by Alyse Wax

For fan boys and average Joes alike, The Dark Knight is the most anticipated film of the year. It?s not surprising, since Dark Knight transcends the superhero comic-book movie genre, and is instead a masterful noir thriller that just happens to star a guy in a cape. (And Heath Ledger?s dark and insane portrayal of the Joker is already sparking Oscar buzz.) We chatted with the film's director Christopher Nolan and stars Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhart, and Maggie Gyllenhaal at the recent Los Angeles press junket about filming The Dark Knight, crafting their characters, and working with the talented actor behind that crazed grin...

Can you talk about upping the game from the first movie and yet keeping these characters feeling really grounded in reality? How much of a challenge was that to pull off?

Nolan: I think the big challenge in doing a sequel is to build on what you've done in the first film, but not abandon the characters, the logic, the tone of the world that you created. So there are elements the audience will expect you to bring back that you need to bring back. You also have to balance that with the need to see something new and to see something different and that's been the challenge through the whole of making the film.

When you found out you were going to be Harvey Dent, were you excited that you would get to play Two-Face?

Eckhart: I was very happy that I got to play Harvey Dent, who is sort of the opposite. I loved playing Harvey Dent--the leader of Gotham City, the political future, the crime fighter?having his relationship with the other characters in the movie, the dynamics there. It was fun to [shoot] the press conferences and act like an important person. I was surprised that Harvey Dent was in the movie so much. I did enjoy playing Harvey Two-Face as well.

Chris gave us a lot of personal freedom [with our characters]. I know there is stuff I did with Heath in [the hospital] scene that is not in the movie that I thought was pretty good, but you can?t put everything in. I felt that if Gary had a good idea, or if I had a good idea, or Maggie did, that Chris was there and listening and would incorporate that idea. Obviously, he has to have the movie planned out because it?s such a big movie, but he did allow for our creativity. I don?t think Chris could have stopped Heath if he wanted to. As a director, you have to let your actor go. Heath needed Chris?s trust and felt like Chris would let him do whatever, so Heath would open up, and let his unconscious and creativity and imagination take over, and give the great performance he does. If Chris tried to shut him down, Heath wouldn?t have been able to give that performance.

And that?s why Chris is the great director he is. He is able to balance the actors with the technical aspects of filmmaking, and make this huge entertaining movie as well as this psychological thriller.

Did it feel weird, playing the good guy amongst so many villains?

Oldman: You have to resolve yourself, when you play a good guy--and I?ve wanted to play a good guy for a while. I?ve tried to turn the ship around, but it?s a big ship to turn around. You can?t do it overnight. I just got into this thing of bad guys. You know, you come onto the scene, like Sid & Nancy, and no one really knows who you are. Up to that point, I had had a career in theatre. I?ve been in comedies and I?ve been in musicals?I?ve been in all sorts of things. And then you do that sort of performance, and slowly, your career narrows and narrows and narrows. I?ve played bad guys because I?ve worked with people who have had less imagination than Christopher Nolan. Chris Nolan saw Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain. It takes someone with great insight to look at that performance, recognize what he is doing, and cast him for the Joker, even though he has never, ever done a performance like that. Less good directors see you in something and say ?I want that.? Then you turn up and they say, ?No, I just want you to do that thing I saw you do.?

I wouldn't mind a go at the Riddler. I used to like the Riddler in the TV series. I think it's the suit with the question marks. I think I like the gear.

What were your considerations in taking this role?

Gyllenhaal: I wasn't actually looking to work. I had a three-month old and I wasn't reading scripts at the time. But I was a fan of Chris Nolan's, and I mean, the cast. I think that everyone who's in the movie was already in it. It was Gary Oldman and Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman and Christian [Bale] and Heath [Ledger] and Aaron Eckhart. It was hard not to take that seriously because they're incredible. I met Chris and he was lovely and smart and thoughtful and he gave me the script to read. He said, "She's not quite finished yet, this character." It was early on and I guess it was a sort of early draft. I read it and I had a lot of ideas and I guess for me there were two chief worries. One was that I wanted to make sure that I had Katie Holmes' blessing and I didn't want to get involved with it if I didn't. I also wanted to make sure that Chris wanted the character to be smart and feisty and fierce and a real whole thinking woman who cares just as much about making Gotham an honorable and safe place to live as any of these guys did. When I realized that Chris wanted exactly that then I had to do it.

Did you take any cues from Katie's performance, anything that carried over?

Gyllenhaal: I'm a fan of hers. I think she's a really lovely actress and I know her a tiny, tiny bit and I loved what she did in the previous movie, but I didn't think that it would help anybody for me to imitate her or even watch it too closely. I think it was better for me to think of her as a whole new woman. At the same time there are plot things and narrative things that she built that are important for this movie. Most importantly, it was that she says at the very end of the first movie that she loves Bruce Wayne, but that she can't be with him if he's Batman but that she understands why he has to be Batman.

Comic-book fans triple analyze actors' performances. Did you think about that before taking this role on?

Gyllenhaal: I didn't really know about it much until I got involved in this. I didn't read comic books. I didn't have a problem with them, but I just didn't know about them really. I'd be doing a scene and be super into it and I'd be taking it absolutely seriously and then I'd hear myself saying, "Believe me, the safest place in Gotham is now Bruce Wayne's penthouse!" I would be like, "What? I'm in Batman!" It feels so cool and so thrilling. You can hear the music swell. When I did that stunt where I'm hanging off the edge of the building and am about to be thrown to certain death and Batman comes and sweeps you up in his cape, that's how you get the thirty-year old women. It's appealing. It's overwhelming too. So then I kind of got into it. I started to pay attention to the fact that there are these people out there that really care about this, and I hope that we did justice to the world that they imagine. I hope that I did justice to Rachel Dawes, who isn't in the comic books, but to this character who's a huge part of Gotham.

Can you talk about Heath Ledger's performance and how he found his way into that, and how you went about editing the film after Heath?s death?

Nolan: Well, to address the second part first. I'm very confident that the performance has been edited exactly as it would've been had Heath not died. It was very important to me that his performance be put out there exactly the way that we had intended it and that he had intended it to be seen. Watching him come up with the characterization was a pretty exciting and pretty amazing thing because you're looking at an actor craft an iconic presence for a character, but making it human at the same time. That's an incredible thing to do and the way in which he's done it is extraordinarily complicated, and everything about what he does--every gesture, every little facial tick, everything he's doing with his voice--it all speaks to the heart of this character. It all speaks to this idea of a character who's devoted to a concept of pure anarchy and chaos. It's hard to get a handle on how those elements combine. The physicality reminds me of the great silent comedians. It has a bit of [Buster] Keaton and [Charlie] Chaplin about it. The voice is very difficult to imitate. On every film set, on every crew, there are dozens of talented mimics who are always taking off different performances or lines that they've heard from actors before, but no one could do the Joker. No one has been able to imitate it successfully. It's very elusive and complicated, but working with Heath you would see that he very precisely worked out every aspect of him.

Did he talk to you about that process at all, the voice and the movements?

Nolan: Yeah, to a degree. When I was working on the script and he'd gone off to think about what he was going to do with the character he would call me from time to time and talk about the things that he was working on, but the truth is that when you're outside that process before you get to set it's all a bit abstract. So he was talking to me about how he'd been studying the way that ventriloquist dummies talk and things like that, I'd be sitting on the other end of the phone going, "Well, that's a bit peculiar." But what I'm really hearing is an actor really invested in trying to come up with something very unique. Then when I saw it all come together, the conversations we'd had kind of made sense. He would talk about having [his voice] change pitch dramatically in very sudden ways and things like that. That helps the unpredictability of the character. When we were mixing the sound for the film, normally you're sort of flattening out voices to make them clearer, evening out the volume at which they speak, but with the Joker we felt that you had to let it be a little bit out of control in the way that he performed it.

There's a little Sid Vicious in there, some Clockwork Orange, but also some reptilian features as well. Did you pick that up?

Nolan: It's really a lot of different things mixed together. Certainly visually, with the makeup, I always had the idea of Francis Bacon paintings, and I showed those to Heath and showed those to John Caglioni who did the makeup. We were looking at smearing and smudging and caking the makeup on him. Doing it in ways that we could degrade the look through the film, but really I think what he's done is very unique. You can see different influences. You can see Alex in A Clockwork Orange. You can see a Francis Bacon painting or the punk sort of influence, but I think there's a very unique combination that he's made from those.

Were you disturbed at all about all the speculation that Heath went too far with the Joker character, ultimately leading to his death? It sounded a bit like nonsense, but nevertheless was out there in the media machine.

Nolan: I'll answer that simply to say that it diminishes his skill as an actor. The job of an actor is someone who takes on a character and distinguishes between real life and a character. Anyone who's spent time on a movie set knows that it's a very artificial environment and the great skill of someone like Heath Ledger or Christian Bale, is that they can be jobbing along in a workaday environment, and then when the camera rolls they can find this great character.

Oldman: People talk about the intensity of someone like Christian. And I've heard someone say ?Christian's a method actor.? Well, Christian's still alive. [pause] I mean, Heath, in between takes, would laugh and joke and sit down on the curb and have a cigarette and talk about Matilda [his daughter]. And I think it's just the sort of thing that everybody wants to go ?Oh, it's the role. It drove him?? You'd have to be neurologically fucking mental, you'd have to have a disorder to play a part and let it affect you so much that you can't sleep and that you--you know what I mean? People want a darker story than there really is. I don't know if he had substance abuse in the past, and people talk about partying and the stuff he used to do, but I was never witness to that. I worked with a sweet kid who had such a heart, who was a lovely guy. I worked with this guy who was completely committed to the role and the work, wanted more than anything to be taken seriously as an actor. He was on time, he knew the lines, and he was a nice kid.

Can you talk about your experiences with Heath the man, and Heath the actor?

Oldman: Really good actors, as Heath was, go along and they have good careers. It's like they're sort of traveling at subsonic speed, and occasionally they go through the sound barrier. You can think of people like Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon? There are certain landmark performances where you just think that they fly. And Heath has done that here. He's just tuning in to a radio station--he's got a frequency that none of us can hear. It was like he found something. And I knew it was special the first day I worked with him. I called a friend and they said ?How is it?? and I said ?It's good, it's good.? And they said, ?How's Heath as the Joker?? and I said ?He's going to be sensational. You can tell already.? How good he turned out to be is beyond my expectation, really.

Gyllenhaal: I really only have that one section with him, and I knew, I guess immediately, that he was doing something really unusual and rare and extremely special even for the most talented and experienced actors. He sort of found this stride where he was totally free. What's so incredible about that is that when that happens it bleeds over into everyone around you. Although the scene that I did with him was scary and full of tension, it actually was so fun because he'd take anything that I threw at him. He threw all sorts of interesting things at me. They shot the scene with one camera circling us. Usually if you're shooting a scene, you have to shoot it from many angles. As a film actor you have to get used to that and find a way to be free anyway. But when they're shooting in that way, with one camera circling you, you don't have to match anything, not exactly.

Eckhart: I had a great time working with Heath. Unfortunately I didn?t get to know him better. I didn?t work with him as much as I wanted to. Heath is one of those actors that other actors admire and want to be. To be so young and so good and so smart is rare. He loved this character. It was his baby. He cared about the Joker very much, making the decisions, thinking about him, creating him, creating his look. Really putting his stamp on it. It was fun, because we had our makeup done at the same time, so we got to have that time together. [I watched while] he played around with his makeup and did the funny faces and the noises?. When we were doing our scene in the hospital, he was just amazing.

What is your greatest fear?

Oldman: I?m afraid of getting a debilitating illness. I?m getting on now. The queue gets shorter. You start reading? ?John Gielgud?s died. The queue is shorter.? And you go, ?Yup.?

Are you signed for a Batman sequel?

Oldman: Um?yeah, I think? Yeah they may do a third. Did you just speak to Chris Nolan? Let me guess--did he just go, ?I?m just tired at the moment.? Yeah, he doesn?t know what he?s doing. He?s going on holiday--he?s exhausted.