“He cuts through the film”: When Christopher Nolan compared Heath Ledger's Joker to the Shark from Jaws

The Dark Knight is one of Christopher Nolan's most popular works, but in 2006, he wasn't sure about working on this project. Until then, Nolan had not worked on a sequel. He had directed only two feature films and had gotten his third, The Prestige, released in the theaters. So, when the studio wanted to produce a follow-up to his 2005 film Batman Begins, he needed to be convinced that it warranted one. In a discussion with Variety, he shed light on this subject.

"Emma and I had never done a sequel so for us, the main challenge was to continue the story appropriately and keep it stylistically and tonally consistent. You want to move the story forward and make it somehow larger or more important without losing what worked in the first one."

Thankfully, Christopher Nolan began working on the screenplay for The Dark Knight, hoping to keep it more grounded and realistic. Then came the discussion about Joker. To make him appear more menacing, he and his co-writer, David Goyer, made a couple of decisions.

Christopher Nolan's creative inspirations behind The Dark Knight, explored

One of Christopher Nolan's creative decisions for his 2008 classic was not to let the villain have an origin story. It helped maintain a mystery about his anarchic actions. The other decision was casting Heath Ledger as Joker.

At the time, this 20-something Australian actor was known for his Oscar-nominated portrayal of a closeted shepherd in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain. So, the decision to cast him in this iconic role wasn't met with the warmest of receptions. Two decades later, Ledger's portrayal often comes up in discussions about some of the finest performances ever.

The Joker in Christopher Nolan's film doesn't learn much from the consequences of his actions or their failings. He remains amoral throughout the film, which makes him all the more terrifying and unpredictable. While speaking about his creative choices, Christopher Nolan once mentioned Steven Spielberg's Jaws as an influence.

"We wanted to push these characters and test them in new ways. We wanted to use The Joker as a catalyst, not as someone who has an arc or learns anything in the story. I like to say that he cuts through the film like the shark in "Jaws." He's a force the other characters have to react to so he helped us push our returning characters forward and fortunately we were able to bring most of the cast back."

In this regard, Heath Ledger's Joker is similar to Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh in Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men (2007). They are both driven by animalistic impulses and feel no remorse for their actions. We learn nothing about their past. So, there is nothing to inform what motivates them to the inhumane crimes. That ambiguity can be lost if characters are dissected from every conceivable angle.

As Christopher Nolan said, Heath Ledger's Joker acts as a catalyst for the other characters' actions and inadvertently works as a mirror to societal issues. While speaking about the etched-out origin stories, the filmmaker said,

"It's quite a familiar trope, really, if you look at Hannibal Lecter or one of these movie monsters like Darth Vader in the first "Star Wars." The more you find out about those fictional characters the less threatening they really are. Our decision with The Joker was to not deal with the origin story and to laugh at that convention. We wanted him to be absolutely threatening in what he represents as a force of anarchy and chaos."

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Also read: “It’s taken away the mystery”: When ‘Qui-Gon Jinn’ Liam Neeson criticized the many spin-offs of Star Wars

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