The Dark Knight ligt nu in de winkel ! Redenen genoeg om de regisseur en producent van de film, Christopher Nolan, eens voor de microfoon te halen en wat interessante vragen te stellen.

Is it true that you rehearsed some of the scenes out of character?

The thing with an actor taking on a role like this and producing such a unique and special performance is, very often in rehearsal, you don’t want to see too much of what the actor’s going to do. So, you tend to treat the rehearsal – if it’s a scene like the one between Aaron and Heath in the hospital – where the blocking is very simple, you tend to just treat the rehearsal as just that: a fairly simple blocking rehearsal. It was figuring out where to put the camera, the order in which to shoot scene, that kind of thing. You let the actors save something for what they’re going to do. Because with simple set ups like that, where it’s just two guys talking in a very controlled physical environment, you can really just let the camera run and let them explore things and have fun with it. When you have two great actors working at the same pitch, you’ll get great results from that.

How did you and Heath manage to erase the iconic images we have of Joker’s past from your own minds and from the audience’s mind?

I don’t think it was really an issue for us to erase them. 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 be in terms of this story and 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 even 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 out of 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 does just take pleasure in tearing down the world around himself. That’s the fear we wanted to inspire in the audience. That’s the threat we wanted underlying everything in the film and that’s something we’ve not seen from this character before. Heath was able to put together a number of different things, a number of different attitudes for the character, 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 humanity of the character, 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’d only seen the prologue. He’d only seen the introduction to his character that we shot with these IMAX cameras and put out as a sort of short film around Christmas. We screened it for him and he enjoyed it very much, and I’m very pleased that gave him a taste of how it was going to come across. But I was obviously never able to show him his finished performance. And, whilst that’s very sad, I’m certainly very gratified and very relieved to see that people seem to be getting from his performance what he wanted them to get.

Did we lose any of The Joker scenes in the cutting room?

Not whole scenes. I very rarely remove scenes from my films, as a writer/director and as a director who can’t bear to take time shooting things that aren’t going to be in the film. I try very hard to not shoot things that we’re not going to use. Really, it’s all in there in the movie. I mean, obviously certain lines have to go and certain little things for time and for the cleanness for the story, but not whole scenes.

You’d never shoot anything, specifically to be added in a DVD?

No. I’m a big fan of theatrical film. That is what I do and what I want to do. DVD is a great format and it’s a great sort of archival format for the piece. But I much prefer people to see the definitive version of the film in theaters.

How do you feel about the deluxe special edition version of Batman Begins that set the bar for extra features?

Well, the extra features, I think, are terrific on that DVD, and they were put together very much by my brother Jonah and the team of people working with him. We put a lot into what was a pretty fledgling form at the time in terms of the complexity of it and the interests of it. But there aren’t any deleted scenes because we couldn’t afford to shoot anything that wasn’t in the movie on that film. The film that’s on that DVD is the same as the one that was in theaters. That, to me, is important. The other special features, the other things around the feature on a DVD or on Blu-Ray, can be very interesting and very worthwhile, particularly for people who are interested in the craft of filmmaking. But I believe that you have to fight constantly for the definitive version to be the theatrical version. You don’t want to be bought off by promises from people that, ‘Ok, take it out of the film, but we’ll let you put it on the DVD.’ I think that is losing that struggle.

You tend to work with the same crew consistently. As the scope of your films gets bigger and bigger, you must be very proud of your people rising to the bigger challenges.

It is fabulous working with the same people. One of the reasons that I have worked with the same people is because, if you take my director of photography Wally Pfister, my production designer Nathan Crowley, or my brother Jonah, who I write with, we’ve grown up together. It’s also fun to work with people who haven’t done the thing you’ve done ten times before with other people. It’s fun to work with people for whom it is new and fresh and it’s a challenge the way it is for you as a director.

With so many pyrotechnics involved in this film, was it difficult to maintain control?

No. It was all pretty well controlled and pretty carefully put together. With the people working at this level, there’s a lot of care and attention that goes into everything and we have great resources to make the film and we try get as much of that on screen as possible and use it in as efficient a way as possible.

Was it sometimes comical for you the amount of secrecy you had to observe on the production of this film?

You do, and 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. And in this technological day and age, that becomes increasingly difficult. You have to be more and more careful in the way in which you try and preserve the secret of what you’re doing.

With some of your actors wearing hoods over their heads, was it as funny looking as I imagined?

I think it was actually quite sinister, to be honest – these very dark, shrouded figures wandering around. It actually added quite an aura of mystery to the set. It certainly makes everybody on the set pay attention when these characters turn up, whether it’s Christian, whether it’s Heath, whether it’s Aaron as Two-Face. But it’s important to preserve the mystery behind films and I think it’s a shame that people allow their curiosity to tear down that veil of secrecy that used to surround the process of making the film. I think that the DVD culture has done that to a degree, as well. There’s perhaps a little too much focus on some of the extras, on exposing all of the secrets of the film and telling how everything is done and showing everything that underpins the film.

You shot a lot of this film on practical locations rather than sets. What was the driving force behind that?

In moving the story on and doing a second film, you feel a real responsibility to try to do something sort of bigger and better. We shot quite a lot on location on Batman Begins, but not as much as we’d like to have. So, we just pushed further and further in that direction. We 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, for example, 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’re going to have to shoot in real places.

Can you talk 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 kid, 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. So, we set about shooting our main action sequences using these cameras. They are very large, very heavy, and very cumbersome. But we had a great crew who put a lot of time preparation and effort into figuring out how to move these cameras and how to manipulate these cameras the same way we do with our 35mm cameras.

Does it slow you down or can you pre-plan in the schedule and make sure it works?

We actually found ways to make it not slow us down. We thought it would slow us down. So, we came up various means to try and save time on the reloads and things like that, swapping cameras in and out, using multiple camera bodies and things. I think we were so afraid of the format and what it might do to our production schedule, and we prepared it so meticulously, that it actually went very, very smoothly. We wound up using the format more and more as the film progressed.

You have two composers working on this film. That’s rare. Can you talk about that?

Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard collaborated on the music for Batman Begins. It was Hans’s and James’s idea. I had gone to Hans with the film and wondered if I could interest him in doing the music, and he came back with this proposal that the two of them work together. They’d been friends for years and they had wanted to find somebody to experiment on in terms of letting them work together as a unit. They’re great friends and extremely good collaborators. And they each bring something very, very different musically to the table. I think their collaboration on this film was pushed quite a bit further than it was on Batman Begins. They’ve retained a lot of things that I felt they’d done very well on that film that I wanted them to retain. But they’ve pushed forward in a lot of new directions and I think the sound they’ve come up with is very unique and adds an enormous to the emotional life of the film.

You films are action movies that also have very fleshed out characters. Can you speak to that?

I think I’ve always just gravitated towards stories in which character is defined through action