When director Christopher Nolan rebooted the big screen Batman franchise with Batman Begins, it only left cinematic comic book fans wanting more. Now with Nolan's second Batman film about to hit theaters, The Dark Knight is shaping up to be what might be the most memorable movie in the entire franchise. Leading up to the explosive release of The dark Knight, Christopher Nolan sat down to talk how Heath Ledger embodied The Joker, rebooting images of the previous Joker, Heath Ledger's reaction to seeing portions of the film, what fans can expect on the DVD, the IMAX cuts, when he might go on to make a big screen version of The Prisoner.

Aaron said there were a couple scenes that were not rehearsed in character. What kind of cliff were you diving off to see Heath Ledger create the Joker?

CHRIS NOLAN: 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 between Aaron and Heath in the hospital where the blocking is very simple, you tend to treat the rehearsal as a fairly simple blocking rehearsal, figuring out where to put the camera, the order in which to shoot the scene, that kind of thing. And 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. And when you have two great actors working at the same pitch, you’ll get great results from that.

How do you erase previous images of the Joker?

NOLAN: 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 true to the terms of this story and the tone of telling the story we had established with Batman Begins which has a bit of grit to it, a bit of reality to it. We’ve tried to push that even further in The Dark Knight. When Heath and I first talked about the Joker and what the Joker needed to be in this telling of the story, it was very apparent to both of us that this was going to be something very different than what 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. And we really focused in 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’d not seen from this character before. Heath was able to put together a number of different things I think. A number of different attitudes for the character and in the process, create and iconic representation of the Joker. And the Joker does need to be iconic and 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 completely finished with Heath when he passed away?

NOLAN: Yeah, he was on another film. It had been months and months since we’d wrapped and we’d cut a lot of the film together and we’d watched the film a couple of times. We were about halfway through the edit process.

So he had seen it and he had a reaction to it?

NOLAN: 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 sort of as a short film in IMAX in Christmas. And we screened it for him and he enjoyed it very much. I’m very pleased that gave him a taste of how it was going to come across. I was obviously never able to show him his finished performance. 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’s scenes in the cutting of the movie?

NOLAN: 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, certain little things for time and for cleanness of the story and everything, but not whole scenes.

You never shoot anything specifically to be added in the DVD?

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

How do you feel about the deluxe special edition Memento that set the bar for extra features?

NOLAN: Well, the extra features, I think, are terrific on that DVD and they were put together very much by my brother Jona and the team of people working with him. And we put a lot into what was a pretty fledgling form at the time in terms of the complexity of it and the interest 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 features on the DVD or these days on the Blue Ray disc, I think they can be very interesting and very worthwhile, particularly for people 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 people with promises that okay, take it out of the film but we’ll let you put it on the DVD. I think that’s losing that struggle.

You must be very proud of your people because they’re rising to the bigger challenges.

NOLAN: Well, you know what they say; it’s all in the direction. No, it’s fabulous working with the same people and one of the reasons I have worked with the same people is because if you take my director of photography, [unintelligible 7:21], my DP, Nathan Crowley or my brother Jona I write with, we’ve grown up together. It’s fun to work with people who haven’t done the thing you’re doing 10 times before with other people. It’s fun to work with those for whom it is new and fresh and it’s a challenge the way it is for you as a director.

Rebooting Batman with Dark Knight Director Christopher Nolan Page 2