11/07/2008
John Hiscock talks to the director and star of the new Batman film 'The Dark Knight' about the astonishing contribution of Heath Ledger
The tone was already deliberately dark and gloomy, but the sudden death of Heath Ledger added an additional and unwanted morbidity to the aura surrounding British director Christopher Nolan's Batman sequel, The Dark Knight.
Heath Ledger as the Joker and Christian Bale as Batman in The Dark Knight
Ledger's death in January from a drug overdose came three months after he had finished work on the film and after Warner Bros had already given audiences an introduction to his Joker through posters, trailers and an Imax short. His death fuelled internet gossip about whether his intense performance as the Joker had been a factor in his demise.
"What Heath brought to the Joker is difficult to describe," says Nolan. "There's an extraordinary intensity to it and he's absolutely terrifying."
The defining quality Nolan was looking for when he cast the role of the malevolent clown was fearlessness, and he found it in Ledger.
"We wanted him to represent pure, unadulterated evil," he says, "and I needed a phenomenal actor, but he also had to be someone unafraid of taking on such an iconic role. Heath created something entirely original. It's stunning, captivating. It's going to blow people away."
Nolan first talked with Ledger about the role before there was a script. "We talked about how we saw this character and we both had exactly the same concept - that the Joker revels in creating chaos and fear on a grand scale. Heath seemed to instinctively understand how to make this character different from anything that had ever been done before."
"The Joker is somebody without any rules whatsoever," says Christian Bale, who returns as Batman. "How do you fight somebody who is bent on destruction, even if it means self-destruction? That's a formidable foe. He's a fascinating character, and Heath did an extraordinary job with him. I don't think the movie would have worked as well as it does if we hadn't had Heath Ledger."
London-born Nolan and Pembrokeshire-born Bale are talking in Chicago, where much of The Dark Knight was shot, about the problems and the questions surrounding the movie, which is expected to be one of the summer's biggest hits. With 2005's Batman Begins, Nolan restored credibility to a property that had become a laughing stock with Joel Schumacher's reviled 1997 Batman and Robin, best remembered for George Clooney's nipple suit. Then, with the franchise re-established, coming up with a sequel presented its own problems.
"You don't want to repeat the first film, so you have to be very different," says Nolan. "As a filmmaker, you immediately get bored with things that have been in the first film. You want freshness but you also want a familiarity to the rhythm and you want the same elements that defined Batman's world.
"With Batman Begins, we tried to make the most realistic version of this character that anyone had ever tried. We wanted to push that further with this film."
Picking up the storyline where Nolan's 2005 Batman Begins left off, The Dark Knight has the same bleak tone, with Bale's lonely and angst-ridden Caped Crusader wrestling with the burden of knowing that he has a duty to continue his crime-fighting indefinitely.
"Now he has achieved what he set out to do," says Bale, "Batman realises that it's not the finite task he thought it would be and he has actually taken on much more than he had ever imagined for himself. There is also more action than in the first film. In this one we don't have the introduction of who Bruce Wayne is and how he comes to be Batman, so we jump right into the thick of it in Gotham."
Action-packed: Batman realises he has 'taken on much more than he had ever imagined for himself' in The Dark Knight
Michael Caine returns as Alfred the butler, Morgan Freeman as inventor Lucius Fox and Gary Oldman as Gotham's honest cop, Lt Gordon. This time, though, Maggie Gyllenhaal takes over from Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes, Bruce Wayne's love interest, and Aaron Eckhart joins as District Attorney Harvey Dent, also known as Two-Face.
Although the death of Ledger, and his incendiary performance, have been the main talking points surrounding The Dark Knight, another feature of the story is Dent's transformation from a crusading Gotham City prosecutor to Harvey Two-Face, a maniac whose face is ravaged by a horrible injury.
"The Joker is terrifying because there appears no rhyme or reason for what he does; he's just a force of nature," says Nolan. "With Two-Face, you see his transformation and you understand where his anger and his grief come from."
The Dark Knight runs for two and a half hours and cost nearly £100 million to make, but Nolan has barely changed his approach to filmmaking since his 2000 film noir hit Memento, which he and his brother Jonathan wrote and which he made for a little over £2 million. He still writes new dialogue on the set, rarely uses storyboards, improvises camera moves as he goes and, unlike directors of big-budget blockbusters, never uses a second unit, preferring to direct every shot himself.
"I've never shot with a second unit," he says, "so I don't really know how I would start the process of splitting things off that would be unimportant to the film. To me, everything has to be important and if it isn't, it shouldn't be in the film. The way I get my ideas on screen is to be there and be controlling things and if I don't have to be there I might as well sit at home and get someone to direct the whole film for me."
Before filming begins, Nolan tries to get as much pre-production work as possible done in the converted garage at his home in the Hollywood Hills. There he and his producer wife Emma Thomas - who gave birth to their fourth child in September - gather with the cinematographer, production designer, costume designer and other department heads to plan their strategy.
It was there that the Batsuit and Batmobile were designed, and where Nolan and his brother Jonathan came up with the ideas and scripts for both movies.
"I just wanted to be able to work on this stuff at home, because one of the problems with big films is that any time you have studio involvement and millions of dollars of other people's money, the machine is very big," he says. "What happens is, once you start the ball rolling many, many people get hired very, very quickly, and the time for pure creativity, when you're not worrying at all about the practicalities of how these things are going to come on to the screen, disappears too quickly.
"So we decided to take a few months with really nothing going on - and this is the third film we've done it on - to design the key elements of the film on our own without everybody looking over our shoulders. It's really a very pure, creative period, and a lot of the defining elements get pinned down in that time."
Even before the release of The Dark Knight, rumours are circulating about the next Batman film. Nolan is saying nothing yet, but the betting in Hollywood is that after the Joker and Two-Face, the next villain to confront Batman will be the Riddler.
Christian Bale, who is currently filming Terminator Salvation in New Mexico, is happy for Batman's crusade against crime to continue.
"Batman is coming to understand, more and more, that this is not something he can easily walk away from now, or possibly ever," he says. "There are always new enemies to protect the city from!"
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