LOS ANGELES, California—Despite “Batman Begins” being a critical and commercial success in 2005, director Christopher Nolan didn’t know if he would find a story compelling enough to return to Gotham City.
He would begin to find those precious pieces in strange places. “I visited Hong Kong many years for the film festival and I just thought the city was stunning to look at,” he explains. “Writing the script, we knew we wanted to take Batman out of Gotham City, take him somewhere very different and extraordinary. I think Hong Kong is very unique as a city in that the geography can be photographed and contained in individual shots, very photogenic and perfect for the type of action sequence we wanted to set up.”
That is how Batman winds up in Hong Kong for a sequence in “The Dark Knight.”
But Nolan also found the story that compelled him to go back to Gotham.
“The story I wanted to tell was the story suggested by the end of ‘Batman Begins,’” he told Super. “The idea that Batman having established himself as this larger than life superhero fighting crime in Gotham, there’s going to be an extreme response to that. That idea started to fascinate me, in particular, that the Joker would be the personification of that response. Everything in ‘The Dark Knight’ is founded on the concept of showing how Batman’s story develops, how the city is affected by him and by this creation of his.”
Writers David Goyer and Jonathan Nolan understood that the new film required a primal Joker.
“We went back to the source material in the very first appearance in the Batman comics,” Goyer says. “The thing that’s been inherent in the Joker from the very beginning is that the Joker has no cause. He’s not fighting for a specific cause and that’s what makes him so frustrating for the Batman. You don’t have to have a justification for anything. The whole point of the Joker is that he’s elemental.”
Jonathan Nolan adds: “I think you walk out of this film with less of an idea of who this character is rather than walking in to it. The interesting thing is that the film is very much the rise of the character and yet he doesn’t change from the beginning to the end.”
Serious crime movie
Whereas the questions around “Batman Begins” was whether the Batman franchise could be rejuvenated, the big question for “The Dark Knight” was whether the sequel could retain the first movie’s serious approach and yet improve on it.
“It always felt more like a crime movie than a comic book movie. I think it does depart from the common notion of the comic book movie, but not actually from the comic books themselves,” Goyer says. “‘The Dark Knight’ is faithful to a lot of the Batman comics that came before it. Because Batman is the most realistic of all the superheroes—he doesn’t have any powers, his villains don’t have any superpowers—the Batman universe has always been more of a crime universe.” Jonathan Nolan adds that their work was informed by Michael Mann’s movie “Heat” and the HBO series “The Wire.”
In that sense, producer Emma Thomas says it was building a world. “The biggest challenge in creative terms was really expanding the world of ‘Batman Begins’ and make it a bigger, better film that will make the people who have seen ‘Batman Begins’ want to go see it,” she says. “In production terms, the scale of it—it took seven months to shoot—it was an exercise in stamina.”
Escalating Batman’s war meant more explosions and more weapons. Batman himself has a new, more flexible bat suit made of polyester mesh and carbon fiber. The new suit has over 100 pieces—the old suit had three. Giorgio Armani takes care of Bruce Wayne’s spiffy suits. With Wayne Manor still in ruins, Bruce Wayne lives out of a penthouse and Batman operates out of a bunker.
Out on the streets, the film debuts the sleek Bat-pod and features an 18-wheel truck flipping over itself almost like a vehicular somersault. There are stunts over air, land and sea. Buildings ignite and cars seem to chase each other without end in the movie.
Nolan also made a fateful and daring decision to shoot six of the movie’s sequences with IMAX cameras, making “The Dark Knight” the first major movie to be shot partially with IMAX technology.
Producer Charles Rove says it was a logistical project of unexpected magnitude. “It was a marathon because of the global footprint of the movie,” he says. A filmmaking armada decamped to three continents, filming in Chicago, London and Hong Kong. “And it wasn’t like we were shooting small things in any one of those places. Everywhere that we shot, we made a big impression as we had an action sequence in each of those places.”
Nolan knew he wanted something a little different for the second Batman outing. “The main thing we wanted to build on from Batman Begins was to do more of the film on location, shooting in real places,” he says. “We wanted Gotham to have a real texture to it as a large, modern American. Whereas we shot in Chicago for a month, in this film we shot four months there. We really tried to shoot not just our street scenes but also our interior scenes there, put them in real places on a real world scale.”
Returning to the fold were production designer Nathan Crowley, cinematographer Wally Pfister and composers Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, among others.
No gratuitous violence
Receiving a PG-13 rating, “The Dark Knight” floods the screen with action but not gratuity. “The truth is there’s less violence in this film than most summer action films,” Nolan explains. “We have a protagonist who doesn’t use guns, he won’t kill people, which is very unusual for this type of film but I think it pushes the story in more interesting directions. There’s a physical feel in the film that you associate with more violent film but there’s very little blood.”
“The Dark Knight” seems to be at the peak of a wave of favorable responses to movies based on comic book characters but producer Thomas goes beyond that. “Obviously it’s a really great thing that there’s some much interest in movies based on comic book characters,” she says. “What we’ve always tried to do is not pigeonhole it into just one genre. I think that’s something Chris has always done with all his movies. You can never really quite classify them in any one way. We’re hoping we can transcend the genre and be a great movie and not solely a great comic book movie.”
After all, part of what has made “Batman Begins” so well received is its stellar cast. Rove says that the roles lend themselves to good actors. “I think it’s got a lot to do with how really great the parts are, every role,” he says. “Those who were there originally held roles with texture and depth from ‘Batman Begins,’ and have to say those roles had more texture and depth in ‘The Dark Knight.’ All of those actors came to us and told us how much they enjoy the fact that their characters got richer in this film.” The new additions also found a solid working unit totally devoted to Nolan.
Now that “The Dark Knight” is winging its way to theaters, it seems only appropriate to ask if there will be a third trip to the not-so-friendly confines of Gotham City. “Chris is very much a one film-at-a-time guy, and that’s the way he’s always been,” Rove says. “When this film’s out there hopefully he’ll start to think about whether he’d like to do another one. He wouldn’t have done a second one unless he thought he could make it different, more exciting, better than Batman Begins. If he can do that and he has the time to do that without getting involved in something else, then maybe there will be, but there’s nothing on the books right now.”
That leaves the movie-going audience looking up at the night sky, hoping that the Bat Signal will soar over Gotham City a third time.
