London-born Christopher Nolan, co-screenwriter, director and producer of The Dark Knight is now in the enviable position of being able to write his next paycheck after his film made box-office history. In this interview with the Emirates Business, he talks about the film, his work and the late Heath Ledger.
Your films are action movies that also have very fleshed out characters. Can you tell us about that?
I think I've always just gravitated towards stories in which character is defined through action; that is to say the story of the film is telling you who the people are. I think it's the strongest form of characterisation, and it's one you find in its most obvious incarnation in genres like film noir and those where you're expecting the double-cross, the reversal. The process of going through the story, to a certain extent, is the process of continually appraising what you think of those characters, who the good guy is, who the bad guy is, and where your sympathies lie. In the action genre, it shifts through the film and I'm interested in stories with complicated characterisations where your sympathies can shift.
How did you and Heath manage to erase the iconic images we have of the Joker's past from your own mind and from the audience's mind?
It was not really an issue. We were trying not to be reactive in any sense. We weren't going to not do things because someone else had done them before. It was more a question of just trying to keep the tone of telling the Batman story that we had established with Batman Begins, which has a bit of grit to it, a bit of reality to it. We tried to push that further in The Dark Knight. When Heath and I first talked about the Joker and what the Joker would need to be in this telling of the story, it was very apparent to both of us that it was going to be something that had not been done before – not as a reaction to previous incarnations, but because the story demands something different. It demands something very frightening, very palpably real and potentially dangerous. We really focused on this idea of the Joker as an absolute force of pure anarchy, somebody devoted to chaos, somebody who truly just takes pleasure in tearing down the world around himself. That's the fear we wanted to inspire in the audience and, in the process, create an iconic representation of the Joker. And the Joker does need to be iconic. Heath understood that very much. But he never loses sight of the fact that the character is a real human being and, therefore, is a real dangerous force.
Were you ever able to show Heath the final film?
Unfortunately, he only saw the prologue. He only saw the introduction to his character that we shot with these Imax cameras and put out as a sort of short film around Christmas. He enjoyed it very much, and I'm very pleased it gave him a taste of how it was going to come across. I was obviously never able to show him his finished performance. But I'm very gratified and very relieved to see that people seem to be getting from his performance what he wanted them to get.
Was it sometimes comical for you with the amount of secrecy you had to observe on the production of this film?
Yes, it can be a little comical to look at. But the truth is, you want to preserve what you are creating. It's not entirely a question of secrecy. What's important is the idea of what we're trying to do, the vision, the ultimate execution of what we're trying to do. It needs to be held under wraps until it's ready to be seen in its entirety. And it is not fair, nor appropriate, that people try and remove that veil of secrecy too early. Creating things in film, it's no different than creating things in music or anything else. You want to be finished with what it is you're doing before people see it and weigh in on it and judge it.
You shot a lot of the film on location rather than creating sets. Why?
In moving the story on and doing a second film, you feel a real responsibility to try to do something bigger and better. We shot quite a lot on location on Batman Begins, but not as much as we would like to have. So, we just pushed further in the direction of saying we want the film to get its scale by being realistic, by being shot on a real-world scale. Because a real location, whether it's a city street exterior or whether it's the interior of a board room, the real world is built on a scale that sets and studios simply can't match. So, if you want a real-world scale, if you want to get scope into the film that way, you have to shoot in real places.
Tell us about your decision to shoot several scenes of the film in Imax?
I'd wanted to shoot on the Imax format for many years. As a child, I used to go watch documentaries in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago on the Omimax screen. This film format is the highest resolution, sharpest, most clear film format ever invented. But it has never been used in Hollywood films before, which seemed crazy to me.
You tend to work with the same crew. As the scope of your films get bigger you must be proud of your people rising to the challenges.
It is fabulous working with the same people. One of the reasons I've worked with them a lot is because many of us grew up together. But it is also a lot of fun to work with people who haven't done the thing you've done 10 times before. It's fun, but also a challenge for everyone involved.