gives nothing to the people around him and he risks doing that to the audience. He risks closing himself from the audience. Nothing in that performance is done from vanity, nothing is done to open out the character to the audience and yet it works. I think that was a very bold choice for that.
CN: Well, no I wouldn’t say so actually. I would say he was a very charismatic, very ordinary person. Very warm, very friendly, he put everyone at ease. He was very considerate of the people around him while he was working, really a great pleasure and a great professional.
Those that knew him and those that had the privilege of working with him, it’s pretty amazing the disparity between the person he was and the monster that he created for us for the film. To see that on a daily basis, to see that being created from this very gentle person is a real testament to his skill as an actor and it was very exciting to watch.
How much of The Joker did Heath actually bring to the character outside of what you had on the page?
CN: I think he brought an immeasurable amount. What was on the page was a very clear indication of the way in which The Joker’s energy would be directed and the way in which he presented himself to the people around him. In terms of being the life of that character that’s something that had to come from Heath. He had to figure out a logical basis for the way in which The Joker does everything and he applied that uniformly to each aspect of The Joker, from the way he moves, the way he moves his hands, the way his face moves, what the voice was. He was very careful to construct an iconic performance and he always knew it would have to be iconic, but never losing sight of the reality of it. He plays the guy as a human being the whole time and The Joker’s form of evil is a very human form of evil and I think it is very important you believe in him as a human being as well as a monster.
Was there ever a point during filming there was something he did that actually surprised you? Surprised you what he actually brought to a scene?
CN: I would say, honestly, ever scene he did as The Joker was surprising in some way. I always knew he was going to be able to produce the degree of intensity that we needed, to do something extraordinary, but I really had no idea how he was going to do that. The performance is very complex and it has very particular elements that make it up and the things he’s doing with his voice, the range it has from the high pitch to the low pitch, there’s an unpredictability to everything and that is what you felt on the set every day, the unpredictable nature of the character. You felt that in the performance as well and there were always choice he made and the way he chose to perform them that were not at all what I had in mind when I visualized the scene at script stage but really seemed to work. He really did his homework, he had the entire film precisely plotted out.
As much as this is an action movie is it also a cautionary tale about the masks people wear? The two sides we all have inside of us. Is that equally important as the action part of it?
CN: Well I think for me what is important is that the action of the story derive out of interesting dilemmas for the characters and the central dilemma I think for Batman, in all his incarnations, is always he’s somebody driven by quite dark impulses, he’s created in a dark way. He’s driven by anger and rage and a desire for vengeance against the criminals of Gotham. But he attempts to channel that into something positive. He attempts to harness that energy and use it for something good and he’s central dilemma is how far can he go in using intimidation and violence to achieve good. I think that is a very human dilemma. I think that is something society deals with. For that reason the action that results from a character who is so poised on the edge of that problem, I think that action is going to be a little more relevant, a little more frightening and exciting for an audience.
CN: When Katie [Holmes] couldn’t do the role I was delighted to find that Maggie was willing to take it over because she is somebody I had wanted to work with for a long time, I admired her work in other films greatly. She seemed to me to be the perfect person to bring the mixture of warmth and credibility the character needed in moving on into this story. She’s somebody who is in a relationship with these two very different men and you have to understand why these men are really looking to her for something outside themselves and outside the lives they’re leading. It’s an active character she has, it’s not a passive. She has to be very active in that triangular relationship, she has to be a force in it.
Maggie is somebody who is able to create a very credible characterization, it’s a very recognizable, every day sort of person, but with a great warmth and attractiveness. She’s really, really excellent at doing that and that’s exactly what the part needed for this story.
You have said how much you wanted to have practical effects instead of CG. How much CG is there in the movie?
CN: I feel quite strongly the audience can tell the difference on some level between things that are animated and things that are created in the computer and things that are photographed, even if your photography is then somehow manipulated or you have wire removals. I think in the film we have about 650 visual effects shots of which a lot of them are simple rig removals and things. Typically these films will have between 1,000 and 2,000 effects shots. So, it’s a pretty low number of shots for this scale of film, very similar to Batman Begins. We start from point of view of breaking down the script and looking at all of the action sequences and figuring out what we can do for real and striving to do everything for real. The things we can’t achieve for reasons of cost or safety or what-have-you, those gaps are filled in with visual effects.
Was there anything you thought you could do practically that just couldn’t happen and you had to do it in post?
CN: Even those things you try not to do them in CG. There was one thing in the film, the Batmobile getting into a head-on collision with a garbage truck, I very much wanted to do that for real, but my special effects coordinator, the guy who flipped the truck and demolished an entire building, when he told me he couldn’t do it I had to accept that. But rather than do it with computer graphics, Nick Davis, the visual effects supervisor, did it with large scale miniatures and I think it cuts very seamlessly into the film.
Was there anything cut that will be on DVD? Deleted scenes?
CN: No, I believe my job as a director is to really fight for the theatrical version of the film to be the definitive version of the film. I very rarely have put deleted scenes or anything like that, and I rarely shoot anything that’s not in the film to be honest.
You’ve always been cautious in speaking about the future of this franchise, but do you intend on making a third film and is there ever a concern your career may become dictated by one specific character or franchise?
CN: I honestly have no concept of what I would do next. I finished the film last week really. So, really I am putting it out there with that sense of nervous anticipation and we have to see what the audience thinks of it. What I can say is in deciding to do a second film, and seeing how few good second films there ever are, we certainly didn’t want to hamper ourselves by saving anything for future films or anything like that. We put everything we could into this film.
You can also read our interview with Maggie Gyllenhaal here, with producers Emma Thomas and Charles Roven here, with Christian Bale here, with writers David Goyer and Jonathan Nolan here and with Aaron Eckhart here.
Also, be sure to stay tuned for Gary Oldman and Christopher Nolan tomorrow. We also have a Dark Knight giveaway you can sign up for right here.
