Two part interview with The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan. Part one is here and part two here.

Interesting to note that in the second part of the interview, Nolan zeroes in on what he thought was the most important scene in the movie: Where Batman interrogates Joker. Nolan goes into quite a bit of detail about the scene – quite interesting – but from a writing point of view, here may be the most critical point:

That rage is very much a central part of the story in ‘The Dark Knight,’ and that interrogation scene is the fulcrum on which the whole movie turns. I think Batman finds out — and Bruce Wayne finds out — a lot about himself in that scene. I was just delighted to get to see Christian show that rage. And it’s wonderfully balanced with Gary’s control as well. Even though everyone remembers the scene as being the Joker and Batman, Gordon played a very important part to setting it up and allowing this interrogation to happen. And then as he is watching from the sideline, he sees the exact point where this is going too far. He knows Batman well enough to observe this, to recognize it. He tries to get in, but Batman has locked the door. And what we get to lead to, by the end of the scene, when he’s just pounding on the Joker, I think Heath managed to find the exact essence of the threat of the Joker and who he is: He’s being pounded in the face and he’s laughing and loving it. There’s nothing you can do. As he tells Batman, “You have nothing to do with all of your strength.” There’s this sort of impudence of the strong and the armored and the very muscular Batman; he’s very powerful, but there’s no useful way for this power to be exercised in this scene. He has to confront that.

Originally, at the end of that scene, once the Joker reveals his information, Christian dropped him and then, almost as an afterthought, he kicked him in the head as he walked out of the room. We wound up removing that bit. It seemed a little too petulant for Batman in a way. And really, more than that, what it was is that I liked how Christian played it: When he drops the Joker, he has realized the futility of what he’s done. You see it in his eyes. How do you fight someone who thrives on conflict? It’s a very loose end to be left with.

A big challenge for a screenwriter is to identify and exploit the themes that arise in the story-crafting process. And here, we can see first-hand that Nolan and his co-screenwriter, Jonathan Nolan drilled down to this point in the writing of the script — How do you fight someone who thrives on conflict? That theme runs throughout the movie, which is why Nolan sees this interrogation scene as “the fulcrum on which the whole movie turns.”

A good reminder about the importance of story themes.