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Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard interview January 8th, 2009

Hans Zim­mer and James New­ton Howard were recently fea­tured on KCRW’s “Morn­ing Becomes Eclec­tic”; on their web­site you can lis­ten to the inter­view and excerpts of the sound­track or read the transcript.

Zim­mer explains that each of the char­ac­ters were so dis­tinct, clearly defined and pow­er­ful that each could have musi­cal iden­ti­ties that were very sep­a­rate. In fact, the col­lab­o­ra­tors often split the work — New­ton tack­led the music for Har­vey Dent, played by Aaron Eck­hart, while Zim­mer cre­ated the Joker’s theme.

“I kept churn­ing around…how do you describe anar­chy, how do you describe a vil­lian and not do it in a way that’s been done before? One of the things I got very much from the char­ac­ter was a fear­less­ness, and an even­ness in a way. The Joker is the only per­son you can trust in the movie. The Joker is the only one who will never lie to you because he is con­sis­tent about his phi­los­o­phy,” said Zimmer.

“I really wanted to do the whole thing just with one note. I had this idea that rather than what a note is in the con­text of the notes sur­round­ing it, what could I do emo­tion­ally through a per­for­mance within one note? How much can I stretch the mean­ing of a sin­gle note and get it down to such min­i­mal­ism. I failed slightly. I had to use two notes in the end.”

Thanks Rachel!

Alan Horn clarifies WB’s position on sequel December 20th, 2008

Seems like the tabloids are at it again, this time with rumors that Rachel Weisz will be play­ing Cat Woman, Shia LaBoeuf to play Robin and Eddie Mur­phy as The Rid­dler — where do they get this crap? Suf­fice to say, it’s all made up drivel.

Time to get some real voices on the sequel to The Dark Knight; Alan Horn, pres­i­dent of Warner Bros. has recently spo­ken with Col­lider:

We’ve been talk­ing to Chris Nolan and what we have to do is get him in the right place and have him tell us what he thinks the notion might be for a great story, but Chris did a great job and we’d love to have him come back and do another one.”

As far as the tim­ing of the project, he went onto say: “The story is every­thing and we are very respect­ful of Chris. We have a won­der­ful rela­tion­ship with him and we are going to be respect­ful of his tim­ing and we want to get it right. Also, I think the fans expect that – they want us to make a ter­rific movie – we have to give them another great movie.

Nolan interview in USA Today: Deleted scenes and sequel December 8th, 2008

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.”

No ‘super heroes’ in Nolan’s universe November 7th, 2008

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,

Dark Knight European Première in London July 22nd, 2008

Mon­day July 21st was the UK and Euro­pean pre­mière of The Dark Knight, Chris­t­ian Bale, Aaron Eck­hart, Mag­gie Gyl­len­haal, Chris Nolan, Michael Caine and the tum­bler were all at hand to sign auto­graphs, greet fans and attend the shindig.

Below is a 17 video playlist of tele­vi­sion fea­tures, video inter­views and can­did shots of the Bat­mo­bile, cast and crew. YouTube is play­ing silly bug­gers and not let­ting me edit this playlist so the order of the videos may not be too great for the moment. Enjoy.

Images from out­side by Samuel Judge:

Images from inside by Ben30:

More Exclusive Comcast Videos July 18th, 2008

Com­cast have posted some more exclu­sive videos — this time inter­views with Gary Old­man, Mag­gie Gyl­len­haal, Christo­pher Nolan, Chris­t­ian Bale and Aaron Eck­hart. On top of this there is a behind the scenes look at Gotham Knight.

I also for­got to men­tion some of their other exclu­sive fea­turettes which are avail­able in stan­dard and high def­i­n­i­tion. I’ve included links to the high def­i­n­i­tion ver­sions for ease, stream­ing was being a bit slow for me earlier.

Film­ing in Chicago

High Def­i­n­i­tion

Bat­man Unmasked

High Def­i­n­i­tion

Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aaron Eckhart on The Today Show July 17th, 2008

The embed­ded video below shows Mag­gie Gyl­len­haal and Aaron Eck­hart in an inter­view on The Today Show, talk­ing about the Dark Knight pre­mier and the feel­ings it has gen­er­ated amongst view­ers — under the ban­ner “Fresh Faces in Gotham City”:

The Dark Knight Video Interview Collection July 15th, 2008

Amongst the Dark Knight pre­mier videos, a slew of video inter­views with the cast and crew have popped up, much to our delight. This embed­ded 20 video playlist also fea­tures Gary Old­man on the Conan O’Brien show and The View.

Many thanks to the YouTube user fal­co­nun­der­ground that has been stay­ing on top of these as best possible.

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