The Dark Knight

[Pozer]

"great tales are told of cakes and white backgrounds. numbers to call.. "
"yes, but what about the movie?"
"oh, i havn't seen the movie."

http://youtube.com/watch?v=gTghUoScGO8

[MacGuffin]

IGN Interviews Christopher Nolan
Our exclusive chat with the director about The Dark Knight, the JLA movie and Bale in T4!

IGN Movies attended a special screening and reception Wednesday for the IMAX prologue of The Dark Knight, which is set to debut with the Dec. 14th release of Warner Bros.' I Am Legend in IMAX. Christopher Nolan was on hand to introduce the thrilling sequence, which is the opening six minutes of the film that introduces the Joker during a Gotham City bank robbery. (Look for our full report on the screened IMAX footage sometime Thursday.)

IGN was able to chat exclusively with Chris Nolan during a cocktail reception following the screening and here's what he had to say about The Dark Knight and more:

IGN: How many IMAX sequences will be included in The Dark Knight in addition to the Joker's introduction?

Christopher Nolan: I think there will be four or five in the finished film. I've only just started editing the feature so it is as yet uncertain. As we shot we intended to shoot four, but we enjoyed it so much and we were loving the results so much as we were watching dailies. We were sitting there on the stage in Chicago watching dailies on an eight-story screen. It's a pretty incredible thing. So we started throwing the cameras [in] a little bit more and more, so it will be a little more in the film than that but primarily they're the big action beats.

IGN: What was your criteria for selecting the scenes to be shot in IMAX?

Nolan: Well, I started with the big action beats but we actually started shooting some of the quieter moments as well [in IMAX]. Yeah, the pictorially interesting, quieter, montage kind of moments. We thought we'd try that. It's just a beautiful way -- it's just the best, most extraordinary image there is in motion pictures so it's kind of addictive. You start wanting to use it more and more.

IGN: Was Harvey Dent's transformation into Two-Face shot in IMAX?

Nolan: Gosh, I'm trying to remember ... We mixed in -- that depends on how you look at it. It's a hard one to answer, actually.

IGN: What about the much talked about shot from Wizard World Chicago of seeing Dent/Two-Face from behind at the bar?

Nolan: No, that's all 35[mm] actually.

IGN: The Joker in this film seems to draw the most from Batman #1, where he was described as "a grim jester." Why, of all the many incarnations of the Joker through the years, did you come to select that one as opposed to, say, The Killing Joke, which is one the fans always clamor about?

Nolan: Well, you know to be honest, we looked at all of them. We didn't look at those first stories until after we'd come up with our story and Jonah started working on the job. It's a weird thing. He called me up halfway through his job and said, "By the way, have you looked at his first and second appearance recently?" And I think maybe years ago I'd seen them. I think David Goyer had told me about them. Went back and looked at them and we wound up at a place that's drawn very directly from that stuff. But we arrived at it in our own way by researching a lot of the more recent Joker stuff, and thinking about what this icon is when viewed through the prism of Batman Begins. When viewed in the world we created, in the tone we created. And what we arrived at is somebody who is quite a serious guy, really, considering his name's the Joker and that turned out to be quite similar to his original conception.

IGN: Judging from all the stills we've seen thus far, he hardly ever smiles. Do you think others have misinterpreted the character and thought he was supposed to be funny when he may actually be meant to be more ironic?

Nolan: There are different types of being funny. The sequence you've seen has a very dark sense of humor to it, I think. Very sardonic sense of humor to what he's doing and that's the way in which he's funny. And, yes, it's very easy to confuse that with a lot of smiling and a lot of laughing but what he does in the film is very difficult to capture in stills to be perfectly frank. It's one of the reasons we wanted to show this sequence as well, to get his introduction out there. It's the total package. It's the way he moves, the way he is, it's the way he inhabits the character. I'm just so excited by it. I think people will be really blown away by it.

IGN: How would you describe Joker's walk? It's not quite a limp. It's the first thing I noticed about the character. There's just something ... off.

Nolan: There's just a feel to it and you can't put your finger on it, and that's what I love about it. It's very original and very unique. It's a unique combination of elements. He would just blow me away every day on set. It was an incredible thing to watch.

IGN: In all the many fan casting wish lists that made the rounds online, Ledger's name never came up. How and when did you think to cast him?

Nolan: To be honest, I don't exactly remember when it came to pass. I'd met with Heath several times on projects in the past and nothing had ever come of it. And I think he'd heard I was looking for someone to play the Joker before we had a script, and I'd heard that he was really actually into the idea. And we met and we got each other. We both had exactly the same concept in our heads of who that guy would be in this film in the way that we'd interpreted it. It wasn't specific to, "Oh, he's going to look like this or talk like that" at all. It was about a psychological concept. It was about a character concept. It was about the threat of anarchy. It was about anarchy being the most frightening thing there is. Chaos and anarchy in this day and age, and I think it is. It's certainly the thing I'm most afraid of.

IGN: And what about the decision to have Joker wear make-up rather than be altered by chemicals. Was it just easier from a storytelling perspective to have him wear make-up than to explain how chemicals changed him?

Nolan: Well, we never wanted to do an origin story for the Joker in this film. The arc of the story is much more Harvey Dent's; the Joker is presented as an absolute. It's a very thrilling element in the film, and a very important element, but we wanted to deal with the rise of the Joker not the origin of the Joker, if that makes sense.

IGN: In addition to Ledger, there are a lot of other actors in the cast, such as Eric Roberts and Anthony Michael Hall, whom people might not have thought to cast.

Nolan: Well, we have a terrific casting director, John Papsidera, who just comes up with great ideas. He introduced me to fantastic people. And then you think about an actor like Eric Roberts, who is just incredibly talented. So if you can convince someone like that to join your film, you're filling out the world of the film with incredibly talented people who can support the main actors and that gives everything depth and breadth. A great actor like Eric or any of these guys can just take a scene and take a character and find something in him, in a moment and give you more depth in a moment than you'd otherwise have.

IGN: And Anthony Michael Hall is playing a reporter?

Nolan: Yeah, he is. Yeah.

IGN: Was there ever any concern about including a reporter character in the film since the 1989 Batman film had Alexander Knox in it?

Nolan: Well, there's an always an element -- there's plenty of other films, whether it's Daredevil or something, where reporters come into it and there's a reason for it. The reason being, particularly in the case of The Dark Knight, we're attempting to tell a very large, city story or the story of a city. In the same way that, I don't know, Michael Mann's films, like Heat or something. That was sort of an inspiration. If you want to take on Gotham, you want to give Gotham a kind of weight and breadth and depth in there. So you wend up dealing with the political figures, the media figures. That's part of the whole fabric of how a city is bound together.

IGN: So is that where you got the idea to cast William Fichtner as the bank manager in your robbery sequence? From Heat?

Nolan: (laughs) Yeah, I know! Exactly! It's a bit of a nod to that. He's just an incredible talent and I wanted somebody who'd jump off the screen in our first six minutes because he's really the only face you see for most of it.

IGN: So Christian Bale's casting in the next Terminator has now been confirmed. Does that mean he's no longer involved with the Batman franchise and will be doing that instead?

Nolan: (laughs) That would be news to him. No, it's great. He's an incredible actor and will bring something great to that production. They're very lucky to have him, but he's not afraid to take risks and take on all kinds of different projects. That's one of the reasons why I like working with him.

IGN: Are you concerned at all about the Justice League of America movie and of a new Batman being introduced to audiences while your franchise is still going?

Nolan: Not really. To be perfectly honest, it's not really something I've thought about much. I really am just immersed in making this movie. Whatever will happen will happen, and we're just working very hard to make this movie the best it can be.

IGN: So it's expected that the third film will focus more on Two-Face. Will it be a solo story for him or will there be another, secondary villain included in it?

Nolan: I wouldn't want to give away too much about this film, but the thing I will say, and I said it a lot about Batman Begins and it was genuinely the truth, is I don't think in terms of sequels. I think in terms of making this film the best film it can be and the most complete film it can be.

[polkablues]

The Ha Ha Times

[B.C. Long]

[B.C. Long]

IInternational Poster:


I wonder if the graphic designers know Batman is staring straight into a pole?

[MacGuffin]

Looks like Batman is presiding over Project Mayhem.

[matt35mm]

Yeah... looks like...

[polkablues]

Also looks like someone had Photoshop and a bunch of stock pictures of buildings that were all in different perspective (also different resolutions and levels of focus) and threw them all together into an unholy mess of a city that would not and could not exist in real life.  And then put Batman in front of it, staring at a pole. 

And got paid thousands of dollars to do it.  Fuck you, world!

[edison]

[Sleepless]

Isn't the bat cave kinda high up?

[Sleepless]

And you'd think they'd show us the Joker's face on the poster since we've all seen it already!

[edison]

New Trailer hurry up since it probably won't be there long. This is one damn amazing trailer that I can't wait to see in a theater.

[Pubrick]

New Trailer

that just redeemed my faith in trailers to make me believe in something i wasn't all that interested in.

this could be something special for one reason alone..

ledger steals the trailer and he'll steal the movie, that's for sure.

And you'd think they'd show us the Joker's face on the poster since we've all seen it already!

i blame bill condon..

[modage]

New Trailer hurry up since it probably won't be there long. This is one damn amazing trailer that I can't wait to see in a theater.

This is a private video. If you have been sent this video, please make sure you accept the sender's friend request.

HELP!!!

[grand theft sparrow]

Here's one that's piss poor quality.  Is this what the other one looked like?