"DARK KNIGHT" WEEK AT THE POPCORN
REEL -- FEATURE STORY: CHRISTOPHER NOLAN'S BATMAN, MALEVOLENT, CONVICTED AND
CHALLENGED
Give Me The Knight: Christopher Nolan's Bat
Metrics
In just seven years Christopher Nolan has
gone from being merely the impressive director of the sensational 2001 film
"Memento" to the sophisticated architect of a seriously reworked "Batman"
feature franchise
By
Omar P.L. Moore/The Popcorn Reel
July 15, 2008
He wears an intense expression at times. The wheels within are turning.
Christopher Nolan has had to soldier on despite the death of a stuntman during
the course of a sweltering hot summer in 2007 in Chicago where "The Dark Knight"
had been filming for several months. "The Dark Knight" is the first
feature film to be shot in part in IMAX, the towering eight-story screen format.
The director of "Batman Begins" has been fighting to keep the wraps on the
happenings on the set of the follow-up film which opens worldwide on Friday,
featuring the opening scene in the format.
Keeping things under wraps hasn't been easy.
"You have to be more and more careful about the way in which you try and
preserve the secret of what you're doing," said Mr. Nolan during a radio
roundtable with several journalists, held recently in Los Angeles for the Warner
Brothers release.
Christian Bale had been quoted in 2007 about how hot it was wearing the black
rubber Bat suit that shrouded his identity. Mr. Bale may have been
sweating inside the bat suit last year but in 2008 he hasn't had to sweat too
much about how his Batman would be portrayed in what turned out to be a new bat
suit, thanks to Mr. Nolan. "It was heavier but it was actually much more
comfortable. There's like a hundred and ten parts to this one. There
were three to the original. I can move my head . . . Chris was very
adamant about that," said Mr. Bale in a roundtable in L.A.
"We wanted to stay serious and dramatic with each of the portrayals of every
single character," said Mr. Bale, reflecting the tone of "The Dark Knight"
director, who himself resisted the idea of being defensive where Heath Ledger's
portrayal of The Joker was concerned. Said Mr. Nolan: "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 true to the terms of this story and the tone of
telling the Batman story that we had established with "Batman Begins", which had
a bit of grit to it, a bit of reality to it. We've tried to push that even
further in "The Dark Knight". And 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 very different than had 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 in on this
idea as 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 them."
The recklessness of man has been an underpinning of Christopher Nolan's feature
films as have the alternately wanton and erring ways of the British director's
protagonists. In "Memento", released in March 2001 in the U.S., Guy Pearce
played a man whose short-term memory allows him to literally forget -- whether
conveniently or otherwise -- who he really is. Where "Memento" was an
ingenious dual narrative featuring opposite and dueling chronological and
reverse real-time stories, the 2003 film "Insomnia" showcased a tormented
middle-aged police detective (Al Pacino) whose frailty is sleepless nights and
bad judgment. In what was Mr. Nolan's most underwhelming film Mr. Pacino
was the right person for the job, displaying a vulnerability and humanity that
rendered him more sympathetic than sinful. With "Batman Begins" in 2005 it
was Mr. Bale's turn to face the duality test as Gotham's crime-fighting
crusader, and now in "The Dark Knight", Mr. Bale finds himself pushed to the
brink in the test of shades of good and bad. But it is now two, not one
character who has to face or embrace the more unpleasant part of themselves.
Both Batman and Joker are strange bedfellows, capable of menace and might in the
same breath -- they are each other's worst boogeyman.
Other previous editions of Batman on the big screen have been largely cosmetic.
Whether in high-gloss production values in Tim Burton's visions ("Batman" in
1989 and "Batman Returns" in 1992) or the amusing, colorful camp of Joel
Schumacher's films ("Batman Forever" in 1995 and "Batman & Robin" in
1997), all hint at or exemplify menace and malevolence but each of the four
films leaves only a surface impression of the depths of evil conjured up by
villains as well as good guys. By contrast, Mr. Nolan has pushed the "dark
side" deeper, in an introductory way ("Batman Begins" in 2005) and as stated
earlier in this story, pushes to the edge with "The Dark Knight".
For all his seriousness and intensity Mr. Nolan possesses a dry sense of humor.
"Well, you know what they say: it's all in the directing," Mr. Nolan wryly and
cheekily observed before a gaggle of journalists in Los Angeles. Asked by
one of the journalists about his tendencies to lean toward film noir-type drama
even if not consciously making that type of film, the director said that "I
think I've always just gravitated towards stories in which character is defined
through action. That is to say that the story of the film is telling you
who the people are. I think that's the strongest form of characterization
and it's one that finds its most obvious incarnation in things like film noir
and those genres where you're expecting the double cross, the reverse. The
process of going through the story to a certain extent, is the process of
continually appraising what you think of those characters -- who the good guys,
who the bad guys or where your sympathies lie. In this genre it shifts
through the film and I'm interested in stories with complicated
characterizations where your sympathies can shift."
Mr. Nolan has long admired "The Prisoner", a popular BBC Television series of
the late 1960's starring Patrick McGoohan. He has been thinking about
making the series into a feature length film, but is not sure when he will take
concrete steps to move things forward.
"The Dark Knight" opens on Friday worldwide, and Mr. Nolan may yet earn the same
title when it comes to evoking a story filled with complication, contradiction,
drama and menace.
Photo: Christopher Nolan ponders before the Bat Signal while on the set of
"The Dark Knight" in 2007. (Photo courtesy: Warner Brothers)
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