Welcome to a world without rules. Paul Fischer discusses 'The Dark Knight' with the stars, Christian Bale and Aaron Eckhart.

THE NEW DUALITY OF AARON ECKHART
EXCLUSIVE Interview by Paul Fischer

Aaron Eckhart is no stranger in playing morally suspect characters, but none comes even close to his dual roles of ambitious District Attorney Harvey Dent and the vindictive Two Face, in the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight. Off screen, Eckhart is unpretentious, charming and says he’s just grateful to be in the movie, despite the buzz he’s receiving for his performance. He talked to PAUL FISCHER in this exclusive interview.

PAUL FISCHER: Your thinking behind saying yes to a movie like this. I think the last time we spoke you had already started shooting it, or maybe you had finished, I can’t remember, and I think one of the things you were saying is that part of your thinking is, you know, given a career, what is good? Is it a good career move? Is that something you consciously think about when you take on a big movie like this?

AARON ECKHART: Well, you know, I’m sure that I thought about it, but mostly the fact that Chris [Nolan] is directing it. I don't know, I’m trying to think how I could have said no.

PAUL FISCHER: If it had been some other director, I assume. Or some director that you didn't really trust.

AARON ECKHART: Yeah, then it’s a whole different ballgame. But coming into it, having Chris directing it, having Christian [Bale], Heath [Ledger] playing the Joker, and Gary Oldman and Maggie [Gyllenhaal] and Michael Caine and everybody, then having read the script. Chris called me to his office, and said, “Will you come in?” We had a chat, and a cup of tea, talked about everything but movies, or but Batman. Then he says, “You know, I’m doing the second Batman and we got this part and maybe you want to read the script.” I was like, “Well, give it to me.” He says, “I’ll have a guy come over to your house and give it to you.” So he did, and I read it, and I was like looking at my part and reading this thing and going, “Oh my Gosh!” Because I thought I was just going to have a little part, you know, a throwaway part, because Heath was in it and everything. The script was so beautiful, so dense pnd complex, and so many characters intertwined, and so many dynamics, psychologically, social, personal, political, moral, ethical. It was so big, and I thought, Wow! So the way, to answer that question, I feel lucky to be in the film. I certainly feel lucky now to be in the film, being part of what I think is one of the strongest Batmans, having one of the greatest characters in cinematic bad guy history, which is Heath playing the joker. To have watched him do it, to have been a part of it, you know, I think is very special, and it’s an honor for me. And to be a member of Chris’s cast, and to have worked with Gary. So, I don't know if I ever, even knowing that Chris was directing it, it didn't turn my mind to turn it down. The question was, How am I going to be good in it? You know, how am I going to, you know, I have to really prepare and try to be good with Gary and with Christian and Maggie and Heath. Those were more my concerns.

PAUL FISCHER: What were the challenges of playing a character so morally ambiguous as this character is?

AARON ECKHART: Well, I sort of made a name on it, you know, it’s in my lexicon, but he is complex. First of all, I really appreciate that Chris brought Harvey Dent into the movie, so we get to know Harvey as an altruistic, justice minded, Gotham-loving citizen who was, is the DA of Gotham, but he was also internal affairs, so he’s a ball buster, you know, he’s a tough guy, but he’s also got a big heart. That was fun to play as an actor, because Gotham City is really the central character in this movie, and cleaning it up is the issue. And then watching the transformation into Two Face, I think the audience can empathize, or understand if not empathize, why he’s doing what he does, the pain and the anger and the bitterness and the whole kind of the why of it all. So I was happy to play that.

PAUL FISCHER: Was Two Face a tougher character for you to play?

AARON ECKHART: I think tonally, to find the tone, especially knowing what Heath was doing, and trying to get it in the ballpark. You know, being in a historical comic book movie playing an iconic figure, where do I go? What tone does Chris want? And we had a lot of discussions about Chris, being lost sometimes, and saying, “What do I do, where am I going? Should I go here, here, over here?” We tried it many different ways. That was probably, for me, was to find the range of the character and how that fit in with the overall picture of the movie.

PAUL FISCHER: Does the physical aspect of Two Face help you? When you look at the mirror and see that makeup, does that enable you to really transform into the character?

AARON ECKHART: Yeah, definitely. Even the suit and the reactions of the other actors.

PAUL FISCHER: What were the reactions of the other actors the first time they saw you in that makeup?

AARON ECKHART: It was a lot of touching. It was funny because Heath and I spent time in the same trailer, him figuring out what he was going with The Joker, and me figuring out what I was doing with Two Face, so there was a lot of, weird noises, a lot of us trying on the character together. I really appreciated that.

PAUL FISCHER: What surprised you about Heath when you were working with him?

AARON ECKHART: He was, well, I don't know if it surprised me, but what thrilled me was that he was an actor who put it all on the table. It was all out there, and he was committed to this character and loved the character. That the crew and the cast loved him. Chris loved what he was doing with it, and he raised everybody’s game. He was a topic of conversation, about his character and what he was doing with it. To act with him was to fly, you know? I watched him as a fan while I was acting, you know? Like going, Wow, this is really amazing.

PAUL FISCHER: Were you a comic book fan before you did this?

AARON ECKHART: I was not an aficionado. I read the comic books after I got the part. But I grew up with Batman, I knew the television show. My interest in comic books is little, but what I do like about comic books is the reality of them. And I think that’s what interests Chris in making these movies, sort of how do you make it real and entertaining at the same time.

PAUL FISCHER: It doesn’t look like a comic book movie, does it?

AARON ECKHART: No.

PAUL FISCHER: This movie doesn’t have that.

AARON ECKHART: No, but it also has a big feel. That’s where Chris’s genius comes in, because you don’t want Batman to be an independent movie. You want it to be big. How Chris achieved that in my opinion is that every chance he gets he does it for real. Those are real stunts, those are real people, those are real crowds. You know, so you’re grounding this film in reality, we’re in the streets of Chicago flipping trucks in the streets of Chicago. Having helicopters, you’re sitting there one day in a building, and you have helicopters flying through the streets of Chicago. That’s insane, you know what I mean? We just shut down the city.

PAUL FISCHER: Do you think this film is contemporary, do you think this film has contemporary themes?

AARON ECKHART: Oh my gosh, so contemporary. When I read it I was like—I didn't know when I read it if that was his intention, and I think he’s stating that it wasn’t his intention, but it’s just subconsciously it just leaks out. But the themes and the issues and the decisions that one has to make in this life and death, fighting crime, vigilantism. Love. Every, it’s a morality play and every issue is explored. Testing people’s limits. The Joker asks the Batman to betray his one cardinal rule in order to save the woman he loves. How Shakespearean is that?

PAUL FISCHER: What’s next for you?

AARON ECKHART: Traveling. Well, Towelhead comes out.

PAUL FISCHER: Finally, right?

AARON ECKHART: Yeah, finally, and then Traveling, which is a romantic comedy with Jennifer Aniston.

PAUL FISCHER: That’ll be a bit of a change of pace.

AARON ECKHART: Yeah. But it’s good. Hopefully it’s touching and profound at the same time.

Christian Bale walks in to our interview sporting a short-cropped haircut and trimmed beard, part of his look on the new Terminator film. Always serious and contemplative, it is clear that the British actor is impassioned about his latest incarnation as Gotham City’s Batman, in Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight. This time, the film explores moral ambiguity as a theme, and it’s the film’s darker approach to the material that appealed to the actor as he reprised the iconic character given a darker twist this time around. “I met with Chris, I had read Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, I had read various other graphic novels, and for the first time I’d seen something interesting in Batman which I’d never seen before, and that was more the tone how I wished to portray him,” Bale explains as we chat in a Beverly Hills hotel room. “I expressed that to Chris, he told me how he wanted to make the movie, it seemed very compatible and so he decided, yes, he would cast me for it. To me, actually, I feel like we’ve kind of gone back to its roots, when I’ve spoken with friends of Bob Kane, relatives, they’ve said, ‘No, he meant this to be a very dark character.’ He always viewed what Adam West did so well, but he was spoofing Batman, he wasn’t really playing Batman then.”

In The Dark Knight, which pits him against Heath Ledger’s psychotic Joker, Bale agrees that he has made Batman about order and chaos. “I think though that Batman is having to maintain this discipline and a sense of order because he does have such a temptation for chaos, for disruption and for violence, because he has this great shadow side born of the pain of the death of his parents, born for a need for revenge. His creation of Batman is never been healthy for his own personal life, he has a great capability for violence and he’s given himself this one rule of he will not kill precisely because he can see how very easily he could cross that line. But because of his inherited altruism and philanthropy from his parents he does not wish to cross that line, but he’s always in conflict with himself about it, and the Joker is the person who has managed to have him questioning his own ethics, more so than anybody up until now, and tempting him to break his own rule because he knows if he can break his own rule, he can possibly prevent the deaths of many of many other people, and the question of, well, is it in that case selfish to hold on to his principles, should he break his own principles for that, and there is some wonderful ethical questions that come up in The Dark Knight.”

One of the most violent sequences in The Dark Knight has Batman interrogating The Joker, a scene that is violent and almost sadistic. It was the first scene that Bale and Ledger shot, and he recalls “it was a great way to start because we were also afforded the luxury for some part of that scene for being completely alone inside of a room with the cameras outside, and mirrors surrounding us so that the two of us [were] able to be eyeballing each other and then any way we looked we would just see reflections of two freaks sitting at the table together.” It was here that Bale got a clear sense of the kind of gifted actor he was working with. “I was able to see for the first time how Heath was playing the Joker, and the complete commitment he had to it, and really enjoyed seeing that. Of course, what the scene reveals is that this is not going to be Batman’s ordinary foe who he is able to intimidate with violence, because the more he beats the Joker, the bigger the smile on the Joker’s face becomes, so he realizes he’s just satisfying the Joker with this violence. Heath, man, received some heavy bangs and bruises from that scene and he loved every second of it,” Bale recalls laughingly. “He just adored it, and he was egging me on for more as the walls were buckling in from doing that scene. He had total commitment to it, he created this really iconic villain, portrayed the Joker in a way that he’s never been portrayed before, far creepier, far more anarchic than anything we’ve seen, a Clockwork Orange style Joker, and it was a great scene to kick off with, literally.” Bale agrees that working with the late Australian actor helped push his game in a way when working with someone like that. “What we do for a living is completely ridiculous, because we call ourselves grown men who are still pretending to be other people for a living. The more ridiculous I view what I do, the more I love it, and the more I appreciate that I’m able to do this as a living, and the more seriously I take it. It sound paradoxical, but I think that the more serious and the more dramatic any role gets in any genre, the more ridiculous you’ve made it. But I take this incredibly seriously and I recognize that in Heath as well, and so me sitting opposite [him], seeing him, I was getting real pleasure from seeing the satisfaction he was getting from it, because I recognized it was the same satisfaction that I get from acting as well, and absolutely when you have anybody as good as him, we’ve got a damn good cast straight throughout this movie, it becomes that much easier to create great scenes.”

As for a third Batman, nobody, Bale included, is giving anything away. “You’ve got to ask Chris that, but look, I see that in finishing the movie I want to know what happens, what is going to happen. It is completely in the hands of Chris, of whether he desires to do that or not. But I think that there’s a great challenge to it for two reasons, one is that there have been a number of sequels that have surpassed the first movie, such as Godfather 2, Empire Strikes Back, in my personal opinion, at least it surpassed the first. There’s not been many times where the third in a trilogy has managed to be the best, and I see that as a good enough reason to want to tackle it. There’s also another challenge which is Heath has done such a superb job with this, how do you create a superior villain to that?”

And it’s unlikely he would a third film without director Chris Nolan. “I can’t imagine doing this without Chris, I don’t even want to consider that, because he’s created this. No matter how much there are great performances, and no matter how much there’s a great cast and everything, it all comes down to the director. He cast those people; he’s responsible for picking the right people for the right parts, he’s responsible for the whole damn thing, so if the movie works it’s all due to Chris. If the movie fails it’s all due to Chris, the director should take the credit and all the blame whether a movie works or not. Absolutely, he should, because he is the one that’s making all the decisions, I’m just providing the piece of the puzzle, but he’s picked me to provide that piece of the puzzle, so if I’m not doing it well, okay, I’m to blame for not bringing that up but he’s to blame for casting me in the first place.”

Bale is currently shooting the new Terminator film and laughs slightly when asked what it is about him and franchises. “That was actually something which I questioned greatly, I would say, ‘Do I want to do that again?’ But what I saw with Terminator was what I saw with Batman Begins. Now whilst Batman Begins was clearly an origin story, and we were in many ways ignoring any of the other movies that had come before, that won’t be the case with the Terminator – we are staying true to the mythology, certainly to one and two more so than three, but it’s the opportunity and the chance to reinvent and revitalize that, otherwise. And there’s no point in making it. So that is my aim, and that’s why I finally decided, because I took a long time to consider and why I finally decided yes, I wanted to try this, because that’s a responsibility that we have as filmmakers and that’s what I’m aiming to achieve.” He says he is pleased with the way Terminator is progressing. “It’s going well, but it’s a tall order, it really is, and I recognize that and we have a lot of work to do, and I’ve just begun on it, because I only just finished working on Public Enemies a couple of weeks back.”

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