Billion Dollar Batman

by Bruce Scivally

  The crew arrived to find Hong Kong gripped in Bat-hysteria. “When we were up by the elevated train, we were shooting in one direction and behind us must have been 15-20,000 people watching us,” said producer Chuck Roven. “They were in the windows, they were on the roofs, all looking. They treated every aspect of our being there like we were celebrities and they were hanging on everything. We finished shooting in one direction and I went up to the Chinese First A.D. and said, ‘How the hell are you going to get the people behind us to move, because we’ve got to shoot in that direction now?’ He said, ‘It won’t be a problem,’ and he turned around, walked over, said a couple of words in Chinese and they were gone! It was amazing...It’s like they didn’t want to be intrusive. They wanted to watch but they were all very polite and everything.”159 The Hong Kong shoot wrapped on November 11, and the cast and crew returned to England.

  Principal photography wound down in November, and by December Christopher Nolan was back in Los Angeles, overseeing post-production. “I loved making a film on a grand scale,” said Nolan. “It took me back to being a kid and watching movies that were so much larger than life. That’s particularly addictive. But I’ve always been driven by story, first and foremost. It has to fascinate me and make me feel something for a couple of years, because that’s how long it’s going to take to make a film.”160

  Paul Franklin and his company Double Negative Visual Effects began enhancing the footage shot live with computer generated imaging, which included augmenting shots of Gotham City, creating a digital Batman and Bat-Pod, and even creating a digital Batman for the hero’s leap from a Hong Kong tower, where a real stuntman’s jump was combined with a digitally-created Batman’s glide.161

  Richard King, the sound editor, went to work on the film’s soundtrack, including enhancing the sound of the Batmobile’s engines roaring to life by mixing recordings of big race boat engines and then adding in the roars and growls of large animals.162 “The sound design of the film was extremely complicated,” said Nolan. “There were an enormous number of elements encompassed in the sound mix and there are moments where it’s hard to detect what is sound design and what is music...There are large segments of the film where we use little or no score. It was a major challenge for our sound designer, Richard King, and his team to create a range of sounds that would provoke the kind of emotional response that you would usually rely on music for. Then the end of the film is very heavily scored with music, but it develops as the action progresses.”163

  DARK DAYS

  For the score of The Dark Knight, composers Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard reunited, having had a successful collaboration on Batman Begins. “I like the score of the film to be an evolution that runs parallel to the editing of the film, and Hans and James have been amazing in accommodating that,” said Nolan. “Usually without even seeing final footage, they give me pieces of music that my editor, Lee Smith, and I take into the edit suite. It’s a very organic process that puts a lot of unusual demands on the composers, but they did a fantastic job with it.”164

  Building on the collaborative relationship they’d developed previously, Zimmer and Howard split duties on The Dark Knight. Zimmer composed the theme for the Joker, while Howard concentrated on Harvey Dent/Two-Face.165 For Dent, whom Howard called “the emotional arc of the film,” the composer used brass to evoke an all-American feeling. “Hans called me and asked how we would show that morally he is completely corrupted,” said Howard. “The idea was to use the brass. It seemed like a good way to go, but it’s so different from the rest of the movie. We took it and twisted it as the character loses ground.”166

  In composing music for Batman, they shied away from heroic-sounding fanfares. “I don’t see Batman as a typical superhero, so I wanted to avoid anything ‘super’ in the music,” said Zimmer. “I kept thinking about the Bat Symbol. It is the iconic representation of Batman, but at the same time, it is dark and unadorned.”167 The duo went for a sound that was even more experimental than what they had used previously. In the new film, Batman wouldn’t have a theme, he would just have two notes. The Joker would only have one. “It’s odd to put avant-garde touches on a blockbuster,” said Zimmer. “It’s tremendously enjoyable in an obsessive way. Once we stepped away from supplying a hero’s theme, we spent most of our time getting rid of notes.”168

  Zimmer and Howard approached the scoring of the film in an innovative way. Usually, a film score is composed after the final edit is locked. For The Dark Knight, Zimmer and Howard composed ten hours of music based on the film’s script. They presented it to Christopher Nolan on an iPod, which the director listened to on flights to and from Hong Kong.169

  After recording the score at George Martin’s Air Studios in London, Howard and Zimmer worked with the sound designers in the final mix. “We created a world from the left corner of the screen to the right rear of the theater. Every movie you score you hope is unlike anything you have done before. You are always trying to not sound like yourself. The vocabulary for this score, we really sweated over. It sounds simple but there were hundreds of choices.”170

  Warner Bros. began their advertising campaign with a teaser trailer released in December 2007, attached to the beginning of the Will Smith movie I Am Legend. Within hours of its release, copies of the trailer filmed from shaky camera phones were uploaded to the internet. The studio had already released a teaser poster showing Heath Ledger’s Joker, and to quell fears that the new film, like Tim Burton’s original Batman, would turn into a movie about the Joker with Batman as a guest star, another poster was released showing Batman looking out over the Gotham skyline.171

  Besides being tied to the trailer for the new Batman film, I Am Legend contained a Batman in-joke. In one scene in the film, which was set in 2012, a billboard in the background had a giant movie poster with a composite Batman/Superman symbol and the release date “May 15, 2010.” Though some comic book fans thought this was a marketing stunt hinting at a film to come, it was in fact just a sight gag to amuse I Am Legend’sproducer Akiva Goldsman, who at one time had been involved with the Batman vs. Superman film that had become mired in development hell.172

  In December, Nolan screened a six-minute sequence from The Dark Knight to an audience of industry executives and journalists in Los Angeles. It didn’t show a single frame of Christian Bale’s Batman; it was all about Heath Ledger’s Joker. “The bold decisions that Heath has made with this performance are fascinating to watch,” said Nolan. “I think he’s done something quite exceptional.”173

  But just as the film was taking shape, tragedy struck the production again. On January 22, 2008, seven weeks to the day after Nolan screened footage for industry executives and journalists, Heath Ledger was found dead in his New York apartment.174 Ledger had only been in the city for a week, having just returned from London, where he was filming Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. A masseuse who had a 3 PM appointment with the 28-year-old actor arrived at his Broome Street apartment in the Soho district and, when Ledger didn’t answer the door, went to the housekeeper.175 The two discovered Ledger’s nude body face down on the bedroom floor at 3:26 PM.176 The masseuse tried to wake him. When she realized he was dead, she first placed three calls to actress Mary-Kate Olsen, who she knew to be a friend of Ledger’s, before dialing 911. Olsen sent over private security agents, who arrived at about the same time as the emergency medical personnel.177 The medical personnel immediately pronounced the actor dead.178 Police said a bottle of prescription sleeping pills was found in the room.179 There were other pills in containers in the bathroom.180

  Just minutes after the news broke, fans began gathering by the hundreds outside Ledger’s apartment building, where he had been living for about five months, since his split with actress Michelle Williams. An ambulance pulled up to the building entrance around 6 PM, and police cleared the crowd away so they could bring out Ledger’s body. Fans on scaffolding and ledges across the way captured the event with their cell
phone cameras.181

  Professional accolades began pouring in. In a statement, Warner Bros. president and chief operating officer Alan Horn and president of Warner Bros. Pictures Group Jeff Robinov said in a statement, “The studio is stunned and devastated by this tragic news. The entertainment community has lost an enormous talent. Heath was a brilliant actor and an exceptional person. Our hearts go out to his family and friends.”182 Mel Gibson, who worked with Ledger in The Patriot, in which Ledger played his son, said, “I had such great hope for him. He was just taking off, and to lose his life at such a young age is a tragic loss.” Lasse Hallstrom, who directed Ledger as Casanova (2005) said, “I am just shocked. He was a wonderful talent and smart. He was an old soul.”183

  Writing in Newsweek, Christopher Nolan said that he had Ledger very much on his mind as he was supervising the editing of The Dark Knight: “I would visualize the screening where we’d have to show him the finished film—sitting three or four rows behind him, watching the movements of his head for clues to what he was thinking about what we’d done with all that he’d given us. Now that screening will never be real. I see him every day in my edit suite. I study his face, his voice. And I miss him terribly.”184

  The day that Ledger was found dead was the same day that Academy Awards nominations were announced.185 In early February, Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the New York City medical examiner, said that Ledger’s death was accidental. The actor overdosed on six kinds of painkillers, sleeping pills and anti-anxiety drugs; the medical examiner attributed his death to “acute intoxication.”186 “It’s the combination of the drugs that caused the problem, not necessarily too much of any particular drug,” Borakove told The New York Times. “All these drugs have a cumulative effect on the body.”187 Ledger’s father, Kim, released a statement saying, “We learned today the combination of doctor-prescribed drugs proved lethal for our boy. Heath’s accidental death serves as a caution to the hidden dangers of combining prescription medication, even at low dosage.”188

  For days after Ledger’s death, the internet was ablaze with speculation that in playing the Joker the actor had plumbed so deeply into the dark depths of his soul that he was unable to find a way back, and committed suicide. It was all nonsense but it made for good tabloid fodder. In fact, when Ledger completed work on the film, he told an interviewer that playing the Joker was “the most fun I’ve ever had, or probably ever will have, playing a character.”189

  Christopher Nolan paid tribute to Ledger, and to the special effects man who had been tragically killed, with a title card in the closing credits of The Dark Knight, reading “In memory of our friends Heath Ledger & Conway Wickliffe.”190

  Ledger’s death caused great concern at Warner Bros., where the marketing campaign of The Dark Knight was built partially around the grotesque images of Ledger as the Joker.191 One poster showed the Joker writing “Why So Serious?” and drawing a clown’s smile on a mirror with red lipstick.192 The last thing the studio wanted was for the “Why So Serious?” tag line to be seen as a bad-taste comment on coverage of the actor’s passing. Consequently, after Heath Ledger’s death, Warner Bros. began focusing its marketing campaign more on Batman and less on the Joker. But just weeks before the film was due to open, they unleashed a new round of billboards, bus-stop ads and TV spots centering on the Joker’s creepy countenance.193 They even unveiled an online viral campaign in which the character took over websites with his maniacal laugh and revealed clues about the film to fans.194The Times of London called The Dark Knight “perhaps the most successful example of viral marketing ever.” Besides a deal with Dominos Pizza that would allow pizza consumers to see an online trailer, the studio put up the entire $36,000 production budget for the first five episodes of a small Web series called Kyle Piccolo: Comic Shop Therapist, set in Manhattan’s Midtown Comics.195

  It was important to Nolan that no one connected with the film make a crass or maudlin misstep in promoting it. The director set the tone by writing an appreciation of Ledger for Newsweek in which he praised the actor’s talents without ever mentioning The Dark Knight’s release date. Aaron Eckhart said, “To have this film be successful and to have people see Heath’s great work in it—to appropriately honor that performance by bringing the film to the audience—that became the goal for Chris and everyone involved. Chris gave us a set where the actors felt very secure, they felt they could take risks. And Chris has continued to protect Heath and his performance.”196 In an interview with Geoff Boucher of The Los Angeles Times, Nolan said, “I think we’ve said as much as we can about Heath. We want to do right by him. I’m proud of his work in this film, and I’m excited to have it seen, but I think in respect to him and his family, perhaps it’s best to just let the film have the final word.”197

  Nolan was still hard at work at Warner Bros. Burbank studios in mid-May 2008, supervising the sound mix and overseeing the last stages of post-production.198 Even then, before the film’s release, buzz was building in Hollywood that Ledger’s performance might win him a posthumous Oscar.199

  With anticipation building for The Dark Knight, on July 8, 2008, Warner Bros. released Gotham Knight, a DVD with six animated Batman stories meant to fill in the timeframe between Batman Begins and the upcoming film. The brief stories, written by David S. Goyer, Greg Rucka, Jordan Goldberg, Alan Burnett, Brian Azzarello, and Josh Olson, were directed by seven top Japanese anime directors: Yahuhiro Aoki, Yuichiro Hayashi, Futoshi Higashide, Toshiyuki Kubooka, Hiroshi Morioka, Jong- Sik Nam, and Shoujirou Nishimi. Each of the six segments had a unique look unlike that of the animated Batman TV series.200

  In May of 2008, well before the release of The Dark Knight, Los Angeles Times columnist Geoff Boucher was already speculating about who would be the villain in the eventual third film in Christopher Nolan’s Batman series. “In public comments, Nolan has said he isn’t a fan of the Penguin character,” wrote Boucher, “and Catwoman was declawed not too long ago in the Halle Berry film fiasco. Maybe that means Gotham’s protector will be solving dangerous riddles a few summers from now.”201

  THE DARK KNIGHT OPENS

  Having made a cameo in the film, Sen. Patrick Leahy arranged for The Dark Knight to have a premiere screening at the Kellogg-Hubbard Library in Montpelier, Vermont on July 12, 2008, with the proceeds from the 350 screening tickets sold at $50 each and a reception going to the institution.202

  On July 14, Christian Bale flew from the Albuquerque, New Mexico set of Terminator Salvation, on which he had begun work almost immediately after The Dark Knight, to go to New York for the Batman film’s premiere. Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhart and Maggie Gyllenhaal also appeared, along with director Christopher Nolan, composers Hans Zimmer and James Howard Newton, Warner Bros. executives Alan Horn and Jeff Robinov, Legendary Pictures’ Thomas Tull, and actors Emile Hirsch and Josh Hartnett. The premiere was held at the Imax theater at Broadway and 68th, with an after-party at the Mandarin Oriental, where a spacious lounge appeared to have been spray-painted by the Joker.203

  For executive producer Michael Uslan, the highlight of the New York premiere was meeting two guests invited to the premiere by DC president Paul Levitz—Jerry Robinson, co-creator of the Joker, Alfred, Two-Face and other classic Batman characters, and Athena Finger, whose grandfather co-created the Dark Knight himself. As he began to go down the red carpet, Uslan yelled to the assembled press and fans, “Ladies and gentlemen! This is Jerry Robinson, co-creator of the Joker.” With that, the newspapermen and photographers descended on Robinson, allowing him to finally gain recognition for characters he’d help to create nearly 70 years earlier. At the after-party, Uslan introduced Robinson to Michael Caine, and introduced Athena Finger to Christian Bale. In his autobiography, The Boy Who Loved Batman, Uslan described the night of The Dark Knight’s premiere as “beyond special.”204

  After the New York premiere, Bale flew on to London to begin an around-the-world promotional tour.205 But on July 22, he was arrested for allegedly assaulting
his mother, Jenny James, and sister, Sharon, the previous night, before the London premiere of The Dark Knight. He was questioned at a police station in central London about the incident, which allegedly took place at the Dorchester Hotel.206 It was reported that the cause of the altercation was money; after Bale snubbed his sister’s request for a £100,000 loan to help bring up her three children, and Bale’s wife was insulted, Bale “pushed and shoved” his sister and mother.207

  The two women, who both lived in Dorset, filed formal charges against Bale at a Hampshire police station. The complaint was then passed on to the Metropolitan Police for more investigation. Despite the proceedings, police allowed Bale to attend the European premiere of The Dark Knight at the Odeon Leicester Square.208 A source told The Times of London, “It would have been wrong to wreck the premiere over a complaint which we do not yet know is founded in truth.”209

  Bale, like all the other cast members who attended the London premiere, wore black in homage to Heath Ledger. Despite the domestic drama he had endured earlier in the evening, Bale posed for photos with his wife, Sibi. Attendees at the premiere were unaware of Bale’s predicament, which wasn’t revealed in the press until the following day. Some of the fans in the crowd were dressed as Batman and some as the Joker.210 After walking the red carpet with Sir Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aaron Eckhart on Sunday night, Bale voluntarily went to Belgravia police station on Monday, where he was arrested and questioned for four hours before being released on bail.211 He denied his sister’s and mother’s allegations.212