THE OPUS SCREENPLAY SERIES
THE DARK KNIGHT
TRILOGY
BATMAN BEGINS
Screenplay by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer
Story by David S. Goyer
THE DARK KNIGHT
Screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
Story by Christopher Nolan & David S. Goyer
THE DARK KNIGHT RISES
Screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
Story by Christopher Nolan & David S. Goyer
Based upon characters appearing in comic books
published by DC Comics
Batman created by Bob Kane
Storyboards drawn by
Martin Asbury, James Cornish, Gabriel Hardman
Contents
Title Page
Introduction: A Sense of Ending
BATMAN BEGINS
Storyboards
THE DARK KNIGHT
Storyboards
THE DARK KNIGHT RISES
Storyboards
Copyright
A Sense of Ending
A conversation between Christopher Nolan, Jonathan (Jonah) Nolan and David S. Goyer, chaired by co-producer Jordan Goldberg
JORDAN GOLDBERG The editor of the book, Walter Donohue, has likened the work the three of you have done on the trilogy to scaling Mount Everest. And now that you’ve come down from the mountain, what do you think of your accomplishment?
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN When you look back at the three films together, I can’t imagine having done them as one project, the way Peter Jackson did with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. That to me would be inconceivable. The only way I am able to do films is to put into each film as much as I can, trying to make it as big as possible. So at the end of this trilogy, I look back and see a lot of scale, a lot of different things we did and a lot of places we went to.
DAVID S. GOYER What amazes me is that going back nine years ago to when we first started talking – you were clear even when we were working out Batman Begins that you wanted to take each film one step at a time and not do sequel bait. And I remember when we started talking about The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, how it was a very organic conversation – we would just sort of cast about whether or not there was a story worth telling. What’s remark able to me is that it wasn’t planned as a trilogy, and yet you look at the final film – and it feels like a perfect fusion of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight – it’s just remarkable how unified the whole thing feels, but yet it was done in this piecemeal fashion.
CN I wouldn’t say ‘piecemeal’ so much as an ‘evolving’ fashion, wanting to live through the process as we were creating it. We certainly had conversations very early on about where would this story go if you were to do sequels, but we quite consciously pushed those questions to the back-burner and said we don’t want to save anything or hold back anything. We want to put everything into every story we’re telling – and then see where it goes. We had the pleasure of living through the story and evolving the story over time. To go back to the Lord of the Rings analogy, those books were written over time. So, Peter Jackson had the advantage in that that time had already been put in; he was able to take that and see it as a whole from the outside. For Batman Begins, I felt we needed to live within it and take our time with it and try to make one great film. And then, if we were interested in doing another, try and make another great film. I never really thought we’d get to three films, but I’m very glad we did. And I think they do hold together as one cohesive story.
DSG I certainly never thought we’d get to three films. I was kind of amazed when we got to The Dark Knight and thought, [laughing] ‘There’s no way we’re going to do another one!’
JG After reading all the scripts, again, it occurred to me that what you guys have done collectively is turn a piece of pop-culture iconography into a modern-day hero’s story that will stand the test of time because it comes across as a contemporary myth. Was that the intent? Was that part of the design? The scripts speak to what it means to be a hero, and in doing so, define the nature of the modern hero.
JONATHAN NOLAN I don’t know how conscious that was – or whether that was a consideration for Chris and David in terms of talking story about these films. When I was in high school, I had a Latin class where we had to read the Greek epics: the Iliad and the Odyssey. What struck me about the Iliad was the reason for its enduring appeal is it’s an examination of what it means to be a man: how to make decisions, how to reconcile irreconcilable things, what to do with feelings of anger and revenge. And I think, to a degree, maybe some of that filtered into the writing of the trilogy. What’s interesting to me about the Bruce Wayne character is that he wrestles with these things; that there is a code at play, one that’s very difficult. One of the key differences between our films and the previous films was revisiting the canon in terms of the idea that Batman doesn’t kill people. He’s this incredibly dark, vengeful, wrathful character, but he has a moral code. Underneath all that darkness, you’ve got a good guy that looks like a bad guy. He has this one rule, as the Joker says in The Dark Knight. But he does wind up breaking it. Does he break it in the third film?
CN He breaks it in …
JN … the first two.
DSG Well, in the first, it’s a kind of yes and no. I think you’re referring to Rā’s al Ghūl, when Batman says, ‘I won’t kill you, but I won’t save you.’
CN Yeah, he gets by on a technicality with that one.
JN He does, but I remember calling you up at one point – I think you’d already shot the scene – and I said, ‘You know what, I’m not sure … I’m not so sure about that one.’ What I loved about that, in the fullness of three films, is that it looks like there’s an evolution, as you were saying.
CN Yeah, but I didn’t know Batman didn’t kill people when I signed on for the project. It was David who broke that news. And I was like, ‘How do you make that work?’ I said to the MPAA on the The Dark Knight: ‘Do you have any idea how hard it is to make a contemporary action film where the protagonist doesn’t carry a gun? Doesn’t kill people?’ But I think that’s an important part of why he’s a mythic figure, rather than just a conventional action protagonist. It’s actually a very important reason why I’ve stayed interested for so long in his story, because you’re having to deal with somebody wrestling with issues that it seems important to wrestle with. So there is great stock placed in life in the way there is in real life. I think too many of these protagonists in action movies are fully formed as characters. Their struggles tend to be insincere somehow, put in there simply for dramatic purpose. Whereas with Bruce Wayne, the struggle to make something good of what’s happened to him in a negative sense seems very much a defining characteristic of who the guy is. That has kept me interested in him.
DSG Over the past nine years it seems like there have been lots of movies that have taken the Batman Begins approach, but I think what was novel at the time and what felt prescient is the fact that in the other iterations of the Batman films and many other super hero films, the characters are fully formed or fully emerged. The whole premise of Batman Begins was not just watching how he built the utility belt or what not but how, step-by-step, he went from an orphaned child to a man who had a hole in his heart, to eventually become this mythic figure. In retrospect, it seems obvious, but, at the time, I think it was very novel. And it was your guidance that we approach it as if it were a real story, and that we really do the diligence of showing how a person could g
o from A to B in that way. And what was exciting to me was that the previous Batman films had never really done that. They had just jumped from a little flash of Bruce as a boy seeing his parents killed to suddenly he’s Batman. Even in Miller’s Batman: Year One they pick him up when he’s returning to Gotham and seven years have elapsed.
CN There’s another aspect to that – relating back to what we were talking about in terms of how we made the films over time, from the inside – which is: when you look at the three films now, the characters have aged. When you look at Christian in Batman Begins, when he’s playing the young Bruce Wayne, in the flashbacks he just looks like a kid. And you look at him in The Dark Knight Rises – and it’s with very little make-up. But if we had made the three films in one go, if we had conceived the story in one go, I don’t think we would have achieved that reality of the passage of time, that reality of the aging of the characters – the way Gary Oldman is older and Sir Michael Caine is older. There’s a reality to the shifts that I think is really amazing. It gives the three films scale, because the stories are written to accommodate those shifts. It gives a timeline, a real timeline to the films. We’ve exaggerated it slightly going into The Dark Knight Rises, but you feel a sense of history behind it.
DSG The other thing that struck me in watching The Dark Knight Rises – I don’t even remember how much of this was conscious or not at the time – I know with Batman Begins, we talked about how Gotham was a sort of proxy for his father’s legacy – not just Wayne Manor but Gotham itself. That’s why when Rā’s al Ghūl goes after it, it’s such a stake through the heart. It’s interesting to watch how much Gotham plays as a character in the three films, how the stakes to Gotham escalate from movie to movie into the incredibly horrific stakes that you guys did so beautifully in the realization of The Dark Knight Rises. It’s interesting to me how much Gotham is a part of Bruce and vice versa.
CN For me, one of the most important bits in The Dark Knight Rises is when Alfred says, ‘I never wanted you to come back to Gotham.’ Talking about when he left. It’s surprising and it’s shocking, but there’s a real logic to it. And I think it ties in with what you’re saying: Gotham is his parents. Gotham is his tragedy. He cares very deeply about it and he doesn’t want to leave it behind but, at the same time, it’s a prison. It’s the prison of his past, and Alfred starts to realize that. But I think Gotham’s a fantastic hyper-real arena in which to discuss contemporary ideas without being pretentious about it, without being overly political or anything. I enjoy having that parallel universe.
JN Yeah, it’s kind of the money-laundering of those contemporary issues. But it’s true! I remember having conversations with you about Batman Begins, where we’d sit around saying, ‘Are we too close to some sort of contemporary issue? Are we too close to it?’ But you were thinking, no, it’s different. It’s through the lens of this different universe that allows you to consider it for what it is.
CN And that’s why Gotham has always been multiple cities to us in the way that we shot it. You don’t want it to be Chicago or New York. You want it to be its own place. The look of it has evolved in the three films; it’s changed, depending on what we wanted to emphasize. But we’ve always tried to make it eclectic, so whenever there’s a shot that’s too recognizable of a particular city, we tended to change it slightly – at least flop it, or something like that. I think it’s a powerful way of exploring the dynamics of a contemporary American city, particularly in The Dark Knight. I think that was a huge part of the crime epic – the idea that the great playground for these characters was this city. I think it’s used for different effect in The Dark Knight Rises. It’s more about isolation – the isolation of a community in jeopardy.
DSG There’s a remarkable shot in the latest trailer of the bridges blowing up outside Gotham. The siege of Gotham in the new film I found very arresting in a way which will shock and surprise the audience. And I mean that in a good way. I was very impressed by what you did there. And after seeing The Dark Knight Rises as an audience member, I’m just not used to being so moved by a super hero film.
CN We’ve always tried to view it not as a super hero movie, not as a comic-book movie. Jonah’s point, coming into the process on The Dark Knight Rises, was that we have to really go there. You have to take it to the place you’ve threatened to take it for the past two films if you’re going to raise the stakes. And I think we managed to do that and hopefully still be entertaining and emotional. When I took over your [Jonathan’s] draft, my challenge was – I think you’d taken the audience to a very, very extreme place, which works if we can justify the heroic figure against it, so I needed to pull it back. All my work at that point was just to try and make that climb back up the hill. I think it does. It takes you to as scary a place as we knew how to make it. But those are the stakes. You try to do something very, very extreme for the story and for the audience because that’s what Bruce Wayne’s story demands if it’s going to have any kind of profound resolution. Other wise it would just be more of the same. I never wanted it to feel like another episode of Batman or Bruce Wayne’s story. This had to feel like the culmination of all of the things that he’s been dealing with in the first two films.
JN You make it the climactic balance. It’s sort of like the line you put into the second film when Dent says, ‘The night’s always darkest before the dawn.’ It feels like the third film has to ratchet up the tension and the stakes. But there were templates for it in the comic books. Through the years, as the writers of the comic books had gotten kind of bored with the stakes, they pulled off storylines like this, to varying degrees of success. If Gotham is that arena – that sort of battleground – then you turn it literally into a battleground, which makes it feel like the climax of it all.
CN Yeah.
DSG I have a question. Chris, I was always curious, given your initial reticence about doing a third film, what was the point in the story or the evolution of the script where you decided, ‘I get this. I can do it.’ What was the turning point for you, where you decided this was a story worth telling?
CN Well, for me it was about the ending, about figuring out the ending. I’d been very curious about where Bruce’s story was going. I actually had a dream about what I thought the ending for the film would be. There’s an important component of that dream that is in the ending of the existing film. And for me, that turned it around. I remember talking to you about that fairly early on. I mean, probably four years ago at this point.
DSG We talked about it within about twenty minutes into our first con versation! We talked about what that ending might be, which is just unusual.
CN For me, endings are everything. I did have the same thing on The Dark Knight. Once I figured out the feeling I wanted to get to at the end of that film, then I knew I had a project that I wanted to get into. For me, that’s everything in this kind of story, to know where you want it to go. And then it took years and years for all of us to figure out how to get there.
JG How do you think the trilogy has changed things, in terms of film-making and storytelling? Have the films changed the genre?
CN Well, there’s a lot more super hero movies, and they’re much better cast than they used to be. [Laughs.]
DSG Yeah! [Laughs.]
CN I think we definitely changed the casting of this genre of movies because we put together a phenomenal cast for Batman Begins. I talked to the studio about basing the casting on the Richard Donner model from Superman (1978), where he had all these great actors, like Marlon Brando, Ned Beatty and so forth. So we set out to put that kind of cast together and we did. And I think they left the film with a lot of integrity and dignity. And that started to open the field for these movies, in a way that hadn’t been there. And God knows a lot of films use our music as well! [Laughs.] Other than that, I don’t know. I mean, we never viewed it as a genre film.
DSG People in other interviews have asked me about the differences between the Nolan films versus some of the other super
hero stuff. And, having been involved in some of the other super hero stuff, I think what a lot of the other comic-book franchises tend to do when they get to the sequels – well, I know this is what they do because I’ve been approached to do a couple with just this scenario – is, they say, ‘Okay, we’re doing Blank-man #2, and this is the villain we want to use. Can you tell a story with that?’ And your approach has always been, even from Batman Begins, to figure out what’s the best story that we want to tell about Bruce, or about Harvey Dent, and then determine which villains in the Batman canon fit with that story. It’s a much more holistic approach and completely flies in the face of the way that a lot of the other super hero films are developed. Consequently, it leads to a better, more organic way of telling a story, at least from my point of view.
CN Well, on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, when we started plotting out story movements, I literally had timings of action scenes – when they should happen and so forth. The action set pieces were pinned down, in terms of where they needed to be and what type of thing they needed to be, before we even really wove the story too firmly around them. But with The Dark Knight Rises, I said, ‘We’re going to abandon that approach completely and just try and figure out the story, where that story goes, and trust that the action will enter into it.’ And so we’ve definitely taken what you refer to as ‘a holistic approach’. We’ve definitely taken it as far as possible on this one. And I’m very happy with the results. There’s plenty of action in the film. As Jonah worked on the script and as we talked about it more and more, it has come to where it needs to be. But I do feel that this film – maybe more than the other two – definitely puts characters and story first.
JG In other super hero films the villains seem to have little complexity to them. The villains that feature in The Dark Knight trilogy, though, operate in a more realistic manner, albeit in an extreme one. This makes them scary because they feel true.
THE DARK KNIGHT TRILOGY: The Complete Screenplays with Storyboards Page 1