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In Conversation With Christopher Nolan
The Dark Knight director on bringing Batman back to the screen | | | |
You once said you had no intention of doing a sequel to Batman Begins. What changed?
I certainly didn’t have any intention of it and I was quite surprised to find myself wanting to do it. The way in which Batman Begins ended was intended not as much as sequel bait, but to create a level of excitement at the end of the movie and imagining how things might continue in this film. Ultimately we just got caught up in that process of imagining how you would see a character like The Joker through the prism of what we did in the first film.One thing that’s really striking about The Dark Knight, compared to Batman Begins, is that you open in daylight, with The Joker’s robbery. You never expect to see daylight in a Batman movie…
 |  | | Batman Begins’ ending was intended not so much as sequel bait, but to create a level of excitement at the end of the movie. |  |
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Yeah, well through the film we tried to play as much of it in the day as possible. Because we sort of set up this dynamic where, at the end of the last film and carrying into this film, Batman, as it were, rules the night and people are afraid of him - criminals know he's out there - so The Joker kind of owns the day, in a way because Batman can't really come out in the day. He'd look a little ridiculous in the rubber suit, walking down the high street in full daylight. So the day, in a weird way becomes more threatening, you know, because you feel when you get into the night, you sort of feel like Batman's probably in pretty good control of things. In the past, you’ve talked a lot about how you think film should explore narrative in the same way as literature. Are you hog-tied at all by doing a sequel? Does it represent a limitation?
It all depends on how you look at it. There are limitations to doing a sequel in terms of having to meet certain expectations, and then try and exceed certain expectations - story-wise. So this story, for example, is probably the first film that I've done that is completely linear in form because that felt very much the way it should follow on from the first film... The first film was quite linear...
Yes, in a certain way, but it played a lot with memory and flashbacks, there's a certain circularity to it in the narrative - it's literally chronological but there are little rabbit holes within itself, which the first Batman (Tim Burton’s) had as well, and on Batman Begins we had the memories of what happened to him as a boy and the way they interacted with the present. This is much more of a straight-down-the-line continuation of where we got to in the last film, but I didn't actually see that as a limitation. I saw it actually, in narrative terms...taking on a sequel is quite liberating because you don't have to explain who people are, etc…With a sequel, you don't have to do any of that - you can just jump straight in and it's a very liberating narrative freedom to not have to build anything other than plot and we introduce The Joker just in that first sequence, that's it. It's not an origin story for The Joker... That was quite surprising. A lot of people were expecting you to make The Killing Joke (Alan Moore’s beloved comic positing events that lead to the birth of The Joker).
Yeah, but even in The Killing Joke there's ambiguity and I think the ambiguity...let me put it this way, our Joker - Heath's interpretation of The Joker has always been the absolute extreme of anarchy and chaos, effectively - he's pure evil through pure anarchy. And what makes him terrifying is to not humanise him in narrative terms. Heath found all kinds of fantastic ways to humanise him in terms of simply being real and being a real person, but in narrative terms we didn't want to humanise him, we didn't want to show his origins, show what made him do the things he's doing because then he becomes less threatening. If you look at Hannibal Lecter or someone like that, the more you explain where he came from, the less interesting he is, I think. In that first Michael Mann film, where he's just sitting in that jail cell, pontificating about serial killers, he's absolutely terrifying and then each of the films that have had him in as a character have progressively revealed more and more about who he was and have made him more of an ordinary person and he gets less and less interesting, I think. So for us, with The Joker, it was very much a question of not so much dealing with the origins of The Joker, so much as the rise of The Joker. We always wanted him to be an absolute; in terms of he's a fully formed individual. People's reactions to him are not fully formed so were seeing him change the world, rather than himself. He doesn't have an arc, as such - a character arc or anything like that - he really just...I like to say he cuts through the movie the way the shark does in 'Jaws'. Would you say this is his greatest performance?
I think that Heath had put some pretty amazing performances under his belt. Certainly his performance in Brokeback Mountain was what, you know, most impressed me, of what he'd done - but Monster's Ball, as well. This performance is completely different from anything he'd ever done before. ...the voice is...
 | | | This performance is completely different from anything Heath has ever done before... I think it’s his most iconic performance. | |
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..the voice, the movements, what's going on in his eyes, is completely different...I think it's his most iconic performance. In taking on The Joker, I suppose that's inevitable, but the fact that he pulls it off - and he is 500ft tall and you know he is just an incredible icon and I think it's a pretty stunning piece of work, honestly. When I first met with him on the project, before we had a script actually - he came on board very early - and I talked with him about the anarchic elements that I saw as being the more realistic Joker, the guy who would actually frighten an audience, and he'd already come up with a lot of that on his own. We talked a lot about Alex in A Clockwork Orange, people like that. He'd come up with the same things independently. I looked into his eyes and I just saw...this guy knows he can do something here, he wants to get in and do this thing and that was without even a script, we were still working on the script.Do you consider this movie to be dedicated to him in any way?
Um I mean, in literal terms, absolutely…I've certainly felt a huge sense of responsibility to make sure that the film is as good as his performance and that, in managing his performance and putting it together in the edit suite from what he'd given us, we've felt a very, very large sense of responsibility that this be as great a piece of work as he knew it could be. But we've all worked very hard on it and, from my end, I'm very pleased with the results and I think he would be. A criticism levelled at a lot of superhero sequels – Batman and Robin, Spider-Man 3 – is that they get overloaded with villains. Here you’ve got The Joker, Two-Face, Eric Roberts as Sal Maroni. What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah...the bottom line is, when you do a sequel, there is a natural movement towards expansion because you have to be offering the audience the elements that should continue from the first film, that they enjoyed, you then have to add to that so, by definition, you are going to expand with this kind of sequel. The sort of truisms about 'why do they do it this way?' - they're all based on examples of poor sequels and there aren't that many good sequels, that's the truth; they're difficult to pull off. But if you look at the good sequels, they do the same thing, they just do it well. So the ambition has to be the same. The ambition has to be to make a better film than the first one and a bigger film than the first one, a film that in some way moves on and develops the world you're in. Otherwise, you're making a television programme - you're just making episodes of the same thing. And there aren't really very many successful examples of sequels that work that way; the Bond films would probably be the only one I can think of off the top of my head, where each film is essentially an episode that doesn't relate to the others and is more in the way that a television programme is. When it's done badly, you then take pot-shots at it and say 'why did they stuff all these extra characters in?’ 'Why did they do this?' 'Why did they do that?' But actually, it can work well, whether it's The Godfather: Part II or The Empire Strikes Back. You think of these movies, you think of The Godfather: Part II when they put in the whole history of Don Corleone; they just completely expanded that world and threw in all kinds of extra people, as it were, and new characters. 'The Empire Strikes Back' - same thing. Those are the two sequels that I always look at as being very successful in how they moved on from their first films. So I think you have to try and do it and you have to try and do it well. In genre terms, I think we have a big advantage in that - the first film we tried to give it a certain epic quality with the origin story, the journey and everything and then when you got to Gotham it was very noirish quality to it. What we've done with this film is we've taken on much more, I think, the dynamic of a story of the city, a large crime story - the sort of film that Michael Mann always did very well, like Heat or something like that. So it's like a crime epic? But with costumed perpetrators?
Yeah, with the occasional psychotic clown running through it! And a guy with pointy ears, and all that. We talked before about having to imagine The Joker through the same prism that you imagined Batman. What can or will you say about Two-Face through that prism?
(Pause)...well, it's not something I want to talk about too much, because particularly for people who don't know the character, and a lot of your readers won't, I think it's more fun for them to discover him in the film but... ...I think most of them know that Harvey Dent is, or becomes...
Oh really? You think most of your readers would be familiar with Two-Face? Not just the comic book fans? Yeah, definitely.
That’s interesting. It's funny, 'cos you never quite know where you are with a character like Two-Face. It's like in the first film when we're dealing with Scarecrow or Ra's Al Ghul – there are the characters that everybody knows and then there are the characters that some people know, some don't. But what I would say about the way in which we view Harvey Dent's story is through that prism of Batman Begins, of trying to be a bit more real with things…where it most applies to Dent and Two-Face is in emotional terms; we've tried to make his story – which is a great tragedy, a great, great epic sort of tragedy – we've tried to make that the backbone of the whole movie. We're very much addressing Dent and Two-Face in an emotionally real way. Why Aaron Eckhart? Is it right that he turned down the role of Leonard in 'Memento'?
I did meet with him about it and I was quite keen on him, but I don't remember if he turned it down or whether we turned him down - it's probably best if we both believe it our own way. But he was absolutely somebody that I was very, very interested in doing that role and I'd met with him about it. He's always somebody that I've admired over the years and wanted to work with…We wanted Harvey to be the most all-American, kind of heroic figure - Aaron's got that kind of Robert Redford thing going on. He just embodies that kind of chiselled American hero, and he has such confidence in the movie. It's very tough for actors to play that kind of leading men; he's a kind of Gary Cooper-confident guy. He does it so well, you just kind of relax in his presence when he's doing that character, but then there's this sort of edge to it all the way throughout, there's this thing kind of lurking just beneath the surface... There has to be, I guess...
 | | | Harvey Dent's this White Knight, this heroic figure for Gotham and yet, under the surface, there's an anger, a darkness... | |
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Well that's what I think is wonderful about Dent's character, he's just this flawed human being, he's a very interesting guy. He's this White Knight, this heroic figure for Gotham and yet, under the surface, there's an anger, a darkness that relates very strongly to Bruce Wayne's. I think a lot of concepts of heroism, of political heroism through the justice system, a lot of those concepts are about what you do with the passion you have and where you're prepared to take these things. We haven't really got onto Batman himself yet. Batman Begins was the first Batman movie to actually focus on Batman, so where does he figure in this more populated movie?
Well it's interesting because he's a much more fully-formed character in this. You get to launch into it with a real degree of confidence. It's really about how he has affected his city; how they're responding to him - in positive ways and in negative ways. There are all kinds of ambiguous responses to this force in Gotham. We explore that at the beginning of the film and then really, I can't really talk too much about it because a lot of it hinges on the ending...Christian has such a sure hand on the character he's playing and he's a little bit more fully-formed and older and wiser and I think for a lot of the film, because so much of the film is focusing on the criminal element of Gotham and the effect that it's having, I don't think it's until the end of the movie that you understand exactly how it all relates to his character. Ultimately it's very much his film but it's not until you see the entire thing that you kind of get that. How does he have to change his methods for a villain who has no fear of him?
There are things he won't do and people start to realise that, whereas The Joker is an absolute force of evil. So The Joker, ultimately, is giving him a lot of competition in the intimidation stakes, he becomes a much more frightening figure to the criminal elements of Gotham, so how do you compete with that? So, yeah, there is a shift in necessary tactics, there's a shift in how the world perceives him and how he perceives what he's doing. For me, the only credible way to address Bruce Wayne choosing to become this vigilante is if he saw it as a finite activity, like a 5-year plan. Like 'if I do this, this and this, I can get Gotham to the tipping point and sent it back to good. I can facilitate a couple of things.' That to me, was much more psychologically credible than the idea that he just takes on 'I'm gonna be Batman for the rest of my life'. And now he's causing more problems than he's solving...
Yeah and this idea of escalation and all the rest of it. He bears a responsibility for it so he can't just walk away from it and this movie and Bruce's character and where he is, absolutely carries straight on from that idea that he's actually looking for an end - he's looking for a way out. Not because he's horribly weary of it, or anything, but more because he thinks the best thing for Gotham is that there be a legitimate positive figure, a legitimate hero. And he looks at Harvey Dent and that's what he sees and he thinks that that's what's good for Gotham. Not a guy, wearing a mask, scrambling over rooftops and everything - as he puts it in the film "a hero with a face". There needs to be this very positive force in Gotham and that will allow him to stop doing what he's doing. But it's more, he actually thinks that's the positive development he 's been looking for. He intended to inspire the good of Gotham to take the city back and what he sees in Harvey Dent's rise to power is that happening. Of course it won't work out...
Well you'll have to see the movie. It might! It might all be very happy. You’re clearly a director with a very strong vision of what he wants to do but you never seem to have faced any compromise or headbutting with studios. How do you think you’ve avoided that?
Yeah, it's interesting because I could see that, from the outside, the reality is always that things, in political terms - which I think is what you're talking about - they're far more difficult from the inside than they appear from the outside. But I've been very fortunate to choose the right project with the right people, so that we're making the same film. The classic example, for me, being Memento, because that's a film that has got a very radical structure, it has got all kinds of significant issues, with it... ...you have to concentrate to watch it, God forbid!
...but the people that I made it with, at Newmarket, and Aaron Ryder and those guys...they...when we screened the film for distributors - and we simultaneously screened it to every distributor in Hollywood - they all passed. Which is a pretty devastating thing for a film because it's a $4 million film and that's real money to these guys that they'd invested and every distributor passed. Basically, you're fucked at that point. But these guys, they never asked me to change anything, they stood by the film, they waited patiently and they actually distributed it themselves. They set up a distribution company and then became very, very successful. So their faith was rewarded. But it was a very tough time for about a year there. Every one of the films that I've worked on has had its massive challenges. But you’ve never at a proper falling out about what you want to do?
No, I'm very straight with them. And if I were to get involved in a project and feel that we weren't seeing the same film, I would run a mile. You can't win at that game - that's when you really butt heads, that’s when things get nasty. A problem that a lot of these blockbuster films tend to have is, quite a lot of the time, they have a release date before you’ve got a finished script. How have you been able to operate in a way that you start the film when you’re ready, not when the studio sees a gap?
With Warner Brothers, on this film, I'm sure they would have liked to have had it a year earlier or something. There are various dating conversations you have with them, but I've always been very honest with them about what I can and can't do, how long it's going to take to do things, right from the beginning. With a sequel you have a huge advantage in that, before our script was even finished, I was able to say 'Ok, we shot 128 days on 'Batman Begins' - we're gonna need to shoot 128 days on this' because it's gonna have to be as big or bigger a film. We actually finished early; we got out at 122, we finished six days early... What do you make of the current boom in the comic-book genre?
 | | | I think if comic-book movies is a genre, then we're all in trouble because there are too many of these films. | |
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I think if it is a genre, then we're all in trouble because there are too many of these films. But I don’t think it is a genre. I think it's a style, perhaps, it's a source. I think Iron Man and Spider-Man and Batman, they're just completely different and they're completely different movies. So in a way, I almost don't see them as the same genre, in a weird way. They're inspired by comic books and superheroes but they're very, very different films, very different characters…It's about viewing comics with a little more respect in terms of their potential as source material…There's as much variety and difference in those stories as there is in the novel form or the short story form or whatever. Do you think you'll do another Batman film?
I don't know. I've certainly put a lot into this one. I wanted to put everything into this movie so that the two movies would stand as two movies together. Third sequels are tricky. Everyone thinks of trilogies though, these days...
They do, but... Do you think it’s because the traditional story structure is three acts?
There's a certain attraction to that from a story-telling point of view. On the other hand, it's pretty difficult to name third movies that are any good. Going to do a second movie there are a couple of really great moments in cinema we could look at and aspire to. Going for a third one would be a little trickier. The Bourne Ultimatum?
Well…in a way, but in a way that's following slightly more the Bond model, where they get into the same rhythm with different movies. The Return of the King probably doesn’t really count, does it?
Yeah, the second was my favourite in that trilogy too. I don't know if that's generally held as a view, but I really enjoyed the second one the most. So The Empire Strikes Back is your favourite 'Star Wars' film?
As a grown-up, yeah. As a kid, I thought the first one was the best but I've been showing them to my kids recently and the second one is pretty amazing. The Bourne Ultimatum would be...they kept the quality up with that one, definitely. But it's difficult. I don't know. It's a challenge that you could take up.
Yeah, you never know. I actually have no idea. The serious version, when we've been talking around, is that I always viewed this as a complete movie, the way we viewed the first movie as a complete movie. That's not to say it doesn't leave room for a sequel, because it does. Because you want the story to linger, you want it to carry on in your mind, you want the world to carry on in your mind. And so we certainly don't exclude the possibility of a third film but this movie is engineered and designed to be a very complete experience in itself. And the two movies relate quite strongly, but hopefully each one stands on its own. I think, as a pair, they're going to be quite something. I'm quite excited to be able to sit back and look at the two together. Parts of this interview appeared in Empire #229.
Interview by Dan Jolin
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