THE DARK KNIGHT TRILOGY: The Complete Screenplays with Storyboards
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CN The villains in Batman have always been more important than they are with other heroes.
DSG Of all the big super heroes, Batman seems to have had the most interesting Rogues’ Gallery.
JN Oh, yeah, no question. And all of them distinct in their MO and their plan. What’s great about the Joker – when The Dark Knight was released, there was a lot of talk about the echoes and resonances with the global war on terror. He has nothing to do with that. The Joker’s an anarchist; a completely different mindset. He lacked a plan, which energized the question of, ‘Well, what’s he going to do? Why’s he going to do it? Does he have a plan? Does he not have a plan?’ That’s really the crux of the character throughout, in terms of his backstory, in terms of what he wants, right up until the moment he burns that pile of money. And even after that, you still think, ‘Is there a method or is there just madness?’ In terms of the trilogy, to the degree that there is a plan at play here – and I think there are some principles at play – the story has adapted to the circumstances of the ten years that we’ve been working on it. And I think, David, your point about other plans for super hero films – there does seem like there’s a corporate flowchart somewhere, in terms of, ‘Here’s our PowerPoint presentation for the next nine movies.’ It’s like, screw all that. Tell a story, center it on the character, and then figure out and harness how the villains resonate with that. When you guys settled on Bane as the villain for the third film, I thought there was something very powerful in that. I wasn’t totally familiar with the character of Bane at first, but when I was walked through what you and David identified as what was key about him – that there’s a lot of similarities, sort of photo-negative similarities between Bruce and Bane and their background – I thought that was powerful. And what’s hopeful for The Dark Knight Rises versus The Dark Knight is The Dark Knight had this incredible villain, a villain that truly threatens to outshine the hero. With all these other heroes, the villain’s sort of an afterthought. Magneto’s pretty cool. Lex Luthor is a great villain. But the Joker kind of outstrips –
CN The Joker’s your favorite, definitely. Right?
JN Yeah, he’s amazing. He’s iconic and, culturally, he plugs into something that’s been around for a long, long time, in terms of a sort of trickster-rabbit kind of idea.
CN I’ve come to like Bane a lot.
DSG Having seen the movie now – because of the extreme sort of perversion that Bane undergoes, in some ways he’s become my favorite villain of the trilogy. He is really terrifying.
CN I would say, for me, the Joker’s the most attractive, because he has that spark to him. But what I love about Bane is that I can believe in him more. There’s a militaristic underpinning to him that we’ve given him in the film that I think Tom [Hardy] took and ran with in his performance that I find very credible. He’s just all about power and strength.
JN Not even power, so much as revolution. Or the willing surrender of power, the fracturing of the paradigm by which power would matter and changing it to something else. My favorite aspect of the relationship between the Joker and Batman is this paradoxical relationship that we settled on: the Joker won’t kill Batman, Batman won’t kill the Joker, and they’re trapped in that paradox. That doesn’t lend itself to the arc of the films. The arc of this bigger story we’re trying to tell is that you get to this third film and Bane is a different kind of villain – what’s distinct about him from the Joker is that he has a plan. There’s no question he has a plan. We know exactly what his plan is. He states it in no uncertain terms in the trailer, which is that he’s going to destroy Gotham and then he’s going to kill Batman – or he’s going to let him die, rather. He’s going to break him, destroy his city, crush every thing, grind it into dust. Which, again, takes us back to the Homeric epic villains where the whole idea was to raze the thing to the ground, then salt the fields and just completely annihilate.
DSG Right. So that you destroy it for generations to come.
JN Yeah. There’s a historical sweep.
CN Yes. A historical sweep. When discussing the music with Hans [Zimmer], he was talking about dictators and about Hitler, the way Hitler would speak and so forth. And I think there is this historical sweep to Bane, an indomitable quality that I just find chilling. In the football stadium, there’s that close-up of Bane as he walks out and you just hate the man. You hate him in a way that you almost can’t hate the Joker because the Joker’s so much fun.
DSG The Joker’s fun, but he’s also crazy, so, to a certain extent, not completely responsible for his actions. Whereas I find Bane scarier because he’s not crazy.
JN He’s driven.
DSG He’s conscious of what he’s doing.
CN Yeah.
JN There’s a vendetta there, which is also very, very compelling. And what I found really compelling about the story from Batman Begins was this idea of what does the vigilante impulse look like carried too far? The moment when Rā’s al Ghū l says, ‘You gotta kill these people. You have to stamp them out.’ Bane is picking up some of the mantle of that. So it feels like a very fitting way to close the trilogy because you have a very linear villain – in the sense that he has this one goal and he’s thought it through and he’s already got a head start. One of the things that I loved about what you came up with in terms of story for The Dark Knight Rises was this sense of ‘It’s under your feet.’ There’s a rottenness because all this progress has been built upon all these lies that have been told. You’ve paved over the ruins of the past and they’re rising up to get back at you.
CN We were trying to get at the Fritz Lang thing. The geography of the movie somehow telling you something about the story.
JN What felt very much like a natural fit to me for this character, this story, this villain, as a way of wrapping things up, was that Batman, of all the super heroes, he’s the haunted one. He’s the one who’s pursued by the damage he’s done. There’s that overall sense that there’ll be a reckoning with him. And so this film is that reckoning.
CN And there’s his struggle to do something positive with all of that. I just find it moving. And it keeps you interested because it’s a very genuine thing to have suffered in that way and see him trying to pull himself out of that and do something for the good. That’s the thing that connects the three films. That’s what made the end of The Dark Knight work well for me. It’s the Joker’s film for so much of the movie because he’s such an electric sort of presence. And with Heath’s performance, he’s such a motor for that film. But right at the end, Batman just takes it back. Bruce takes it back to himself. And, for me, that’s what makes that film work at the end. And that’s what kept me interested in finishing that story and seeing where that guy would really go next.
JG In closing, what would you guys say you’ve learned through this experience?
CN I’ve learned to get more reaction shots. [All laugh.] I’ve learned you can never have too many reaction shots to something extraordinary. Just on a technical level. In order to portray an extraordinary figure in an ordinary world, you have to really invest in the reality of the ordinary and in the reactions of people to him. That, to me, was what was fun about taking on this character because it hadn’t been done before. He is such an extraordinary figure, but if you can believe in the world he’s in, you can really enjoy that extraordinariness and that theatricality. And it’s been interesting to watch him play so much in the shadows and the darkness of Batman Begins, then step out in the twilight in The Dark Knight. And now, in The Dark Knight Rises, he’s out in the middle of the day, running around in that suit because we felt we’d earned the right to do that because you believe in it. That’s been an interesting evolution.
DSG It’s a really essential point – you’re absolutely right – because Batman is such a bigger-than-life character. One of the only ways to properly portray him is to show people’s reactions to such a bigger-than-life character. I never thought about that. I remember thinking how bold it was that you st
aged that big action sequence in The Dark Knight Rises in the day.
JN The moral of it for me has been – I don’t quite know when we started talking about this, but it just feels like your philosophy on this and we sort of carried it throughout – is leave nothing for the ride home. Put it all into the film. Don’t trust that there’ll be another one and, if there is going to be another one, trust that you’ll figure out what that’s going to be. It’s sort of the opposite of ‘Keep your powder dry.’ It’s ‘Blow all your powder up.’ Put it all into each film because you have no idea what’s coming down the line.
CN Exactly.
JN With this kind of outsized story, and a character this outsized, with the stakes raising and raising, you will find a way to reinvent and carry on. But if you start relying on these ‘hedging-bet’ storylines that people often want you to put into these sorts of films, it’s like, forget all that. Tell a really compelling story, burn it all down, and then see what’s left for the next time.
CN I agree.
DSG And another reciprocal rule that leads to the same result is simply, Chris, your edict from the very beginning when we were talking about gadgets and what not, not to use the conventional tropes of a super hero movie; that this is real and that we would need to be able to figure out for ourselves how could he actually do this. It led to a lot of conversations about how could he build all the stuff that he needed, all the individual components – well, by parceling out things to other subsidiaries of Wayne Enterprises and things like that. I think you were very smart to do that, which is that everything has to be credible down to the smallest detail, in terms of how he could have pulled this off.
CN Well, it’s what audiences demand in other action films, and it felt like we had to be true to that. But the other thing I would say we learned in these films is that, done right, something that has a parallel universe to it and an interesting set of ideas and fears will be interpreted politically in every which way by everybody differently. I found it pretty fascinating to watch people read bizarre political interpretations into what we’ve done. And I can only imagine what they’re going to make of this last chapter.
JN But you realize you have to let that go. To me, there’s no moral there other than the individual choices that Batman makes along the way. And this is where you take it back to the Iliad. One of the things I was fascinated about with the Iliad is, when you get to the end, there’s no Trojan Horse and there’s no winning of the battle. It just ends with Achilles and Priam negotiating over Hektor’s body. That’s the end of it. And you realize it’s not about war. It’s about a man. It’s about the individual decisions made by a hero and the difficult choices he faces and the odd, sometimes tacit rule-set that he forms over the course of it, answering the question of how far is too far? There’s some thing interesting behind all that.
CN Good enough?
JG Yes. Thank you all very much.
Batman Begins
THE SCREENPLAY
Screenplay by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer
Story by David S. Goyer
Based upon characters appearing in comic books
published by DC Comics
Batman created by Bob Kane
Black. A low keening which becomes screeching that builds and builds until –
Red flickers through black as the screen bursts into life.
Clouds of reeling bats silhouetted against a blood-red sky, bolting away from camera, massing in the sky … forming a density the shape of an enormous bat-like symbol.
More bats mass, swamping the symbol, darkening the screen to –
Black. Distant children’s laughter which comes closer as –
SUNLIGHT FLICKERS THROUGH BLACK. SUNLIGHT THROUGH TREES 1
Running through a summer garden.
A boy (Bruce Wayne, aged eight) chasing a girl (Rachel Dawes, also eight).
YOUNG BRUCE
Rachel! Let me see!
They reach a Victorian greenhouse. Rachel runs inside.
EXT. GARDENS, WAYNE MANOR – DAY 2
Young Bruce peers down rows of plants on long trestle tables. Rachel grabs him, pulling him under a table.
YOUNG BRUCE
Can I see?
RACHEL
Finders keepers – I found it.
YOUNG BRUCE
In my garden.
Rachel considers this. Then opens her hand to reveal a flint arrowhead. Young Bruce stares. She smiles. Young Bruce grabs the arrowhead. Sprints for the back door, laughing.
Finders keepers!
EXT. DISUSED KITCHEN GARDEN, WAYNE MANOR – CONTINUOUS 3
Young Bruce races through the garden, Rachel behind – scrambles over a crumbled wall into the mouth of a disused well … the boards across the well give way – he plummets into …
INT. OLD WELL – CONTINUOUS 4
Young Bruce drops thirty feet – lands painfully on the rubble -strewn bottom of the shaft.
EXT. KITCHEN GARDEN, WAYNE MANOR – CONTINUOUS 5
Rachel runs to the well.
RACHEL
BRUCE?!
INT. OLD WELL – CONTINUOUS 6
Young Bruce lifts his head from damp dirt and rocks, groaning.
EXT. KITCHEN GARDEN, WAYNE MANOR – CONTINUOUS 7
Rachel sprints towards the house.
RACHEL
MOM!! MISTER ALFRED!!
INT. OLD WELL – CONTINUOUS 8
Young Bruce, in shock, groans. He hears squealing – freezes, peering into the darkness of an opening between rocks …
Bats explode from the darkness, filling the air. He screams – curls against their flapping, squawking, fluttering blackness.
A jolt: older green eyes flick open, waking … in darkness. Filthy, sweating darkness … and we are –
INT. BHUTANESE JAIL – MORNING 9
The eyes belong to a bearded, weathered, young man’s face. Bruce Wayne, aged twenty-eight. An Old Asian Man sits staring at him.
OLD MAN
A dream?
WAYNE
A nightmare.
OLD MAN
Worse than this?
Their cell is a tin box. Light seeps through gaps in the roof. Shouts echo. Wayne shrugs.
EXT. PRISON COURTYARD – LATER 10
Wayne and the Old Man line up for gruel. Prisoners are scattered in small groups. All eyes on Wayne.
OLD MAN
They are going to fight you.
WAYNE
Again?
OLD MAN
Until they kill you.
Wayne holds out his plate. Watches gruel get dribbled onto it.
WAYNE
Can’t they kill me before breakfast?
Wayne turns from the table. His path is blocked by an Enormous Man, backed by five aggressive Prisoners. The Enormous Man smashes his plate away.
ENORMOUS MAN
(broken English)
You are in hell, little man …
He punches Wayne – Wayne goes down hard.
… and I am the devil.
Wayne picks himself up. Dusts himself off.
WAYNE
You’re not the devil …
The Enormous Man swings again – Wayne catches his fist, kicks the big man’s knee out and, as he goes down, boots his face.
… you’re practice.
Six Prisoners rush Wayne all at once … Wayne fights skillfully and hard, flipping one Prisoner into another, kicking as his arms are held … Several prisoners hit the deck before – gunfire – two Guards break it up, shooting into the air … they grab Wayne.
GUARD
Solitary!
WAYNE
(indignant)
Why?
GUARD
For protection.
WAYNE
I don’t need protection.
The Guard points angrily at the unconscious Prisoners.
GUARD
Protection for them.
INT. SOLITARY, BHUTANESE JAIL – MOMENTS LATER 11
Wayne is tossed into the dank cell. The door slams.
VOICE
(o.s.)
Are you so desperate to fight criminals that you lock yourself in to take them on one at a time?
The voice is mellifluous. European. Wayne turns to the shadows. Touches his split lip. Sardonic.
WAYNE
Actually, there were seven of them.
A Man steps into the light: powerfully built, distinguished, in a well-cut suit and tie. He smiles.
DUCARD
I counted six, Mr. Wayne.
WAYNE
How do you know my name?
DUCARD
The world is too small for someone like Bruce Wayne to disappear … (Gestures around them.) No matter how deep he chooses to sink.
WAYNE
Who are you?
DUCARD
My name is merely Ducard. But I speak for Rā’s al Ghūl. A man greatly feared by the criminal underworld. A man who can offer you a path.
WAYNE
What makes you think I need a path?
Ducard looks around the cell.
DUCARD
Someone like you is only here by choice. You’ve been exploring the criminal fraternity … But whatever your original intentions … you’ve become truly lost.
Wayne stares at Ducard, struck by his words.
WAYNE
What path does Rā’s al Ghūl offer?
DUCARD
The path of one who shares his hatred of evil and wishes to serve true justice. The path of the League of Shadows.
WAYNE
(dismissive)
You’re vigilantes.
DUCARD
A vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification … He can be destroyed, or locked up …