Cinematic Faith

Written by Scott Foundas

Lets start down this memory lane through the Dark Knight trilogy by pointing out that in your first film, Following, theres the curious appearance of a Batman insignia on the apartment door of the main character, the Young Man. Coincidence?

Id love to pretend that it was some kind of foresight and part of my great master plan, but it was total coincidence. Jeremy Theobald, who plays the Young Man, thats his apartment. Thats the door to it, and I think when he moved in, the sticker was already there. How did you come to Batman Begins, and what appealed to you about rebooting a series that had already been interpreted by Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher? Its a sign of how quickly things change in the movie business, but there was no such thing conceptually as a reboot. That idea didnt exist when I came to look at Batman. Thats new terminology. Warner Bros. owned this wonderful character, and didnt know what to do with it. It had sort of reached a dead end with its previous iteration. I got excited about the idea of filling in this interesting gapno one had ever told the origin story of Batman. And so even though Tim Burtons film had done a definitive version of the character, it was a very idiosyncratic Tim Burton vision. I had in mind a sort of treatment of Batman that Richard Donner might have done in the late Seventies the way he did Superman. To me what that represented was firstly a detailed telling of the origin story, which wasnt even really definitively addressed in the comics over the years, funnily enough. And secondly, tonally I was looking for an interpretation of that character that presented an extraordinary figure in an ordinary world. So I wanted the inhabitants of Gotham to view Batman as being as outlandish and extraordinary as we do. The overall tone of the film is realistic compared to most comic-book-derived movies. The world around Batman is plausible and not particularly stylized or exaggerated. The term realism is often confusing and used sort of arbitrarily. I suppose relatable is the word I would use. I wanted a world that was realistically portrayed, in that even though outlandish events may be taking place, and this extraordinary figure may be walking around these streets, the streets would have the same weight and validity of the streets in any other action movie. So theyd be relatable in that way. And so the more texturing and layering that we could get into this film, the more tactile it was, the more you would feel and be excited by the action. So just on a technical level, I really wanted to take on this idea of what I call the tactile quality. You want to really understand what things would smell like in this world, what things would taste like, when bones start being crunched or cars start pancaking. You feel these things in a way because the world isnt intensely artificial and created by computer graphics, which result in an anodyne, sterile quality thats not as exciting. For me that was about making the character more special. If I can believe in that world because I recognize it and can imagine myself walking down that street, then when this extraordinary figure of Batman comes swooping down in this theatrical costume and presenting this very theatrical aspect, thats going to be more exciting to me.

In fact, we spend much of the first half of Batman Begins not in Gotham at all but rather following the young Bruce Wayne on his odyssey through Asia and his training with Ras Al Ghul and the League of Shadows. We wanted to get out of the notion of Gotham as a village, as a claustrophobic sort of otherworldly environment which is what it had always been before. We wanted to show it as New York, in a wider world. So taking Bruce Wayne around the world, showing how he builds himself using skills acquired from all these different places around the world, we felt that would position Gotham as the leading international city of our world of Batman. Following on that idea of how Bruce Wayne builds himself into Batman, theres a great emphasis in the Dark Knight films, and, actually, in all of your films, on how things work, how things are constructed. Nothing is taken for granted or presented as a fait accompli. If Batman needs a batsuit, we see how he orders it, and where all of his toys come from. They have a practical explanation: theyre Wayne Industries military prototypes. We literally see him building himself in a way a lot of origin stories try to gloss over. Its like how in The Prestige we see the ways in which the magicians accomplish their illusions. Very much. Im interested in process, the process of becoming. Im fascinated by the idea of Bruce Wayne being an ordinary man without superpowers, turning himself into this larger-thanlife figure who appears to have extraordinary abilities. And once you start down the road, its like cleaning the dirt off something. Once youve cleaned one spot, once youve peeled back the logic or reality of what it seems to be, you have to go all the way. Ive never liked films that go part of the way there and then take an improbable leap. So in terms of where he was sourcing

something from, how he would go about it, we really tried to come up with the best solution possible and present it in the film. What we found was that, very much like in The Prestige, that process becomes a really interesting part of the entertainment of the film. Ras Al Ghul is a fascinating character, because hes not a boilerplate nefarious villain who wants to dominate the world, hes an ideological villain. He seems to have been ripped from todays headlines, especially with his rhetoric about the decadence of the capitalist West. With my co-writers David Goyer and my brother [Jonathan Nolan], we decided early on that the greatest villains in movies, the people who most get under our skin, are the people who speak the truth. So with Ras Al Ghul, we wanted everything he said to be true in some way. So, hes looking at the world from a very honest perspective that he truly believes. And we applied the same thing to The Joker and Bane in the third one. Everything they say is sincere. And in terms of their ideology, its really about ends justifying means. It was important in Batman Begins to have Bruce go very far down this road with Ducard, to the point where they want him to chop somebodys head off because he has stolen something. And at that point theres this almost comic moment where Bruce turns to Ducard and says, You cant be serious. At that point, youre surprised by how seductive the training and indoctrination can be. And the scales fall from his eyes. But even later when Ras Al Ghul returns and is about to destroy all of Gotham, there is a logic to everything he says. I think truly threatening villains are the ones who have a coherent ideology behind what theyre saying. The challenge in applying that to The Joker was to have part of the ideology be anarchic and a lack of ideology in a sense. But its a very specific, laid-out lack of ideology, so it becomes, paradoxically, an ideology in itself. In a way, the films feel like a tour of different schools of creating social revolution. You have Ras Al Ghul with his very clear-cut extremist ideology Almost religious, I would say. And then you have the anarchy of The Joker, and in The Dark Knight Rises you come back with the followers of Ras Al Ghul who are trying to enact his plans by masking it as class warfare. Class warfare but also in a militaristic, dictatorial approach. If you look at the three of them, Ras Al Ghul is almost a religious figure, The Joker is the anti-religious figure, the anti-structure anarchist. And then Bane comes in as a military dictator. And military dictators can be ideologically based, they can be religiously based, or a combination thereof.

Something you seized on is the fragmented identity of Bruce Wayne/Batman, which is certainly a central part of the character, but its much more present in these films. At the end of The Dark Knight on some level he senses that maybe hes become the villain of the story, that maybe he has too much blood on his hands, and that Batman should go away and leave Gotham alone. Those are dark areas that no Batman movie really ventured into before, and they seem related to an interest you have in the dual or sometimes more than dual nature of identity. Its paradoxical, but in order to get at the duality of Bruce Wayne, we had to make him into three people. I sat down with Christian early on and we decided theres the private Bruce Wayne, who only Alfred and Rachel really get to see; the public Bruce Wayne, which is this mask he puts on

of this decadent playboy; and then the creature of Batman that hes created to strike back at the world. By making him into these three aspects, you really start to see the idea that you have a private person who is wrestling with all kinds of demons and trying to make something productive out of that. I think the most interesting moment to me that Christian pulls off in Batman Begins is the scene at the party when he pretends to be drunken Bruce Wayne being rude to his guests to get them out of the place, to save them from Ras Al Ghuls men. But theres some truth to it which comes through, and you can see that in his performance. Its an act, but Bruce Wayne as an actor is drawing on something that he really feels. Its quite bitter, and I like the layers that Christian was able to put in there. Was there some key moment during the casting where you knew that Christian Bale was right for the role? Christian was actually the first actor I met for the role. But given the stakes, the studio was always going to need me to put together a group of actors to be screen-tested. And we got the old costume out and shot the tests and Christian just owned it in a way that was very close to the conception that we were putting together in the script. In terms of the potential for rage that this character has, the axe that this character is carrying with him, he was able to project that very well in his test and have that underlie not only Batman but also Bruce Wayne the playboy. Theres a darkness that the character has been infused with by tragedy at an early age, and its the engine that drives everything that he does. You seem to really love actors, and that comes through in these films in a very strong way, even if we tend not to think about large-scale action movies as showcases for great acting. But you cast great actors and then you give them interesting things to do. Theyre not just there for their name value. I do love actors and I feel great actors can find the depth of a characterization that adds to the richness of the film. I felt a lot of the scale of Batman Begins should come through the casting, and once again I looked back to Richard Donners Superman for that because he cast Marlon Brando and Glenn Ford and Ned Beatty, all the characters were played by these terrific stars. So we went after that kind of depth of casting. And then as you come to explore the world of Gotham, and revisit it, and revisit it again in The Dark Knight Rises, because youve got this set of massively talented stars there, youre able to deal with the truth of some of these extraordinary situations that the mythology of the character and your spin on it has put together. Thats something that you rarely see in films of this nature. Christian said it very well when he said The Dark Knight Rises is about consequences. What I was doing was saying, Okay, I know Ive got Christian Bale and Michael Caine playing this scene together, and they are able to take on the truth of what if the things that happened in The Dark Knight actually happened? What if they actually did tell the lies they told in order to get at a greater truth or get at the expediency of saving a city? Whats that going to do to them over time? What is the reality of the relationship between Bruce and this servant of the Wayne family whos been tasked with raising their only child, their most precious thing in the world because they have been gunned down in front of him? And what must this kid have gone through? I am looking at these actors and saying, Ill write you a scene where these things are coming to bear, these consequences are coming to the surface. And I know that theyre going to find the truth in that, and that is going to be

devastating at times and invigorating at times, and its going to take the drama to operatic heights, and extremes of emotion where you really feel something because they found the truth of a situation. Youre experiencing emotions in a very intense operatic way.

Its fitting because in Batman Begins its after a visit to the opera that the young Bruce Wayne witnesses the death of his parents. Yeah, absolutely. And the theatricality of opera and the larger-than-life quality of the presentation of it, but also the emotions it generates, has always sat underneath my understanding of how to make these heightened realities work. Why am I working in this genre for the audience? What does it allow me to do as a filmmaker that I couldnt do in a more everyday universe? The answer is this operatic quality. Its this ability to blow things up into very large emotions that are accessible to a universal audience. And its a very privileged position that youre in as a filmmaker with your audience. I felt that I wasnt getting to experience that in mainstream commercial movies at the time, so I really wanted to enjoy that as a filmmaker. Ive had a great time with these three films, really enjoying that relationship with the audience. What were the technical and physical challenges of doing these films? Theyre much bigger than anything you had done up to that point in your career. Was that intimidating? Well, it was intimidating in theory, but a lot of the challenge with taking on a big film is not allowing yourself to get caught up in the way that other people do big films. Because you can put a team around you of very experienced people, and that gives you a great safety net, but that also has a lot of pitfalls. However, it is possible to make large-scale films very much in the way that

you make your smaller films, and its possible to maintain some of the spontaneity and creativity you have on set. Not all of it. You have to adjust your methods, but you dont want to get completely railroaded into the big movie thing out of fear and inexperience. I would have conversations with my line producer and hed say, Oh, therell be some days where youll only get one setup in the morning, and I just said, Ill never work that way, because frankly its too boring, and its creatively stultifying. With the team I had, we were able to keep things much lighter on their feet, despite the enormous scale. And the thing I learned is that no matter how big the film became, people would always complain it was too small. For the studio, it was never enough. So you learn to relax with it a little bit, and trust your instincts about scale, how this is going to feel big enough when its in the can. So when we came to do The Dark Knight, we were comfortable setting much more of the film just in Gotham, in more claustrophobic situations, because having been all over the world for Batman Begins and having a very big scale, with an exploding monastery and sliding down the cliff and all that, by the time we get to The Dark Knight we had the confidence to say, If were putting huge characters and huge conflict on screen, and making this kind of urban crime drama, the scale will naturally be there, in just the way we shoot The Joker walking down the street with a machine gun. That will be a huge image. That was a big part of investing in that sort of tableau style of photography which I hadnt really done before. You also used the IMAX format extensively on The Dark Knight and even more on The Dark Knight Rises. You seem drawn to IMAX in a way that a lot of people seem drawn to 3D at the moment. But IMAX feels like the more dynamic format, with a hypernatural clarity that trumps the quite artificial images of most 3D movies. I think youve put your finger on it. As blockbuster filmmakers, were all looking to try and open up the screen for the audience, throw the audience into the movie in a way that they forget theyre watching a film. The clarity of IMAX, and the size of the screen, to me is overwhelming in a very positive way. Youre able to create an overwhelming immersive experience for the audience, really take them on a hell of a roller-coaster ride. The issue for me with 3D is that even though its immersive with its stereoscopic illusion, your brain is performing an unnatural optical function, converging your eyes where youre not focusing them, and theres a feeling in your head that its hard. Theres literally a feeling in your head thats a little bit different than what youre used to feeling, and so I find myself unable to forget that Im watching a movie. And for me thats a bit of a barrier. Theres a strong analog quality to your films in general and the Dark Knight films in particular. You talked about wanting to have a very tactile world, and seeing The Dark Knight Rises in IMAX 70mm you cant escape the feeling that youre seeing a film made on film, albeit with hundreds of CGI shots, but integrated in a way that you dont feel that digital quality in the way you do with most movies that make heavy use of digital technology. I recently saw a 70mm print of The Master and I realized that, other than my own films, its the first photochemically finished film Ive seen in many years, and it looks the way a movie should look. To me, its just a superior form. In The Dark Knight Rises, we have about 430 effects shots

out of 3,000, so the idea that the tail wags the dog and then you finish the film in the digital realm is illogical. We make the 430 shots fit in with the remaining 2,500 that we timed photochemically. For that reason, Ive never done a film with more than 500 effects shots. These films have about a third or a quarter the number of CG shots of any other film on that scale. That allows me to keep working photochemically and to make the digital effects guys print out their negatives so we actually cut the effect with its background plate on film, and we can see whether it matches. For me, its simply the best way to make a film, and why more people havent done it I could not tell you. The novelty of digital is part of it. For some filmmakers, theres a fear of being left behind, which to me is irrational because as a director youre not responsible for loading a camera. You can hire whoever you need to and shoot how you want to shoot, but I think, very simply, industrial economics favor change, and theres more money in change, whether or not its better. But I talk to a lot of young filmmakers who want to shoot on film and see the value in it. Ive gone out of my way to screen film prints of The Dark Knight Rises for other filmmakers, because no one prints dailies anymoretheyre not seeing the potential of filmwhereas Ive been seeing it every day Ive been working for the past 10 years.

At what point did you start to think that there was more than one story to tell here, that this could be a trilogy without repeating or cannibalizing itself? I think it was in the months after the first film was released. At the end of Batman Begins, when he turns the Joker card over, I found myself wondering, Okay, who would that antagonist be? seen through the prism of Batman Begins. I wanted to see how we could translate The Joker into that world. That was the jumping-off point. And the nature of The Jokers antagonism was so utterly different to what happened in Batman Begins and was so different to Batmans relationship with Gotham in particular. So The Dark Knight is very much a story about a city, a sort of crime drama, whereas Batman Begins is more of an adventure story. So it actually felt like a different genre, and then you know that youre not retreading what youve done, youre expanding it.

When you were starting to write The Dark Knight Rises, were you thinking about what was going on with the economy and movements like Occupy Wall Street, in terms of the depiction of society on the brink of a kind of second American Revolution? We were writing years before Occupy Wall Street, and we were actually shooting at the time that it arose, but I think the similarities come from Occupy being a response to the banking crisis in 2008. We were sitting there in a world where, on the news, we were constantly being presented with what-if scenarios. Like: What if all the banks go bust? What if the stock market is worth nothing? These questions are terrifying, and we were taking the view that we should be writing about whats most frightening. We came to the idea of how in America we take for granted a stability to our class and social structure that has never been sustained elsewhere in the world. In other words, this sort of thing has happened in countries all over the world, why not here? And why not now? So a lot of the ideas underlying the film come from a situation in which the economy was in crisis and therefore even on the news questions are being askedunthinkable questions about what might happen in society. It was interesting to see the spectrum of reactions to The Dark Knight Rises, with some arguing that it was a sort of a neoconservative or very right-wing film and others seeing it as being a radical leftist film. And one of the things the film seems to be talking about is how easily the political rhetoric of one extreme can be co-opted by the complete opposite extreme. Absolutely, and then you get into the philosophical question: if an energy or a movement can be co-opted for evil, then is that a critique of the movement itself? All of these different interpretations are possible. What was surprising to me is how many pundits would write about their political interpretation of the film and not understand that any one political interpretation necessarily involved ignoring huge chunks of the film. And it made me feel good about where we had positioned the film, because its not intended to be politically specific. It would be absurd to try to make a politically specific film about this subject matter, where youre actually trying to pull the shackles off everyday life and go to a more frightening place where anything is possible. Youre off the conventional political spectrum, so its very subject to interpretation and misinterpretation. Is it true that you dont use a second unit director, in effect shooting every frame yourself? Yeah, Ive never used a second unit director. Occasionally, wed hire a splinter unit for a day or something and splinter off a couple of shots, but I went into Batman Begins saying to the studio, Look, I dont understand how to peel things away from my script and say these arent important enough for me to shoot them. Because to me, if theyre not important enough for me to shoot them, they shouldnt be in the film in the first place. So the promise I made to them was that I would stay on schedule and budget, and if we got into trouble then Id hire five units or whatever it took. But we stuck to our schedule rigidly and were allowed to carry on with the one unit. And Ive taken that approach on all of my films. The last hour of The Dark Knight Rises, from the singing of The Star-Spangled Banner in the football stadium through to the end, is an hour of film that takes us through a lot of

different locations and action, but it feels like one long sustained set piece. It has this gradual build in intensity and careful linking of everything that happens, and its quite exhilarating to watch. We tried with all three films, but in the most extreme way with The Dark Knight Rises, what I call this sort of snowballing approach to action and events. We experimented with this in The Dark Knight, where the action is not based on clean and clear set pieces the way Batman Begins was, but we pushed it much further in this film. The scope and scale of the action is built from smaller pieces that snowball together so youre cross-cutting, which I love doing, and trying to find a rhythm in conjunction with the music and the sound effects, so youre building and building tension continuously over a long sustained part of the film, and not releasing that until the very last frame. Its a risky strategy because you risk exhausting your audience, but to me its the most invigorating way of approaching the action film. Its an approach I applied with Inception as well, to have parallel strands of tension rising and rising and then coming together. In The Dark Knight Rises, from the moment the music and sound drop and the little boy starts singing The Star-Spangled Banner, its kind of like the gloves are coming off. Ive been amazed and delighted how people have accepted the extremity of where things go.

One could say that of Inception. On paper it sounds like a movie Hollywood wouldnt dream of makingand it speaks to the fact that you have a lot of faith in the intelligence of the audience and their ability to embrace things in movies that might not fit into cookiecutter molds.

Well, I think its interesting. Ive often characterized it as faith in the audience, but it is also faith in the movies, faith in pure cinema. If you can avail yourself of the appropriate cinematic device to make the audience feel something, then cinema is an incredibly powerful communicator. I have faith in that process, that if I get it right and put the pieces together, then people will understand what they need to understand and will feel the intensity of the experience that Im trying to give them. The Dark Knight Rises leaves the door open at the end for a possible continuation of the Gotham saga, without Batman perhaps, but with these new characters like Catwoman and the young cop played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Do you envision revisiting Gotham? For me, The Dark Knight Rises is specifically and definitely the end of the Batman story as I wanted to tell it, and the open-ended nature of the film is simply a very important thematic idea that we wanted to get into the movie, which is that Batman is a symbol. He can be anybody, and that was very important to us. Not every Batman fan will necessarily agree with that interpretation of the philosophy of the character, but for me it all comes back to the scene between Bruce Wayne and Alfred in the private jet in Batman Begins, where the only way that I could find to make a credible characterization of a guy transforming himself into Batman is if it was as a necessary symbol, and he saw himself as a catalyst for change and therefore it was a temporary process, maybe a five-year plan that would be enforced for symbolically encouraging the good of Gotham to take back their city. To me, for that mission to succeed, it has to end, so this is the ending for me, and as I say, the open-ended elements are all to do with the thematic idea that Batman was not important as a man, hes more than that. Hes a symbol, and the symbol lives on.