Christo­pher Nolan has been speak­ing with USA Today about the suc­cess of The Dark Knight and its poten­tial sequel:

Nolan says he is jot­ting notes and doing some rough out­lines for a third story, but he hasn’t yet found any­thing he’s will­ing to com­mit to film, despite Warner Bros.’ eager­ness to get a new film underway.

“It was obvi­ous when the box office was so big ($530 mil­lion domes­ti­cally) that we had under­es­ti­mated how ready fans were to reboot the fran­chise,” he says. “The worst thing you could do now that you’ve got­ten the plane back in the air is mess up the landing.”

[Talk­ing about sequels and a third movie] “I don’t know why they’re hard to do,” Nolan says. “Maybe there’s so much expec­ta­tion to them. But I wouldn’t want to do one if it weren’t going to be as good as the first or sec­ond. That’s not respect­ful to the fans.“

Nolan also points out his rea­sons for not putting out­takes or deleted scenes on the DVD — not a sin­gle extra scene involv­ing The Joker:

Nolan says he wasn’t keep­ing deleted scenes from fans. “For my past three films, I really haven’t had scenes that didn’t make it in the movie,” he says. “If it’s in the final script, I tend put it on screen.”

Any out­takes, how­ever, were inten­tion­ally left off the DVD. “I don’t like out­takes or gag reels,” Nolan says. “I don’t think it’s respect­ful to the actors, who signed on to have their per­for­mance on screen, not the takes that didn’t work out. It dis­cour­ages actors from going all-out if they think every mis­take is going on the disc.”