Empire Mag­a­zine are run­ning a Batman/Joker dual edi­tion of their pub­li­ca­tion, the Bat­man fronted ver­sion is as nor­mal, with the caped cru­sader don­ning the front, and all pages as nor­mal. The excit­ing bit comes in the form of The Jok­er­ized ver­sion, where the Joker has taken it upon him­self to not only deface the Bat­man arti­cle, but also the entire issue!

Seems like NYC is under­go­ing sim­i­lar treat­ment…

Chris­t­ian Bale has been fea­tured on the cover of Details (a men’s mag­a­zine on the order of Vogue, for those not in the know). The arti­cle fea­tures an inter­view where he talks a lit­tle about his role as Bat­man, and his ini­tial reac­tion to the Bat­suit itself:

“I was stand­ing on the back lot where they were cre­at­ing the suit, and I had a few min­utes to myself, star­ing up close in the mir­ror, just think­ing, ‘This isn’t going to work. I’m claus­tro­pho­bic, I can’t breathe, I’m get­ting a headache already, and this is all going to go very badly.’”

He also com­ments on Heath Ledger’s per­for­mance as the Joker:

“He was incred­i­bly intense in his per­for­mance but incred­i­bly mel­low and laid-back. Cer­tainly there was this great anar­chis­tic streak to it—just get­ting dirt­ier than anybody’s envi­sioned the Joker before. This char­ac­ter has power because he has no limits—absolutely noth­ing to lose.”

Read the full inter­view here, at men.style.com’s The Gad­about blog.

Thanks Jenny Stein!

Wiz​arduni​verse​.com has posted a Q&A with Gary Old­man. He speaks a lit­tle about his char­ac­ter and role in the film, as well as Har­vey Dent and the Joker. The inter­view includes a few spoil­ers about the plot, so those of you that avoid such things may want to stay away.

The LA Times recently sat down with Mr Eck­hart (aka Har­vey Dent) to dis­cuss his role as a vil­lain in The Dark Knight. Beware, spoil­ers lurk below.

“I can tell you that, basi­cally, when you look at Two-Face, you should get sick to your stom­ach. Being the guy under all that, well, that was a lot of fun for me. It’s like you would feel if you met some­one whose face had pretty much been ripped off or burned off with acid. I can’t talk about it beyond that because I don’t want to give away too much of the plans by Chris.”

[…]

“The dif­fer­ence between Bat­man and Two-Face is how far they are will­ing to go and how they make their point,” Eck­hart said. “Oth­er­wise, we’re talk­ing about vig­i­lante crime-fighting. That’s what Bat­man is all about. He has a strong sense of jus­tice. And Har­vey Dent has an extremely strong sense of jus­tice. His fiancée is killed. He’s hor­ri­bly injured. But he is still true to him­self. He’s a crime fighter, he’s not killing good peo­ple. He’s not a bad guy, not purely.”

[…]

“You look at a good guy too long and it’s not that excit­ing, it’s the Boy Scout always doing the right thing. I’m inter­ested in good guys gone wrong. They’re not the bad guy, they’re the good guy doing bad things.”

[…]

“Really, all of it is more than an adven­ture tale, it’s some­what of a mir­ror of our times. It deals with some fun­da­men­tal ques­tions of what’s going on in soci­ety. To me, this film is about how Bat­man feels about jus­tice, how he takes care of the city, how he feels about the Joker when he meets him and sees what he is capa­ble of doing. How he feels when Har­vey Two-Face takes mat­ters into his own hands. It’s not sim­ple, and it gets ugly. I think peo­ple will be surprised.”

In an inter­view with Bloomberg,  Hans Zim­mer spoker about his work on The Dark Knight, along­side James New­ton Howard,

Oscar-winning com­poser Hans Zim­mer was strug­gling to find the right music to rep­re­sent the Joker in “The Dark Knight,” the new Bat­man movie sched­uled for release this summer.

Zim­mer, who wrote the scores for “The Lion King,” “Glad­i­a­tor” and more than 100 other films, had already com­posed a two-note sig­na­ture for the fiendish char­ac­ter, played by the late Heath Ledger. But he wanted to expand that sound to sym­bol­ize the Joker’s pen­chant for anarchy.

“I’ve been sit­ting here all night try­ing to find out what else to do with those two notes,” Zim­mer said dur­ing an inter­view last month at his Santa Mon­ica, Cal­i­for­nia, studio.

Zim­mer, who col­lab­o­rated on the score with James New­ton Howard, said Ledger’s death from an acci­den­tal drug over­dose in Jan­u­ary wouldn’t change his musi­cal approach to the Joker. The com­poser said the best trib­ute would be an accu­rate reflec­tion of Ledger’s portrayal.

“The worst thing I can do is stray from that course and not be rig­or­ous about his per­for­mance,” the tall, bald­ing com­poser said in a Ger­man accent that reflects his native country.

SHH have had a short moment to talk with Mag­gie Gyl­len­haal (Rachel Dawes in the Dark Knight) at ShoWest:

When asked about tak­ing over from Katie Holmes,

“I think she’s a won­der­ful actress and I really admired the work that she did in the first Bat­man, but I don’t think it would have worked if I tried to imi­tate her. I think the only way to do it is to do it like myself,”

“They just (expect you to) sus­pend your dis­be­lief, I’m Rachel Dawes now. I mean, how many Bat­men have there been? Lots of them!”

Speak­ing about work­ing on her first major blockbuster,

“I antic­i­pated it was going to be much dif­fer­ent than mak­ing a small movie, and in the end, it didn’t feel that way, and I think it was because I was work­ing with really good actors like Gary Old­man and Michael Caine and Chris­t­ian Bale, Aaron Eck­hart and Heath Ledger. It felt like mak­ing any other movie, and I think Chris Nolan has a lot to do with that, and also because he really likes and respects actors, so it felt like doing good scenes in any movie.”

And get­ting involved in the action…

“They took really good care of me. I thought I might get bruised up but in fact, I didn’t. They really knew what they were doing. I was scared to do some of the action stuff I had to do, and I did it once, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is a blast!’”

Thanks Austin!

The Asso­ci­ated Press have put together a short video inter­view with Chris Nolan and Chris­t­ian Bale from the recent ShoW­est. Bale and Nolan talk about Heath Ledger’s per­for­mance, Bale describes it as “defin­ing” whilst re-iterating the seri­ous­ness of the movie. In other news — the clip is ter­ri­bly cut together amongst the Dark Knight Trailer:

Wiz­ard Uni­verse have had a sit down chat with Aaron Eck­hart (Har­vey Dent). This inter­view reveals a lot of juicy bits about Two-Face and Har­vey Dent’s role in The Dark Knight — direct from the Horse’s mouth. As a warn­ing, this inter­view does con­tain spoilers!

WIZARD: Direc­tor Christo­pher Nolan said he saw Two-Face and Har­vey Dent as the back­bone of “Dark Knight.” Did you draw inspi­ra­tion from the comics or the older movies?
ECKHART: Chris [Nolan] comes at this with such a dif­fer­ent take on Bat­man, so I didn’t feel that I had to be true to any other actor play­ing this role. Of course, I read the comic books. His rela­tion­ships with Lt. Gor­don and with Bat­man, with Gotham City, those really helped me the most.

There are a lot of dif­fer­ent ways that you could go with the Two-Face per­for­mance, […]Where will you take it when the film opens July 18?
I believe that it’s stronger if you have a heart. If you can relate to a char­ac­ter who’s a vil­lain, or not, it’s always bet­ter. If I can help you to relate to my char­ac­ter, then I think that I’m more likely to keep your attention.

In terms of the heart of the char­ac­ter, Har­vey has gone through a large arc. Will we be see­ing Harvey’s full arc here or will it play out in, say, another movie?
I think with the other [films], you’re look­ing at the cli­max of a character’s arc. Where does he go after that? I think that right now we’re show­ing who Har­vey was before he was scarred, and it’s an inter­est­ing role that he plays. We’re look­ing at Gotham City try­ing to get out of its dark­ness. That’s why Har­vey is important.

Does Har­vey get scarred in this movie or will we have to wait until the next one to see that?
Har­vey Dent turns into Har­vey Two-Face in this movie. So that answers your ques­tion bet­ter. [Laughs]

Have you filmed a lot of scenes in makeup?
I have done scenes as Har­vey Two-Face. It’s inter­est­ing. I won’t tell you exactly what we’re going for, but I think that I can say that it will use all of today’s tech­nol­ogy to cre­ate this char­ac­ter. He’s going to be inter­est­ing, and I think that’s what makes this char­ac­ter impor­tant in the movie—you get to see him as he was before, as in the comic books. Har­vey is a very good guy in the comic books. He’s judi­cious. He cares. He’s pas­sion­ate about what he loves and then he turns into this char­ac­ter. So you will see that in this film.

[…]

There are cir­cum­stances that cre­ate the darker side of his per­son­al­ity…
It’s inter­est­ing to show that there are rea­sons for his behav­ior. It depends on which [of Harvey’s per­son­al­i­ties] you think is more attrac­tive and excit­ing. Obvi­ously a guy who goes out and mur­ders peo­ple, that’s vig­i­lante jus­tice. It’s prob­a­bly more cin­e­mat­i­cally excit­ing, but I think that know­ing why he got there and that he was a cool dude before is impor­tant, as well.

Are you say­ing you see Two-Face as more of a vig­i­lante in this as opposed to his clas­sic por­trayal as a bank-robbing, blow­ing sh– up kind of thug?
Well, I mean, in terms of vil­lains and movies, in anyone’s moti­va­tion in a movie you’re always try­ing to improve your lot in life and to exact your own code in life and I think that Har­vey Two-Face has a code, and his code is killing peo­ple for rea­sons that…will remain secret.