Perhaps the most anticipated film of the summer, The Dark Knight swoops into theaters on July 18, bringing with it returning characters Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, stepping in for Katie Holmes) and new ones as well—notably the Joker, played by Heath Ledger, who died in January after completing his role, and Harvey Dent, played by Aaron Eckhart. Ledger's groundbreaking performance is being hailed by critics, and there is even talk of a posthumous Oscar nomination.

In director Christopher Nolan's sequel to his 2005 reboot Batman Begins, Dent is the newly elected crusading district attorney in a crime-ridden Gotham City. He works with the police, led by detective Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman), and vigilante hero Batman (Bale) to contend with the Joker, a force of chaos.

Nolan and Bale spoke with reporters in Beverly Hills, Calif., earlier this month about The Dark Knight.

Christopher Nolan, you had to be convinced to do a sequel.

Nolan: Yeah, well, you know, it's daunting, the idea of taking on a sequel. ... I came to see it as an interesting challenge, but at first I was a little bit unwilling to roll the dice again, if you like, because Batman Begins had been well received. There's really no point in doing the sequel unless you can try and do something that you'll be more interested in or that you hope the audience will be more interested in.Do you feel in a sequel you were able to do more of what you had hoped to do with the character, with the franchise, with the world?

Nolan: There's a huge advantage being able to jump in having told the origin story, so you can jump in with a fully formed character and then see where that goes. So I think it definitely gives you the opportunity to go new places and to get into the story much faster. But at the same time, I had very much enjoyed the rhythm and dynamic of the origin story that we got to tell in Batman Begins, so it was a little bit daunting how we were going to replace that: the feeling of scale and size that gave us, just the timespan of that story. And so what we chose to do is to tell a very immediate, very linear story, but based on a slight genre shift, going a little more into the crime story, a little more into the kind of epic city stories of films like Michael Mann's Heat, things like that, which I think achieve great scale, even though they're confined within one city.People have been talking about Heath Ledger's performance and the way that you directed Heath, which is basically to give him a lot of freedom to do what he wanted to do. Can you talk about that and what he brought to the character and how that sort of evolved?

Nolan: Heath and I talked a lot about the abstractions of the character, of the underlying philosophy of the character and what he represents in the story, and what that tone would need to be. But then it was really up to him to go off and figure out how he was going to make something that he understood had to be iconic somehow. But he also understood that it had to be human and recognizably human, because the threat we discussed—the threat of pure anarchy, of chaos ... an individual whose only real pleasure, only real amusement, comes from tearing down the structures around him—that's a very human form of evil. So he has to be human as well as iconic. Heath put a lot of time and energy into figuring out a very complex way of achieving this.You chose to shoot large parts of the film in the IMAX big-screen format. Can you talk a bit about the process of what exactly you shoot in IMAX?

Nolan: The logistics and the creative [decisions] actually match up relatively well. ... The first thing you think of is that you're going to shoot your major action set pieces that way, and action tends to be light on dialogue, which is helpful, because the cameras are far too noisy to record dialogue with. You also tend to be ... large camera mounts, which can be made to accommodate these larger cameras, so there's a good match up logistically there. You also have a lot of time to shoot those scenes, because of the complexity of them and the logistics of them. [But] what we found as we started getting more and more interested in [it is using] these cameras ... for smaller, quieter moments that weren't necessarily action-based. And that became interesting photographically as well. So we just worked [the IMAX format] more and more into the movie, and because we knew that for the 35mm release we'd be extracting [a] 35mm [image] from the IMAX [print], we used the cameras as much as we felt like, and then in the [editing] were free to decide, "Do we use the full IMAX frame for this, or do we keep it in the 35mm [aspect ratio]?" And so there are a few things we shot—like the ... cop funeral, where there are so many hundreds and hundreds of police—we shot all those grand shots ... actually ... in IMAX, but they don't appear in IMAX in the finished film, because, ... rhythmically, it didn't feel right. It was an edit-room decision at the end of the day.So do you think that the formula that you created for The Dark Knight might be the template that you'd use for your next film?

Nolan: I think it might well. I mean, I have to see how audiences respond to it, but based on these early screenings we've been doing and based on the way people are receiving the film, it seems to heighten the experience of the film for people. It seems to throw them into the action in very much the way I'd hoped. ... We've found a lot of ways to deal with the cumbersome nature of the post-production process and everything; we learned a lot. ... Anything you can do, I think, to elevate the theatrical experience of film helps keep film distinct from the home-theater experience, which is increasingly technically sophisticated.In sequels, the hero tends to get lost among the new characters and villains, but in The Dark Knight, Batman is very much sharing a lot of film time with Harvey and the Joker. Can you talk about how you keep Batman in that mix and interesting and sort of at the forefront, while having these other very colorful characters around him?

Nolan: The danger with a sequel that attempts to be sort of bigger and broader than the first film is you do have to bring in more characters, you do have to expand on what was there. The danger is that you lose sight of the heroic presence at the center of it. You lose sight of who the film's about. I think that what Christian [Bale] figured out from the script—and what we were able to put into the story—was that by the end of the film, I think he makes the film very much his own. The film sort of rotates back to Batman, and he takes it back very much in the last few minutes of the film, I would say. The relevance of all of these other characters and all of the other things that would have gone on, the relevance to those things to the figure of Batman, I think, becomes very apparent. And that was always very important. I knew how the film ended long before we figured out the story of the film, and that's the way in which we've tried to make it clear that The Dark Knight is ultimately about Batman, is about the Dark Knight.Can you talk about what it would take to bring you back for a third film? David S. Goyer, who helped come up with the story, and your brother, Jonathan Nolan, with whom you share screenwriting credit, talked about how you had to be talked into doing this sequel. What would it take to bring you back for a third time?

Nolan: Enormous amounts of cash [laughs]. I don't know. No, the truth is, the only way I can answer that question, ... there are two ways. The first thing to say is I literally finished this film last week. That was when we finished our IMAX prints. So I have no idea what I'm going to do next, what I'll do in the future. The film to me is not actually finished until the audience sees it and tells me what it is, really. So it's too early to say for all those kind of reasons. The other thing to be said on the subject is we absolutely did not feel in taking on the idea of doing the second film that we could in any way hamper ourselves or disadvantage ourselves by saving things for another film. ... I think that's a mistake people have made in the past, thinking too much of the future. I think you have to put all your eggs into one basket and make as great a film as you can, and that's what we've tried to do.I wanted to know what fans might expect on the DVD and/or Blu-ray?

Nolan: We're coming up with, I think, some very interesting extras for the DVD and for the Blu-ray. [For] the Blu-ray in particular, we'll be able to use the shift in aspect ratios as it appears on the IMAX screen, because the 16-by-9 aspect ratio is sufficiently different from the 240 that you'll actually see a shift on the Blu-ray, and the resolution on the Blu-ray is clear enough that you'll see a difference in grain structure and sharpness, so I think it'll be quite spectacular. But that's something we're only just beginning to work on.Can you tell us anything about how the Harvey Dent makeup worked?

Nolan: Depending who your audience is, certainly for film sophisticates, if you like, it's very apparent that it's done primarily using computer graphics. And that was a choice I made, because I wanted the look to be so extreme as to be a little bit fanciful. When we looked at doing sculpts of the look, you know, in clay, of Aaron's face and how it would look degraded in different ways, the more subtle the mutilation, the more horrible and depressing it was somehow, and it's the one area of the film where I felt [like] being a little more fanciful, being a little bit less ... realistic ... and having just a lot of interesting sculptural detail in it for the audience to look at, have a morbid fascination with. That was the term we were looking for. We don't want people ... throwing up their popcorn, and we don't want them looking away from the screen. We want them to be able to engage with his character. So we wanted it to be a little bit fanciful.Christian Bale, in a franchise like this, a lot of times the filmmakers say that the second movie is the film they wanted to make the first time around, because they don't have the problem of establishing the world anymore and can just jump right into the heart of the story. Is that how you feel about this?

Bale: I wouldn't abandon the first one quite so easily as that. I mean, I enjoy very much Batman Begins. I think it was done superbly. I really enjoy the origin story; it's absolutely essential. The Dark Knight couldn't exist without having had Batman Begins beforehand. What I do think is that previous to Batman Begins, everyone was going on faith based on what Chris Nolan was saying he was going to do, whereas now with The Dark Knight they had proof of what he was going to do. And I think that in my eyes it appears as though he was given more freedom to make exactly the movie that he wished to. And so we see an even more realistic-appearing Gotham, the characters, and I think he's really nailed it with his ability to take a certain genre of movie but not have it be constricted by that genre, you know? And truly has made a superb story and finely crafted movie that I think stands up against any movie, regardless of genre. ...This is a much more street-level Batman. This is a crime epic, as opposed to the first one. Does that affect the way you're playing Batman this time, because it is more of a crime epic, a little bit more noir, pulpy?

Bale: There are more mind games being played here in this one. ... Batman will always have this conflict within himself of his altruistic side versus his raging, violent ... demonic side. But added to it with this one is the notion that he wants out. He does not want to continue to be Batman. He is looking for somebody who can be, like he says, a hero with a face, which will make Batman obsolete. Which is his initial goal. He doesn't want to have a Gotham where Batman is necessary. ...

Harvey Dent is clearly the potential heir to that, the elected official who can have integrity and stamp out the corruption and the crime. But we're seeing that Batman is finding it impossible to relinquish this creature, no matter how much it means that his own life is being sacrificed and that he's suffering because of that. ... And especially with the arrival of the Joker. ... I think there's a mutual fascination between Batman and the Joker, you know? Like the Joker says, "You complete me." I think that Batman is a wonderful challenge for the Joker, because everyone else has just been too easy. They've quit so early on. They've been paid off. They've been bought out. They just give up their ethics and beliefs so quickly. The Joker sees that Batman does not compromise. The Joker does not compromise, and so both of them are raising great questions for each other, and the Joker is tempting Batman very much to break his own cardinal rule of, you know, he will not kill. ... Bruce Wayne really wants to quit being Batman. Will there ever be a day that Bruce Wayne could stop being Batman? Is there enough of him left in there anymore?

Bale: I think, again, there's two minds about that. I think that on the one hand he needs to. I think this is not something he feels he can continue to do endlessly in terms of [the] physical and mental toll that it is taking on him. But I think there is also an addiction to it. I think the day that he actually did take off his suit and burn it, ... I don't think he would know what to do. Do you ever get tired of it, or are you excited about doing another one?

Bale: No, I mean, listen: The possibility of doing another one is completely Chris Nolan's decision. ... If he's doing it, then absolutely. ... He's presented himself with a huge challenge of surpassing this one, I believe. And very much so with the challenge of surpassing the Joker as a villain. How do you up that? It's a very tricky thing to do. If anybody can do it, I think Chris can. So that's his choice. I've actually enjoyed very much reprising a role. You know, I've never experienced that before, and I like it a great deal.Other cast members who have all uniformly said how Heath Ledger came in and helped raise their performances because of how free he was with the character. Can you talk about working with him and how that informed your own performance?

Bale: The tone for the performances had already been set, and ... Chris had picked a really wonderful cast, so each and every person was up in their game. Heath clearly had created a character which, I was absolutely happy to stand back and witness and see that, you know, this guy is going to completely steal the show, and in a fantastic way, in a deserved fashion, you know? The Joker is a hypnotic character. I mean, one thing that we'd always wanted to make sure is that, in all the other portrayals of Batman that I've seen, he'd always been less interesting than the villains, and I think that we've found, you know, the true interest, and I find Batman to be absolutely fascinating. But, clearly, the first movie was all about Batman and how he came to be that. Well now we see him, he's in a position of power already, ... now is the time that we start introducing these other archetypal villains, and Heath did just a fantastic job.

It was a real pleasure to work with him, to see his immersion in it. It gave me a lot of amusement, because I enjoy watching somebody when they commit themselves so absolutely to a role, and it's absolutely right. Yeah. I think he's just raised the bar in general, as Chris has, for villains, you know? He's created an iconic villain for the ages, and I think, simultaneously, Chris has raised the bar for so-called genre movies. They don't have to be limited to being considered good action or good superhero movies. They can be good movies, finish, and I think this one stands on its own two feet against any drama that's been out there this year.In this film, Dark Knight, you have some big action set pieces, and you have some very small moments. Do you have a favorite, when you've looked at the film, that you've just—a favorite of the film?

Bale: The ones that immediately come into my mind are actually the interrogation room scene with Heath, I did enjoy that greatly. Largely because that was the first time that we were sitting together in that room by ourselves, just recognizing how we were going to be portraying these characters. In terms of experience, I did enjoy, no end, the standing on the edge of the Sears Tower shot. ...Were you on the edge of the Sears Tower yourself?

Bale: Yeah, I was. It's not really a stunt. It's more an experience. I had a cable; they weren't going to let me plummet 110 stories to the bottom. I could have fallen, but I just would have had a nasty bang against the [side of the building and] surprised some office worker down below and then get hauled back up. But yeah. ... All the fight sequences I do myself. With that, I had to turn to my stunt double Buster [Reeves] and say, "Sorry, buddy, that one's mine. I've got to be doing that one." But I gave him slamming into concrete pillars at 30 miles an hour, falling five stories onto a car, that stuff. I was like, "No, that's yours. You can take that one." But the Sears Tower experience I had to take for myself. Had to be selfish.