Christopher Nolan Talks About Escalating the Batman Saga

Posted by Neil Miller (neil@filmschoolrejects.com) on July 14, 2008

One look through his filmography and any ardent fan of film can see it — Christopher Nolan knows how to make a very original, engaging drama. From his work on Memento in 2000 to his reinvention of the Batman franchise in 2005 with Batman Begins to his dark magic thriller The Prestige in 2006, Nolan has always delivered his stories in a very refreshing way. But with The Dark Knight, Nolan found himself for the first time in a strange new world, the world of the sequel. In this world it is all about outdoing what you’ve done previously and advancing already complex characters into a brand new story without shifting too far away from what drew fans in the first time around. And in order to keep the world of Batman, one with almost 70 years of lineage fresh, Nolan looked toward raising the stakes and the scale.

“I got interested very much by the idea that we left at the end of Batman is the idea of escalation,” he told us at the recent press junket for The Dark Knight. “The idea of having established Batman as this heroic figure in Gotham who’s going to try and take Gotham back for the good people in the city, that there was going to be an extraordinary criminal response to that, that in going so big as he has in employing such heavy handed tactics you know, what are the criminals going to come back with? And that really manifests itself in the person of The Joker, that was really my interest is, taking this story forward, of seeing it expand out so that Batman’s internal struggle from the first film really sort of takes on a city-wide aspect now.”

And it was in that internal struggle, Nolan and writers David Goyer and Jonah Nolan found a theme of moral ambiguity, a theme that leads to a very compelling balance between order and chaos, also known as Batman and the Joker. “Batman exists on this very precarious state of somebody who has very negative impulses but tries to channel them into something good and I think that’s a very human dilemma and one that in this film we see infect more and more people, and I think The Joker is very much the catalyst for that infection.”

But much to the surprise of audiences, this balance between good and evil isn’t the traditional type, which is perhaps what makes it most interesting. In you traditional order v. chaos story, both the hero and the villain have a tendency to go through some sort of change. In Batman Begins, Nolan very aptly delivered the transformation of Bruce Wayne into Batman, a man who would learn to deal with his fear in order to be able to use fear to combat evil. As well, Batman Begins saw villains that had a very clear purpose — to flush Gotham City of its population, creating a world where peace could be reborn.

With The Dark Knight, Nolan and team took a very different approach to the villains. At the center of it all is The Joker, played by Heath Ledger, a man who never stops to apologize for his sociopathic ways. “The purpose of The Joker for us was always that he has no arc, he has no development he doesn’t learn anything through the film, he’s an absolute. He cuts through the film sort of like the shark in Jaws so he’s a catalyst for action, people are reacting off and being affected by him.”

And to play such a dynamic and unapologetic character, Nolan knew that he would need a special talent: “What I knew I needed for The Joker was an actor of extraordinary talent and that was evident from his other work, has it performance in Brokeback Mountain for example which was truly spectacular,” Nolan explained. “But also an actor who was unafraid who was completely prepared to take on an iconic role and make it his own, and Heath told me he could do that before we even had a script, you know, I met with him, and he and I saw it the same way. We saw it as crafting a character who was an absolute who has devoted a pure, an ideal of pure anarchy, a desire to seek chaos, a desire to just rip the world down around himself, purely for his own amusement, and Heath really got that.”

And get it he certainly did, as posthumous Oscar talks have already begun for the late Heath Ledger, his performance already being heralded as easily one of the best of the year. But for Christopher Nolan and team, the success is not only that Heath Ledger live on through one final, jarring performance, but that The Dark Knight itself takes on an epic scale, raising the stakes from the first film. And thanks to Nolan’s foresight with IMAX and expert casting, his film has taken on a scale unlike anything we will see this year.

For more on The Dark Knight, check out our Official Guide. Also, I would humbly suggest my review.

Read more articles by Neil Miller