This report comes from All Things Fan Girl via AICN and details the main points from the talk, cov­er­ing the Blu ray, BD-Live, a live Chris Nolan com­men­tary on Dec 18th, the con­tin­u­a­tion of the Bat­man story (e.g. the third movie), lack of a direc­tors cut and shoot­ing an entire movie in IMAX, with workarounds for the nois­i­ness of the camera.

This is a very good read..

Went to the Dark Knight Blu Ray release event with Chris Nolan last night.

Before tonight I had never even HEARD of BD Live. Appar­ently it’s Xbox Live for Blu-Ray? If you have a BD Live enabled Blu Ray player or a PS3, then you can con­nect to the inter­net and par­take in the poten­tial awe­some­ness. The Dark Knight is Warner Broth­ers’ first foray into this for­mat and it’s shap­ing up to be rea­son alone to invest in a Blu-Ray Player.

First of all, it comes with tons of con­tent, wait­ing to be streamed for free– the newest Warner’s trail­ers, episodes of Warner Pre­mière Motion Comics (Mad Love! Shadow of Ra’s al Ghul!) and more. And because every­thing is stream­ing, you can get to the con­tent faster and it doesn’t take up any hard drive space. One of my favorite fea­tures of TDK BD Live is the com­men­tary option. With a com­puter & web­cam, you can record YOURSELF giv­ing com­men­tary for the whole movie or just a scene here, a scene there. Then, when peo­ple go on BD Live, they can select your com­men­tary to watch with the film. Now, it’s doubt­ful that I would ever watch a stranger’s com­men­tary, but a friend’s? Cer­tainly. Maybe even some­one famous? A blog­ger, a writer, a direc­tor, an actor, a critic, a tech­ni­cian — peo­ple not involved with the film who would have no busi­ness doing com­men­tary for the dvd, but would have an inter­est­ing per­spec­tive, mak­ing their thoughts avail­able to the gen­eral pub­lic? Yes, I’m into that.

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In speak­ing with the LA Times and asked whether Bat­man would par­tic­i­pate in any DC crossovers, Christo­pher Nolan responded,

Nolan: I don’t think our Bat­man, our Gotham, lends itself to that kind of cross-fertilization. It goes back to one of the first things we wran­gled with when we first started putting the story together: Is this a world in which comic books already exist? Is this a world in which super­heroes already exist? If you think of “Bat­man Begins” and you think of the phi­los­o­phy of this char­ac­ter try­ing to rein­vent him­self as a sym­bol, we took the posi­tion — we didn’t address it directly in the film, but we did take the posi­tion philo­soph­i­cally — that super­heroes sim­ply don’t exist. If they did, if Bruce knew of Super­man or even of comic books, then that’s a com­pletely dif­fer­ent deci­sion that he’s mak­ing when he puts on a cos­tume in an attempt to become a sym­bol. It’s a para­dox and a conun­drum, but what we did is go back to the very orig­i­nal con­cept and idea of the char­ac­ter. In his first appear­ances, he invents him­self as a totally orig­i­nal creation.

GB: That doesn’t lend itselt to hav­ing him swing on a rope across the Metrop­o­lis skyline.

Nolan: No, cor­rect, it’s a dif­fer­ent uni­verse. It’s a dif­fer­ent way of look­ing at it. Now, it’s been done suc­cess­fully, very suc­cess­fully, in the comics so I don’t dis­pute it as an approach. It just isn’t the approach we took. We had to make a deci­sion for “Bat­man Begins.”

GB: A dif­fer­ent path…

Nolan: Yes, com­pletely dif­fer­ent. It would have given a very, very dif­fer­ent mean­ing to what Bruce Wayne was leav­ing home to do and com­ing back home to do and putting on the cos­tume for and all the rest. We dealt with on its own terms: What does Bat­man mean to Bruce Wayne, what is he try­ing to achieve? He has not been influ­enced by other super­heroes. Of course, you see what we’re able to do with Joker in this film is that he is able to be quite the­atri­cal because we set up Bat­man as an exam­ple of intense the­atri­cal­ity in Gotham. It starts to grow out­ward from Bat­man. But the premise we began with is that Bat­man was cre­at­ing a wholly orig­i­nal thing. To be hon­est, we went even fur­ther than the comics on this point. I can’t remem­ber at what point in the comics his­tory the idea came about that he was a fan of Zorro as a kid. I haven’t researched that, but I don’t believe it goes back ter­ri­bly far.”

The inter­view con­tin­ues by dis­cussing Nolan’s next project, his time off and the upcom­ing Acad­emy Awards:

GB: You’ve said you aren’t sure what you next project will be. But clearly Warner Bros. looks at Bat­man as a core part of their movie busi­ness, per­haps now more than ever, and there are mar­ket­place pres­sures on them to sched­ule the next install­ment of the fran­chise. Are you get­ting a lot of pres­sure to make a decision?

Nolan: They’re being extremely gra­cious. I have a very good rela­tion­ship with the stu­dio. They know that I really needed to go on hol­i­day and take some time to fig­ure what I want to do next. They’ve been very respect­ful of that, which is ter­rific and one of the rea­sons I enjoy work­ing with Warner Bros.

GB: The nom­i­na­tions for the 81st Acad­emy Awards will be announced in Jan­u­ary. How mean­ing­ful would it be for the cast and crew of “The Dark Knight” if the late Heath Ledger is nom­i­nated for best sup­port­ing actor?

Nolan: I think the thing that has always been impor­tant to me in light of Heath’s death is the respon­si­bil­ity I’ve felt to his work. The respon­si­bil­ity of craft­ing the film in such a way that his per­for­mance came across the way he intended. Clearly, that has been the case. That’s one of the rea­sons I take such pride in the film.

I felt a great wave of relief, really, as peo­ple first started to see the per­for­mance and it was clear that they were get­ting the per­for­mance. It’s easy to for­get with every­thing that’s hap­pened what an enor­mous chal­lenge it was for Heath to take on this iconic role. He rose to that chal­lenge so admirably that any expres­sion of peo­ple being excited or moved by his per­for­mance is a won­der­ful thing. What­ever form that takes. Peo­ple com­ing to see his per­for­mance and get­ting it. It’s been extremely sat­is­fy­ing for all of us already. Any­thing that adds to that would be wonderful.

In other news,

We posted these rumors a short while back (along with a Jolie Cat­woman one), but now some news of this cast­ing has come from the lips of Michael Caine in speak­ing with MTV:

“They’ve already got them in mind,” said Caine, when asked who he’d like to see take up arms against the Caped Cru­sader. “It’s Johnny Depp as The Rid­dler. And The Pen­guin is Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man. I read it in the paper.”

So Caine is like the rest of us, read­ing gos­sip in the tabloids, right? Except for one thing…according to the actor, he con­firmed the news through the stu­dio itself.

“When Christo­pher [Nolan] said we were going to do ‘The Dark Knight’ next, I didn’t what that meant in Bat­man terms,” related Caine, who plays Bruce Wayne’s loyal but­ler, Alfred Pen­ny­worth. “I said, ‘What’s the story?’ and he said The Joker. I said, ‘Oh, s–t! How are you going to top Jack [Nichol­son]?’ He said, ‘Well, I’ve cast Heath Ledger. And I went ‘Ha! I couldn’t top Jack, but if any­one could, maybe Heath could.’ And he did.

“I was with [a Warner Bros.] exec­u­tive and I said, ‘Are we going to make another one?’ They said yeah. I said, ‘How the hell are we going to top Heath? And he says ‘I’ll tell you how you top Heath — Johnny Depp as The Rid­dler and Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man as The Pen­guin.’ I said, ‘S–t, they’ve done it again!’” [Laughs]

No doubt there will be some offi­cial clar­i­fi­ca­tion of this announce­ment in the com­ing days, how­ever what is inter­est­ing is the clear inten­tion for The Pen­guin and The Rid­dler to star in the third movie, whether Depp or Hoff­man sign on is another mat­ter — and one that I still don’t see being con­firmed for a long while yet.

How do you feel about The Rid­dler and Pen­guin poten­tially appear­ing in Bat­man 3?

In all the debate about the sequel to The Dark Knight, a lot of peo­ple sug­gested the pos­si­ble return of Har­vey Dent and the Two Face char­ac­ter. In an inter­view with Com­ing Soon, Aaron Eck­hart has con­firmed once and for all that Har­vey Dent is dead. It is also inter­est­ing to hear that the orig­i­nal plan was to bring The Joker back for the third movie, whether that will still hap­pen is highly debatable.

CS/SHH!: Is Har­vey Dent alive?
Aaron Eck­hart: No. He is dead as a door nail.

CS/SHH!: So he’s not com­ing back?
Eck­hart: He ain’t com­ing back baby!

CS/SHH!: I was hop­ing he would.
Eck­hart: No. I asked Chris [Nolan] that ques­tion and he goes, “You’re dead” before I could even get the ques­tion out of my mouth. “Hey Chris, am I?” “You’re dead!” Alright, cool.

CS/SHH!: That’s not a prob­lem in comic book movies. You could still come back.
Eck­hart: I think in con­tract nego­ti­a­tions it’s a problem.

CS/SHH!: So you were never signed on for another film?
Eck­hart: No, I’m not com­ing back. I think unfor­tu­nately, Heath [Ledger] was sup­posed to go on and that didn’t work out. I’m nobody. I’m a cog. I have no say over this sort of stuff. I’m sure that there’s so many other char­ac­ters that they could whip together. I heard Angelina Jolie was going to be Cat­woman or some­thing like that. I thought that was a great idea. I’d like to be in that one.

Would you want to see a Joker played by some­one other than Heath Ledger?

On the scale of fan cre­ated works, this ranks very highly. Below you can find a fan’s pre­dic­tion of what the next Bat­man movie shall entail; com­bin­ing The Gotham Times, news­pa­per sto­ries and hints of The Rid­dler to cre­ate a tan­ta­liz­ing look into the future. The ques­tion mark fea­tur­ing the bat sym­bol, which played in a sim­i­lar vein as a mouth dur­ing the Why So Seri­ous cam­paign, is a nice and sub­tle touch.

Cre­ated by Chrisp85

Intre­pid inter­net scourer BatGirl567 has pro­vided links to two arti­cles dis­cussing the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the third Bat­man movie.

Cin­ema Blend believe that The Joker was orig­i­nally writ­ten into the first draft of a Bat­man 3 story and that all ref­er­ences have since been removed. I would inter­pret this as noth­ing more than rumor with no cred­i­ble source — mainly because their ‘scooper’ tells them that Two-Face will fea­ture promi­nently in the next film, “cov­er­ing his ori­gins” — the gen­eral con­sen­sus is that this will not hap­pen. They con­tinue to sug­gest that the graphic nov­els The Long Hal­loween and Dark Vic­tory will also be referenced.

With Two Face and the Joker gone, we need some new Vil­lains… MSNBC have some sug­ges­tions, although there are also some stark ommis­sions (Harley Quinn and Bane both being repeated sug­ges­tions in our ongo­ing dis­cus­sions). I have para­phrased, added pic­tures and pro­vided appro­pri­ate links.

Cat­woman and Talia al Ghul

[…] Jewel thief Selina Kyle [Cat­woman] is a habit­ual crim­i­nal, but she does adhere to a moral code of her own, even if it often puts her at odds with Batman.

[…] Talia al Ghul is per­haps even more com­pli­cated; she’s the daugh­ter of R’as al Ghul, some­times aid­ing her father’s plans for world dom­i­na­tion, and some­times sid­ing with her lover. Although Bat­man has repeat­edly foiled the ille­gal schemes of both father and daugh­ter, R’as approves of Batman’s romance with Talia and would like to see them mar­ried; in some sto­ries, Talia and Bruce Wayne even have a son.

Nolan-ability rat­ing: Cat­woman: A-. Talia al Ghul: B–
Cat­woman seems almost cer­tain to show up even­tu­ally if the cur­rent Bat­man series con­tin­ues. Talia, on the other hand, prob­a­bly won’t unless R’as al Ghul also returns, given her character’s inter­twined rela­tion­ship with both men.

Cos­tumed crime lords: Pen­guin, Black Mask, Scar­face and The Ventriloquist

[…] The dap­per, gen­tle­manly Pen­guin, […] is por­trayed these days in the comics as an eccen­tric but effi­ciently schem­ing crim­i­nal who con­trols much of Gotham City’s under­ground. Though this Penguin’s not as flam­boy­ant as past ver­sions have been, it’s still hard to take him seri­ously out of the comics’ oper­at­i­cally weird world, and Nolan him­self has said mov­ing Pen­guin into the movies would be “tricky.”

[…] Black Mask, a ruth­less and bru­tal crime boss who takes his name from his ebony skull dis­guise, and comes with the twist that he bears a grudge against Bruce Wayne rather than his Bat­man alter ego.

[…] Arnold Wesker, a mild-mannered ven­tril­o­quist who keeps a bloody grip on his crim­i­nal empire but will only speak though his dummy, Scar­face, a wooden doll carved to look like a 1930s gang­ster. [..] The duo would prob­a­bly be laughed out of the theater.

Black Mask would fit per­fectly, espe­cially if they need another vil­lain in Two-Face’s evil mode.

Nolan-ability Rat­ing: Pen­guin: D. Black mask: B. Scar­face: D.
FofR: Black Mask is an inter­est­ing sug­ges­tion; I wouldn’t want to see a new incar­na­tion of The Penguin.

Mon­ster men: Man-Bat, Killer Croc and Clayface

[…] Man-Bat is the Mr. Hyde-like dou­ble of sci­en­tist Kirk Langstrom, who trans­forms uncon­trol­lably into a giant winged mam­mal after a lab acci­dent. Killer Croc, sim­i­larly, is a mutated beast-man who’s slowly becom­ing less human and more croc­o­dil­ian over time. […] Clay­face, but the most well-known ver­sion is a blob­like crea­ture that can change its shape and eats humans to survive.

Nolan-ability Rat­ing: B+ for all three. “Overtly fan­tas­ti­cal ele­ments.“
FofR: Mon­sters in Nolan’s uni­verse? I don’t see it hap­pen­ing — the power of The Dark Knight lies with its sto­ry­line firmly rooted in reality.

The puz­zlers: The Rid­dler and Cluemaster

[…] Edward “Rid­dler” Nygma wears a trade­mark green suit cov­ered with ques­tion marks […]. His jester-like qual­i­ties some­times make him some­thing of a low-rent Joker, but lately in the comics he’s turned over a new leaf and rein­vented him­self as a detec­tive, solv­ing puz­zles instead of cre­at­ing them.

[…] Clue­mas­ter, who turned to a life of crime as after being fired from his high-profile TV job, with a sig­na­ture attention-grabber of leav­ing clues behind for Bat­man to fol­low. Even the Rid­dler, not exactly the least gim­micky of vil­lains, felt con­tempt for Cluemaster’s shtick, which he thought was a rip-off of his own.

Nolan-ability Rat­ing: The Rid­dler: B. Clue­mas­ter: D.
The Riddler’s appar­ently got a pretty good shot at a future film, if you can believe com­ments made recently by Gary Old­man [any­one have a link to these com­ments?]. “Doc­tor Who” star David Ten­nant report­edly would love to do it.

Penny Plun­derer

[…] Joe Coyne’s par­tic­u­lar pec­ca­dillo was pos­si­bly the most pathetic of any of them: He was obsessed with pen­nies, going to ludi­crous lengths to steal rare coins and one-cent stamps, and defended him­self by hurl­ing rolls of cop­per coins at Batman’s head.

Nolan-ability Rat­ing: C-. “He’d work as comic relief” — [no he wouldn’t]
FofR: No.

Chan­dell

[…] A pair of twins [from the 1960s tele­vi­sion show] — famous pianist Chan­dell and his evil brother Harry, who schemed to steal a for­tune from Batman’s Aunt Har­riet and black­mail his own brother in the bargain.

Nolan-ability Rat­ing: D-. […] “camp,” exactly what Nolan’s avoid­ing.
FofR: No.

Bat-Mite
[…] Bat­man has his own mag­i­cal imp who pops in every now and then to sow trouble.

Nolan-ability Rat­ing: F.
FofR: Not a chance, seems like this writer was lazy in their vil­lain short­list — seri­ously.. Bat Mite!?

Also, whilst I am going over the vil­lains, remem­ber Zsasz in Bat­man Begins?

Know a lot about Bat­man villains?

We’re look­ing for some peo­ple to make Bat­man 3 vil­lain pro­pos­als whilst pro­vid­ing some solid ground­ing to sup­port them. We’d like to have some arti­cles cov­er­ing the lesser known poten­tials for Nolan’s straight-up Bat­man uni­verse. Con­tact us

Christo­pher Nolan has stated an inter­est in the exten­sive and elab­o­rate 70 year his­tory of Bat­man — par­tic­u­larly the inter­est­ing parts that have not yet been in the movies or the six­ties tele­vi­sion show.

Mean­while, The Rid­dler, The Pen­guin and Cat­woman are all vil­lains that have been bandied about as poten­tials for the next movie; I per­son­ally doubt whether we will see these char­ac­ters pop up in the next fea­ture. Instead I think we will see Nolan opt for a vil­lain that impacts more on Batman/Bruce Wayne’s pro­file. As seen so dev­as­tat­ingly with The Joker, when the vil­lain really messes with the Hero in every which way, the sto­ries become much more inter­twined, com­plex and exciting.

So — on that note:

Which villain(s) do you want to see in Bat­man 3?

The less obvi­ous, the bet­ter — feel free to include your cast­ing wishlists.

Talk­ing with MTV, David Goyer says that he already “knows the theme” for the third Bat­man movie, although he also reit­er­ates that a third movie is not set in stone and it could “go either way”.

“I think that’s the scari­est thing – to think, could we come up with a third movie that was as good as the first two? Can we top our­selves?” screen­writer David Goyer asked aloud, almost rhetor­i­cally, in a recent con­ver­sa­tion with MTV News. “Doing it a third time would be a big proposition.”

Make no mis­take about it, though, a third film HAS been dis­cussed, Goyer con­fessed, reveal­ing that, while noth­ing is con­crete, both a vil­lain and a theme have been bandied about.

“We’ve only talked loosely about it, though, Chris and I,” Goyer said.

Inter­est­ingly, it’s the theme, and not the vil­lain, that most inter­ests me, espe­cially given how the lat­ter seems inex­orably tied to the for­mer in this new mod­ern Bat­man uni­verse. (Fear the pre­dom­i­nant issue in “Begins” pre­cip­i­tat­ing the intro­duc­tion of Scare­crow, esca­la­tion in “Knight” sim­i­larly call­ing for The Joker.

The fact that Goyer has a theme he wants to keep in mind for a pos­si­ble “Bat­man 3” means he also has a direc­tion, a cri­sis, and, yes, a villain.

So what is it?

“I have one,” Goyer said laugh­ing. “But I’m not going to tell you. Chris is very par­tic­u­lar about that.

“I do think, though, that if there’s not a third film – these two movies stand on their own,” he added. “I think it could go either way.”

/Film have also spo­ken with Chris­t­ian Bale and Christo­pher Nolan about Bat­man 3 — every­thing is still up in the air:

Nolan: “I don’t know what I’d do next, or what would hap­pen next. I felt in doing a sequel that it would be a big mis­take to try to hold any­thing back for future films. You have to put every­thing you can into this movie and try and make it as great as it can be.”

Chris­t­ian Bale: “I always like to have to think when I’m leav­ing the the­ater. I do love any movie that leaves me ques­tion­ing what has hap­pened, what is going to hap­pen. I see that in fin­ish­ing the movie I want to know what will hap­pen, what is going to hap­pen. But it is com­pletely in the hands of Chris, weather he decides to do that or not. It will be a lot of money that he didn’t give you any indi­ca­tion if that was going to hap­pen or not? But it’s com­pletely his deci­sion. I can’t imag­ine doing this with­out Chris. I don’t even want to con­sider that because he’s cre­ated this. This is his.”

And in an older EW arti­cle, Bale says some­thing similar:

Inter­viewer: So do you think there will be a part 3 of Bat­man?
Chris­t­ian Bale: Um, look, let’s wait and see…

Inter­viewer: Or, I guess it’d be part 6.
Chris­t­ian Bale: No, no, no, no, no. [Smil­ing] Part 3 is what I’d con­sider it, yeah, I don’t say part 6. Bat­man begins — that was the begin­ning there, with all due respect to the oth­ers. We are re-creating this. You know, obvi­ously the deci­sion is out of my hands. I would, know­ing the Dark Knight story, I would like very much to com­plete a tril­ogy. And I think that know­ing the story of The Dark Knight, it leaves you antic­i­pat­ing some­thing that really can get very, very inter­est­ing for a third. Now, the ques­tion would be: Is Chris going to be doing it? Because to me I find it tricky to imag­ine work­ing on it with­out it being a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Chris.

Thanks BatGirl567!