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The Second Part of the Gothic Trilogy Directed by
Christopher Nolan
was ten years old, an ideal excuse to revisit curiosities and clues that made this film one of the great adaptations to cinema based on a cartoon character.
The birth of a legend
In 2005 Warner tried to revive the Batman franchise in the cinema.
After the box office failure of Batman and Robin in 1997, the producer had put the bat to rest until the public had a bad taste. And eight years later, once again, the character returns to the cinema but with a decidedly darker tone and forgets any disc of camp that could have remained from the Schumacher era.
That way, he came to Batman theaters starting
with the protagonist of
Christian Bale
and under the direction of Christopher Nolan, filmmaker who, without having too many films to his credit,
I had shown with Memento
Subscriptions and
White Nights a remarkable police domain. The film was unexpectedly successful and quickly, Warner gave the green light to a sequel with the intention of having Nolan again in the role of director, but he was not so convinced: "L & rsquo; The idea of taking a suite is not very encouraging. to see it as an interesting challenge, but at first I was a little reluctant to restart the same machine.
Batman Initiates had been well received, it did not make much sense to make a sequel unless trying to do something different with the belief that the audience was interested. "
Unlike Nolan, David Goyer's S & # 39; he had a plan that went beyond the first film, Goyer had thought of a second part devoted to the Joker, leaving the arrival of Dos Caras for the third part, another change that appeared in the early versions of the script, but that remained in the way, was to introduce the Grayson family, who were going to be friends with Rachel Dawes (
Maggie Gyllenhaal
). As we know, Dick Grayson is the name of the first Robin, a concept that seems very vaguely about the end of
The knight of the night rises
Finally, Nolan agreed to play the sequel when he saw the opportunity to direct Batman to a new place, one more related to hate than to fear (a feeling that was the guiding concept in
Batman begins ). This decision allowed him to rethink the hero of Gotham in a totally renewed perspective. In an interview before the release of the film, Nolan said, "As we read more and more of his comics, a fascinating insight emerged about how Batman's presence attracted criminals to Gotham, as well as his own." it was a magnet for madmen, and when you handle such dubious concepts as a man who takes justice in your hands, you really have to ask how that can end, and that's what makes the character so dark, because he expresses the desire for revenge. "
In the sequel, another benefit that interested the director was to show Gotham as one more character. With its factories, its industries and a decidedly gray and deaf stamp, this city becomes a nest of mafias and corruption. For the director, it was important to "tell the story of a city" and, on this idea, he explained: "If you want to deal with Gotham, you have to give this place weight, breadth and depth, and that's how you end up politics and their celebrities, these elements are the fabric that shows how this city is united. "On more than one occasion, the director talked about
Fire on Fire as a vital influence at the time not only to represent the battle between two opposing (but similar) figures, but also in the way of describing a city as the context that gives birth to the characters they live there. Interestingly, this film by Michael Mann was also a decisive influence for the Russo brothers in
Captain America and the Winter Soldier surely one of the strongest feature films in the Marvel Universe.
Forced changes, and a new challenge for Basel
With the continuation in progress, the first step was to reconvene the casting of the first film. All of them quickly made themselves available to Nolan to resume their work, but the problem came with
Katie Holmes
. The actress who in
Batman begins and plays Rachel Dawes, she was not interested in repeating her role. In return, he signs a contract for a comedy entitled
Mad Money which hardly anyone remembers because it was a failure. With the vacancy, the aspiring Rachel Parade began, which included actresses like Rachel McAdams, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Emily Blunt. Finally, the character was in the hands of Maggie Gyllenhaal, an actress who enriched Rachel's emotional world, bringing her to a much darker place that culminated in a totally unexpected ending.
For his part, Bale took up the challenge of not repeating himself, and giving a new dimension to Batman. In an article, Bale explained that in other adaptations that he had seen from Batman, the hero was far less interesting than his rivals, but that changed thanks to Nolan's point of view: "After read
Frank Miller's Year One (a cartoon that tells the origin of the vigilante in a much more urban register) and others of his comics, I asked myself:
How was it always a boring character? I have never found it interesting at all. But all these comics describe them in a much more fascinating way. And I think we won with
Batman begins we made him a character with substance. "
The most absolute evil
Nolan once said, "We thought: What is the most terrifying thing in the world today? And for me, it's anarchy and chaos, things that the Joker symbolizes. " Continuing history and heading towards now that Batman is already established, there is an inevitable darkness on the horizon, "and this darkness can only be represented by the figure of the Joker, the character who, for Christopher Nolan, allowed him to show the other side of Batman There is a phrase that sums up perfectly the logic of the villain, and that is the one in which Alfred (
Michael Caine
) tells Bruce that there are people who only seek to "see the world burn". And that's the most basic concept of the Joker from Nolan's point of view: "Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, these are the punk influences he's talked about (with
Heath Ledger
). We also talked about Alex's
The mechanical orange . He is very anarchic but nevertheless has a great charisma, both in the book and in the film. We talked a lot about different influences and then referred to an extraordinarily diverse set of influences like ventriloquism. The way he could talk or move, it was odd ideas that I really did not understand before seeing him play, and there he began to show how the character moved and gesticulated. And also how he spoke, with this incredibly unpredictable voice. "
That Ledger realized with his version of the Joker a masterpiece, something that was repeated relentlessly The actor did an exhaustive job in which he decided to spend six weeks alone in a hotel building his version of the Joker, which according to his point of view should be located poles apart from what Jack Nicholson had done in the
Batman 1989. And Heath managed to become the definitive version of Batman's famous Nemesis. In an interview, Christian Bale spoke at length about what this character represented: "I think that there is a mutual fascination between Batman and the Joker, as the villain says, they complement each other, I think Batman is an exceptional challenge for the Joker because everybody else was too easy, they left very quickly, and they gave up their beliefs and ethics very soon, but the Joker sees that Batman does not surrender, and he does same, so that both become big questions that for the other, but the Joker constantly tries Batman to break the most important of his principles: do not kill. "
For Nolan, the essence Joker was simply the one of evil in its purest form, and he went so far as to express he was "the absolute villain, because in him there is no gray d & # 39; No matter, it is incredibly dark. "
The importance of the white knight
One of the most interesting aspects of
Batman: The Gentleman of the Night is this almost coral structure in which a large handful of characters come in and out of the scene, spinning the protagonism and gaining space on the screen . All have a very clear motivation and purpose (with the exception of the Joker, obviously, which is managed according to its most primitive impulses). But the great merit of Nolan was to understand, ironically, that Batman was not the heart of the film. In fact, the real core of the story is Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), and how the Gotham White Knight, prisoner of the Joker manipulations, has no choice but to go to court. kiss his dark side and let himself be corrupted. In an interview, Bale talked about Dent's relevance in the plot: "Batman does not want to continue being Batman, he's looking for someone who, as he says,
a hero with a face because his goal is precisely that a concept like that of Batman becomes obsolete. He does not want Gotham in which someone like Batman is needed. And Harvey Dent has the potential to be that heir, a man of integrity to clean up corruption and crime. "
The success of the creative team was to combine in one film a plot that was to be distributed in two films, because as already mentioned, the original plan was to show Harvey's transformation in Two Faces Just in the third part of the saga.
Batman: The Knight of the Night Tooth is a kind of trophy between Batman and the Joker, a prize whose tilt in the moral balance will eventually mark the victory of the lord. one or the other. And in this sense, in the story, it is essential to show that Batman is the loser in this bet because he can not stop Dent from becoming two faces and join the list of villains who populate Gotham's corrupt streets. . And for Nolan, Joke's reason for being was simply to manipulate the people around him: "What the Joker provides in the second part, is to show that his motives are related to pushing people to the limit until they come back against themselves. "And the Joker's triumph was to study Harvey's limitations, until finally destroying him and through that action, defeat the morality of Bruce Wayne.
Christopher Nolan's favorite scene
Several years after the first of
Batman: The Knight of the Night Nolan admits that the interrogation of Batman at the Joker is the favorite segment of his film. This first moment where the two dialogues face each other, is the scene in which the director marks the dynamic between the characters, and in which Nolan and Goyer establish this idea which obsessed them both, and had to say that there has a Joker, because there is also a Batman. Nolan referred to this moment: "The whole scene is focused on showing something real and brutal, bringing everything to a point of real hardness." For the director, this interrogation also represented this possibility of seeing how Batman was tempted to be carried away by his most brutal side: "There is a point where everything becomes uncontrollable and Batman drags the Joker over the table (. ), and I've never seen anyone sell a hit like Heath did with Christian, I had the violence I was looking for, and what we showed was Batman specifically torturing someone 39, one in exchange for information, because the situation he had already become personal. "
Despite pretending to be an island, Batman has preserved his mental health through a concrete emotional world Rachel, Alfred, Lucius and even Commissioner Gordon were people Wayne cared about, but the Joker feared nothing, just because he could not take anything away from him.For Bale, the delivery of the actor Australian was absolute, and his work to blend in with the dangerous villain reached unimaginable heights: "The more I shook him, it was as if Heath had encouraged me to continue, but he ended up getting hit C & # 39; It was the same thing, and on this scene there were walls with tiles that looked bumpy, their commitment was undisputed. "
The Citizen Kane of Superhero Cinema
Batman: The Knight of the Night was an immediate success. In his first weekend he raised $ 158 million, compared to the 27 he had achieved during the same period
Mamma Mia! the other first strong these days.
Batman stayed for four weeks in first place in the United States, and two months after its release, it was no longer one of the ten most-watched movies in this country. Today, with more than one billion dollars raised in the world, it is the most profitable movie of any character based on
DC Comics . Regarding the prices received, the list is extended.
Batman: The Knight of the Night is the cartoon-based movie that has received more Academy Award nominations. There were eight in total,
of which one has won Heath Ledger as the best supporting actor, and another Richard King for sound editing. The Bafta, the Golden Globe and dozens of other awards have also highlighted the work of everyone involved in the feature film, and this way
Batman: The Knight of the Night became a
rara notice in a movie of superheroes who had made friends with the most demanding with mbad audience, a marriage that, to this day, is very rarely repeated in works belonging to this sub-genre. Nolan left an indelible mark on the character, and to reach it he used a debtor style of black police, broken antiheroes,
femme fatale and the agents of the law who fight not to exceed the limits. From the director's point of view, Batman could be a distant cousin of Philip Marlowe and the world without codes in which this detective moved. And this formula, so effective for Nolan, was wrongly the mark that Warner tried, unsuccessfully, to impregnate the later adaptations of DC, even calling it to produce
Superman: The Steel Man a film that shows that the director's signature is not easy to imitate. On the opposite path, Marvel has published
Iron Man that same year, beginning to bet on a much more relaxed tone that did not prevent him from making high quality films, and that over time became an oiled way of doing things. approach the myth of the superhero. 19659017] But as
Batman: The Knight of the Night There were no other similar and worthy successors (surely the one who came closest was
Logan ), and without a doubt this piece of Nolan became the last representative of a species in the process of extinction, not only because it was a film
mainstream superhero primarily targeting the adult audience, but also because it was a film that featured a cartoon hero at the head of a bitter adventure in which he was the big loser.
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