Trivia For The Dark Knight

The first Batman movie which doesn’t have BATMAN in its title.

While the shooting of movie, Christopher Nolan was asked by someone, “Why Heath Ledger as the Joker? He replies, ‘Because he’s fearless’.

It was not so easy for Heath Ledger to portray ‘The Joker‘. In order to prepare himself for the role, he lived alone in a hotel room for a month just to formulate Joker’s psychology, voice and his posture etc. He also read comic “Batman: The Killing Joke”, and ‘Arkham Asylum: A Seriuos House on Serious Earth“. His other sources of inspiration were: A Clockwise Orange’s Alex and Sid Vicious.

Police officers were taken from Chicago, Elyria OH, Hammond IN, Buffalo Grove IL and Joliet IL

It was a shocking truth for the fans that were eager to watch movie when Heath Ledger dies on January 22, 2008. But luckily, all his scenes were complete.

An explosion scene was filmed at Battersea Power Station in London. It made the people to believe that a terrorist attack had been occurred.

The Joker make-up was composed of three pieces of stamped silicone, which took less than an hour to apply to Heath Ledger on each day of shooting. Ledger described it as “new technology which is much quicker to apply than regular prosthetics”; he felt he was not wearing any make-up at all.

Aaron Eckhart enjoyed wearing the Two-Face makeup and warned: “When you look at him, you should get sick to your stomach. It’s like you would feel if you met someone whose face had pretty much been ripped off or burned off with acid. There are fans on the Internet who have drawn versions of what they think it looks like, and I can tell you this: They’re thinking small. Chris has gone way farther than people think.

Off-duty Chicago Police Officers along with Officers from Elyria OH, Hammond IN, Buffalo Grove IL and Joliet IL played Gotham Police officer extras.

Holds the record for reaching the $400 million mark the fastest, after 18 days. The former record holder was Shrek 2 (2004) (43 days).

The nine-minute suite composed for the Joker is based around two notes, D and C. Interestingly enough, Batman’s comic book company (who also produces the film) is DC Comics.

The film uses numerous elements of the Joker’s first appearance in “Batman” #1, published in 1940. In both “The Dark Knight” and “Batman” #1, the Joker publicly announces his crimes before committing them, removes his make-up and disguises himself as a police officer to gain access to a person he threatened to kill, uses a powerful bomb smuggled into jail to escape, steals and kills not for personal gain but simply to create chaos and disorder, and infringes upon the city’s old-fashioned mobsters.

Heath Ledger improvised when he started clapping inside his jail cell in a mocking and sardonic capacity as Gordon is promoted. The clapping was not scripted but Christopher Nolan immediately encouraged the crew to continue filming and the sequence was included in the film.

After his transformation, Two-Face flips his coin eight times. It comes up on the “good” side five times (for the Joker, Sal Maroni, Detective Ramirez, Dent himself, and Gordon’s son) and the “bad” side three times (for Detective Wuertz, Maroni’s driver, and Batman).

Early in the film, a witness on stand pulls a gun out on Harvey Dent (Two-Face) during the trial and tries to shoot him. This is nod towards Two-Face’s original origin story in the comics where in a similar trial scenario, crime boss Sal Maroni is on stand and throws sulfuric acid in Dent’s face resulting in his scarring.

There are many elements from various Batman graphic novels, either verbatim or slightly recast. In “The Long Halloween” Batman, Gordon, and Dent fake Dent’s death. In “The Dark Knight”, Gordon’s death is faked. Also in “The Long Halloween”, Batman poses as a SWAT officer. In the movie, Gordon does. The Joker’s reference at the end of the film to “pushing Dent over the edge” mirrors his “social experiment” with Gordon in “The Killing Joke”, in which The Joker attempts to drive Gordon insane by making him have “a really bad day”.

While filming both the bank and Police Department scenes at the Post Office, an unrelated fire broke out in a top floor mechanical room and many onlookers believed that the smoke and fire was related to the filming.

Set a new record for the biggest opening-day gross at the box office with $66.4 million. Former record holder was Spider-Man 3 (2007).

The “Batman” theme is heard only twice in the film, as Composers Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard decided that a heroic theme that a viewer could hum would ignore the complexity and darkness of the character. Hearing the tune only twice would create what Zimmer calls “a musical foreshadowing.”

An explosion was filmed at the Battersea Power Station in London. The fireball created calls from panic-stricken local residents, who assumed a terrorist attack had occurred at the out-of-use Station.

Christopher Nolan cites the film Heat (1995) as a major influence on this movie. William Fichtner played in Heat and in the scene in The Dark Knight that was obviously inspired by Heat.