Producers and idle actors huddle under a flimsy canopy near a dreary office plaza at Wabash Street and the river. A few stories overhead, a stunt double in a familiar black cape swings from a hoist, slamming into the window of a tower that’s doubling as Gotham City Hall. A noose is around his neck, a knife plunged into his heart.
Batman, or at least his doppelganger, is dead.
Christopher Nolan, the director of “The Dark Knight” — his follow-up to 2005’s “Batman Begins” — is unperturbed by the rain, but a tiny detail irks him. “Hey, buster!” he shouts to the stuntman, craning his neck skyward and raising his voice for the first time all day. “Could you turn yourself a little more to the left?”
In so many ways, this isn’t what you’d expect of a $180 million Hollywood comic-book movie sequel with a zillion moving parts, a cast of thousands and sets from Chicago to Hong Kong. Anyone else would shoot indoors, use digital effects or wait for clear skies; Nolan rolls with the weather’s punches, believing that the messiness of reality can’t be faked.
That kind of maestro is just what Warner Brothers wanted five years ago when it hired the 37-year-old to reboot the franchise that had become a laughingstock with 1997’s “Batman and Robin,” best remembered for George Clooney’s nipple suit.
Nolan’s Caped Crusader, Christian Bale, recalls how “people would kind of laugh” when they heard that he and Nolan were taking Batman seriously for “Batman Begins.”
But when they finally saw the film, the same people “would say, ‘What a surprise,’ ” Bale said. “I believe that even the most popcorn-like movie can be done incredibly well, and can have something that you really have to work at. That was what attracted me to doing it the first time, because I felt I’d never seen that done, and I didn’t understand why.”
While not a mega blockbuster, with $205 million in domestic box office, “Batman Begins” expanded the audience well beyond comic fans.
Now the question is whether Nolan’s vision of Batman can expand its reach to an even wider summer moviegoing audience, even as the death of Heath Ledger, who played the Joker in “The Dark Knight,” has added unanticipated morbidity to the film’s deliberate darkness.
“The Dark Knight,” which will be released July 18, picks up where “Batman Begins” left off, with Gary Oldman’s police lieutenant, Jim Gordon, warning about the perils of escalation: that Batman’s extreme measures could invite a like response from the criminal element. And sure enough, a deadly new villain, the Joker (Ledger), emerges to wreak havoc.
In a political context, this would politely be called an “unintended consequence.” (Gotham as Baghdad, anyone?) Nolan doesn’t deny the overtones.
“As we looked through the comics, there was this fascinating idea that Batman’s presence in Gotham actually attracts criminals to Gotham, attracts lunacy,” he said. “When you’re dealing with questionable notions like people taking the law into their own hands, you have to really ask, where does that lead? That’s what makes the character so dark, because he expresses a vengeful desire.”
In Bale’s view, “The Dark Knight” is an even lonelier outing for his character.
“This escalation has now meant that he feels more of a duty to continue,” Bale said. “And now you have not just a young man in pain attempting to find some kind of an answer, you have somebody who actually has power, who is burdened by that power, and is having to recognize the difference between attaining that power and holding on to it.”
It may not be too much of a stretch to see another analogy here for Nolan: Rebooting the Batman franchise may be behind him, but he still has to improve upon it. And now he also must navigate the aftermath of the Jan. 22 death of Ledger.
Nolan, for his part, said he felt a “massive sense of responsibility” to do right by Ledger’s “terrifying, amazing” performance.
“It’s stunning, it’s iconic,” Nolan said. “It’s going to just blow people away.”
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The Joker factor?
Heath Ledger had finished work on “The Dark Knight” in October and was already halfway through another film when he died in January.
At the time of his death, news that the prescription drugs that killed him included sleep aids — and narcotics — prompted Internet chatter about whether his intense performance as the Joker had been a factor in his demise.
Ledger, however, called it “the most fun I’ve ever had, or probably ever will have, playing a character.” But his fatigue was obvious, said co-star Michael Caine.
“He was exhausted, I mean he was really tired. I remember saying to him, ‘I’m too old to have the bloody energy to play that part,’ ” Caine said. “And I thought to myself, I didn’t have the energy when I was his age.”
Cinematographer Wally Pfister said Ledger seemed “like he was busting blood vessels in his head,” he was so intense.
“It was like a seance, where the medium takes on another person and then is so completely drained.”
[ NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE ]
