Chris Nolan Says The Joker is Like the Shark in ‘Jaws’
He cuts through the film...
Wired has posted an extremely long and quite frankly, boring, article about The Dark Knight focusing on director Chris Nolan. I had a hard time getting into it so I started skimming for good quotes to pick from and this one really stuck out:
The director wasn’t interested in plumbing the murky origins of the Joker himself — the Clown Prince is more a Loki-like force of chaos. “He’s like the shark in Jaws,” Nolan explains. “The Joker cuts through the film, he’s incredibly important, but he’s not a guy with a backstory. He’s a wild card.”
The article focuses on Nolan’s desire for practical stunts and as little CG as possible as well as the making of the film, primarily on how some of it was shot on IMAX film stock.
Wally Pfister, the movie’s director of photography was quoted talking about the difference between seeing the film in IMAX and conventional theaters saying, “You can see something way off on the horizon… You can see a little glint of light, a reflection in Batman’s eye. You can’t see it in a conventional theater. And you definitely can’t see it on a plasma screen at home.”
An example of the difference was included in the article and is featured just below.
Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures courtesy Wired.com
Finally the article touches on Heath Ledger as Nolan’s wife Emma Thomas says, “Everything you see onscreen is his performance.”
Nolan himself recalled a conversation he and Ledger had before shooting, “I remember Heath calling up while I was working on the script and talking about ventriloquist’s dummies, about having a voice that was high and low, and I’m on the other end going, ‘Uh … yeah.’ It sounded insane, and not necessarily in the right way. But when he performed it, I was like, ‘OK, I see.’”
If you pick and choose the article is pretty good. It gets boring in the middle and picks back up at the end. You can read the whole thing right here and on page four there is even more description into the IMAX vs. conventional theater comparison.
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