12:00 AM, 02-JULY-08
Knight Shifts Batman Genre
Christopher Nolan, director of the Batman sequel film The Dark Knight, told reporters that his ambition was to make the franchise bigger and smaller at the same time by shifting genres from superhero-origin story to urban crime drama.
"There's a huge advantage being able to jump in having told the origin story, so you can jump in with a fully formed character and then see where that goes," Nolan said in a group interview in Beverly Hills, Calif., over the weekend. "So I think it definitely gives you the opportunity to go new places and to get into the story much faster."
In The Dark Knight, Gotham City has seen crime lowered by the presence of Batman (Christian Bale), who is working with police detective Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman), and a new crusading district attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), has been elected. But a sinister new villain, the Joker (the late Heath Ledger), appears, casting doubt on the moral choices made by all and challenging Bruce Wayne to confront his darkest impulses.
"I had very much enjoyed the rhythm and dynamic of the origin story that we got to tell in Batman Begins, so it was a little bit daunting how we were going to replace that, the feeling of scale and size that gave us, just the timespan of that story," Nolan said. "And so what we chose to do is to tell a very immediate, very linear story, but based on a slight genre shift, going a little more into the crime story, a little more into the kind of epic city stories of films like Michael Mann's Heat, things like that, which I think achieve great scale even though they're confined within one city."
In his own interview, Bale said that viewers will find themselves immersed in a Gotham City that feels authentic. "We see an even more realistic-appearing Gotham, the characters, and I think he's really nailed it with his ability to take a certain genre of movie but not have it be constricted by that genre, you know?" Bale said. "And [he] truly has made a superb story, and finely crafted movie, that I think stands up against any movie regardless of genre."
The murky morality of The Dark Knight is particularly relevant now, Bale added. "Clearly that's very relevant to America: the question of what kind of deals do you do with the devil in order to solve a problem quickest," he said. "But are you then setting yourself up for future problems and more dire circumstances and consequences?" The Dark Knight opens July 18. --Patrick Lee, News Editor
