‘The Dark Knight’: The superhero movie that astonished Werner Herzog
Picture the scene: you’re the director of an enormous superhero blockbuster which cost $185million to make and would go on to gross over $1billion. You find yourself standing in front of Werner Herzog, the German arthouse filmmaker and documentarian. In his inimitable accent, he tells you, “Congratulations, this is the most significant film of the whole year.” You think he’s being sarcastic or teasing you in some way. He is not. Herzog does not tease.
This is the situation Christopher Nolan finds himself in when he and Christian Bale run into Herzog after he feasted his eyes upon The Dark Knight in 2008. Bale had worked with Herzog on the 2006 war drama Rescue Dawn and impressed the director so much that he watched The Dark Knight purely to watch him work. He told The Hollywood Interview that Bale “was the only reason I saw the film. I wanted to see how Christian was doing because I so love that man as an actor.”
Indeed, Herzog cast Bale in Rescue Dawn before he’d even donned the cape and cowl for the first time in Batman Begins. He told ONTD: “There’s casting where there’s absolutely no question. He was onboard long before he was chosen for Batman. I said to him, ‘No matter what, you have to be Dieter, and if you’re not going to be Dieter, I don’t want to make the film.'”
Herzog even went one step further by declaring, “What drew me to Christian is that he is the best of his generation.”
Nolan, however, had no familiarity with Herzog beyond his somewhat eccentric reputation. So, he must have been truly shocked when Herzog lavished such praise upon his film. Herzog revealed, “In a way, I was totally astonished by The Dark Knight because, on the one hand, it’s a huge, mainstream movie. But it also astonished me at how dark it was, as though it was a premonition of something coming at us.”
“I ran into Christian and Christopher Nolan,” continued Herzog, “And said to Nolan, ‘Congratulations, this is the most significant film of the whole year.’ He thought I was kind of making it up or joking. And I said, ‘No, no, no! This is a film of real substance. It doesn’t matter if it’s mainstream or not.’ And it’s wonderful that he made the film the way he did.”
When asked if Herzog had tried to bring any of The Dark Knight’s flavour to his adaptation of Bad Lieutenant, which starred Nicolas Cage. He replied: “Yeah, but in a different way. I mean, The Dark Knight isn’t funny at all.” When the conversation turned to the comedic elements of Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker, Herzog cautioned, “Yeah, but scarier. Really deeply scary.”
To Herzog, the idea of bringing Ledger’s nihilistic threat to Bad Lieutenant was not the way to go. Instead, he wanted to push things away from reality, feeling, “Nicolas Cage is more joyful. You see the bliss of evil with Nicolas in this film.”
