HOLLYWOOD - The joke's on anyone trying to pry clues about the next Batman flick from its brain trust.Christian Bale, Michael Caine, director Christopher Nolan and co-writer Jonathan Nolan all collaborated on 2005's Batman Begins, teamed again for this Friday's magic-themed mystery The Prestige and will return to Gotham City for the Batman sequel, The Dark Knight.
Yet while promoting The Prestige, none of them revealed much about the follow-up, which shoots early next year for a June 2008 release.
Heath Ledger will portray a more depraved incarnation The Joker. Rumours about other villains popping up (Philip Seymour Hoffman as The Penguin? Guy Pearce as Two-Face?) remain fanboy speculation for now, as does the storyline itself.
Even Batman himself remains, appropriately enough, in the dark. "I have no clue what we're going to be doing and I haven't paid a lot of thought to it," Bale said. "When I sit in the safety vault and read the script being monitored on all sides then I'll know more and I'll move forward with it from there. Before then, I'm truly not thinking about it ... I trust (Nolan) completely. I'm sure he's been coming up with something which improves upon our first one."
Jonathan, Christopher's brother, puts it this way: "There's actually a Warner Brothers team of ninjas that will execute me if I say anything about the script ... I wish I could tell you all about it because it's (going to be) awesome."
As for the surprise casting of Ledger, who received an Oscar nomination for Brokeback Mountain, Christopher Nolan explains it was "just a fortunate series of events. He expressed an interest. I hadn't thought he would be interested in doing it, but I thought it would be worth a try. It was a very early conversation. Then, you know, we realized we were seeing the same character."
Ledger has publicly compared Nolan's take on The Joker to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.
from The Ottawa Sun
