Half-Assed Internet Research
Nolan avoided a Joker origin story and changed the chemical scarring to knife wounds; Michael Caine doubted the film and that Ledger could top Nicholson, then forgot his lines on first working with him; IMAX camera problems left out-of-focus shots in the bank robbery
In the discussion (8)
Approx. transcript time · 00:42:58Read transcript
- Little wild happened before or after filming apart from the tragic air of Ledger's passing; Nolan purposely avoided giving the Joker an origin story and changed his canonical chemical scarring to knife wounds to keep his origins unclear.
- Michael Caine did not think the movie would work or that Ledger could top Jack Nicholson's Joker, but was blown away and so frightened on first working with Ledger that he forgot his lines; the hosts call him dead wrong about Ledger.
- Caine's role is worth exploring: he has become the Professor Emeritus of every Nolan movie, the man who comes in and says something pithy, and here he keeps telling Batman why he is doing what he does, as if he thinks he is Batman; a Lethal Weapon 2 South African villain impression breaks out along the way.
- Alfred mythology as the hosts recall it: a British soldier with combat medical training, which is why he can fix Bruce's broken ribs, who somehow got into manservanting after a colonial expedition and buoyed Bruce after his parents' death; yet he tells a Burmese bandit story Bruce, a 40-year-old man ten years into fighting villains, has never heard.
- The bandit story is an extended metaphor for a Joker with no methodology who just wants to watch the world burn, an iconic line, but also movie poppycock, screenwriter push-ups, like letting Michael Caine get a couple of minutes isolated on the wing; he got to cry in Dark Knight Rises.
- The hosts question how Alfred's Dark Knight sermon, that Batman must eat shit as the outcast and sin eater, squares with his Dark Knight Rises wish to see Bruce at a cafe in Venice; it is jarring, though five or six years have passed, Wayne keeps coming home bruised and concussed, and Alfred has his own arc toward believing Batman should stop.
- Does Morgan Freeman need to be in these movies, could Alfred not also be good at gadgets, and how many characters could be removed with the movie still effective.
- An early tidbit: there were problems with the IMAX cameras on the bank robbery and a couple of out-of-focus shots.