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.

Also avail­able is par­tak­ing in live text com­men­tary — a bunch of peo­ple watch­ing the movie at the same time, tex­ting or typ­ing their thoughts as the film goes on. So a whole group of friends, all in dif­fer­ent parts of the world, could watch The Dark Knight together and read each other’s commentary.

And you heard it here first — on Decem­ber 18th, Chris Nolan is doing a live com­men­tary with 100,000 Dark Knight Blu Ray own­ers. He will host the screen­ing and answer ques­tions as it goes on. With 100,000 peo­ple, it will most likely get a lit­tle crazy and who knows if Chris Nolan will tell me how exactly the Jim Gor­dan thing works (try­ing to keep this post spoiler free…), but it still sounds pretty damn cool to me. In Nolan’s words, “It’ll be inter­est­ing to see what it’s like…the poten­tial of it is very excit­ing.” (Note: It had pre­vi­ously been announced that at some point Nolan would do a com­men­tary, but only tonight was the date of this chat confirmed)

After learn­ing all about BD Live and again wish­ing I had lots and lots money to spend on Blu Ray play­ers and Blu Ray discs and giant HD tele­vi­sions, we got to spend a half hour with Chris Nolan. Here are some high­lights from the discussion.

–It was “a shock” to Nolan & his team that TDK was so suc­cess­ful i.e. is the 2nd high­est gross­ing film of all time

–He really stud­ied how to approach a sequel — what works ver­sus what doesn’t. His goal was to “pro­vide a new expe­ri­ence, stretch in all direc­tions” He wanted to delve deeper into the char­ac­ters, both old & new and stage the action and story on a “grander scale”, using an “oper­atic sensibility”

–He wanted the film to con­nect to what we as an audi­ence are con­cerned about. What would impact us, what would excite us. In the end he real­ized he was tap­ping into his own “fear of anar­chy” and that the Joker was a “dis­til­la­tion of that force”

–In his approach to the entire fran­chise, Nolan wanted to use a great ensem­ble à la Richard Don­ner in Super­man. Get a cast that is wholly tal­ented, all of whom bring a lot to the table. This was the mind­set in cast­ing Bat­man Begins & was car­ried through to Dark Knight

–In ref­er­ence to Heath Ledger, he had “Some­thing to express that was very much in line with the char­ac­ter in the script. It just meshed”

–Com­pared the home Blu-Ray ver­sion of Dark Knight to the big screen IMAX ver­sion and said that the advent of Blu-Ray is a vast improve­ment tech­ni­cally and impor­tant for the trans­la­tion of IMAX to home video. Now peo­ple at home can see the dif­fer­ence between shoot­ing in IMAX and shoot­ing in 35mm in a way that even audi­ences who saw TDK with a 35mm pro­jec­tion didn’t get to expe­ri­ence. Blu Ray points out the “grain struc­ture” and “focus anom­alies” and will actu­ally expand in size the same way the IMAX print did, all of which are impor­tant for opti­mal TDK viewing.

–Drew inspi­ra­tion from Frank Miller’s work in the 80s — more seri­ous, more contemporary

–If he made a third film, it would be for no rea­son but the con­tin­u­a­tion of story. He is cur­rently look­ing into where the story would go and if it needs to go there. He main­tained that it’s very hard to make a movie of this scale (and spec­i­fied he wasn’t ask­ing for our sym­pa­thy, draw­ing a laugh from the crowd) — it’s two hard years and you gotta love it. One of his biggest fears is get­ting halfway through mak­ing a film and real­iz­ing it’s unnec­es­sary and he doesn’t want to make it any­more. If there is a third story that needs to be told, there will be a third film, but noth­ing is set in stone or a given.

–There is no 3 hour cut any­where — no deleted scenes. He, John Nolan & David Goyer would cut scenes before they ever made it to the screen in what Nolan calls an “aggres­sive edi­to­r­ial approach.” Their cri­te­ria was that every scene needs three rea­sons to be in the film or it’s out. This made for a dif­fi­cult time in the edit­ing suite as every sin­gle scene was essen­tial and could not be removed.

–The music ended up play­ing a huge role in pac­ing and storytelling

–Shoot­ing in IMAX is about “clar­ity” and “sharp­ness” not being big. It’s about pro­vid­ing a “sense of the screen disappearing.”

–He was shocked that no one ever tried to work with action films in IMAX before & would love to shoot a film entirely in IMAX. The prob­lem with this? An IMAX cam­era is very noisy, SO noisy in fact that all the dia­logue in every IMAX scene had to be looped in post — a feat more dif­fi­cult for the younger gen­er­a­tion of actors, who have less ADR expe­ri­ence. Would ide­ally like to shoot a hybrid film where all MOS scenes are IMAX are all scenes with dia­logue are 65mm.

–When trans­lat­ing a story to a screen­play, the first ques­tion he asks him­self is “What is the point of view?” For Memento, the pro­tag­o­nist couldn’t remem­ber what had hap­pened right before, there­fore telling the story back­wards seemed a nat­ural device. In TDK, there are many char­ac­ters and a grad­ual rise in ten­sion, so lin­ear works best.

–The videos shot by the Joker were in fact shot and mostly directed by Heath Ledger. For the first video, Wally Pfis­ter came in and checked the lights, the sound guys set up a few extra mics, every­one hid around the cor­ner and they let Heath play. Ledger had been plan­ning to direct and was an incred­i­ble col­lab­o­ra­tor with a great mind. Nolan trusted him implic­itly. Ledger’s work on the first video was so fan­tas­tic that Nolan wasn’t even there for the sec­ond video shoot with Anthony Michael Hall. He gave Ledger the cam­era and said “do what­ever you want.” Appar­ently every take Ledger did was dif­fer­ent, but always in line with the story and always fan­tas­tic. Where are those on the dvd, Mr. Nolan?!!

–Some­thing was men­tioned about scan­ning 8k…I couldn’t fol­low the tech­ni­cal speak. Which is sad for me.

–He stud­ied Eng­lish Lit in school and is a self taught direc­tor. Started play­ing around with a cam­era at age 7 or 8. Believes in the Kubrick school of thought that the best way to learn how to make a movie is to make one.

He then bid us good­bye and a screen­ing of Dark Knight began. Have I men­tioned I really love that movie?

Also an impor­tant bit of infor­ma­tion — Missed TDK in IMAX the first time around? The Dark Knight is being re-released on Jan­u­ary 23rd in IMAX the­aters across the coun­try. If you haven’t seen it yet, I encour­age you to take advan­tage of this oppor­tu­nity and buy your IMAX tick­ets the moment they go on sale.