As The Dark Knight swoops into theaters this weekend, the buzz around Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker is becoming deafening. But how much of that character and how much came from director and co-screenwriter Christopher Nolan? Here, in a Filmazing exclusive, Christopher Nolan explains where The Dark Knight's dark storyline and imagery comes from, and how he and Ledger collaborated to create a villain for the ages.

Q: You have a unique vision as a director and the writer of this film.  Fill in the viewers so they’ll know what to expect when they first come into it.

A: I think what people can expect from The Dark Knight is a very direct continuation of our story from Batman Begins.  [When] we left Batman at the end of Batman Begins, he’d become the Batman we know and love, but Gordon at the end points to this idea of escalation.  He turns over a joker card, he talks about you’re doing this crazy crime fighting, [like] "You’re putting on a mask, jumping off roof tops, what’s that going to inspire in the criminal fraternity? What’s the response?"

This movie is all about the response, personified most by the person of the Joker, who is this absolute maniac who comes essentially inspired to some degree I think by Batman’s theatrics. So it’s all about escalation, it’s all about the escalation of the criminals versus the crime fighters, and it opens up I think a very epic sort of crime story.

Q: Great, now I’ve read...that you have a slight aversion to CGI. It seems you’ve gotten over it for this film. There are some amazing special effects.

A: We have some amazing visual effects in the movie. I like to use computer graphics. I really like to play to their strengths, and what they are very good at is enhancing something that you photograph for real.  So what we try to do is shoot as much as possible for real, and then use computers and visual effects to enhance that, to take that to the next stage.

And there are various things in the film that we [use to] sort of push the boundaries, and...at the same time, there are big long action set pieces where I think other films these days might have done by visual effects, where we’ve actually done everything for real. So we’ve tried to really keep a feeling of reality through the film, whether we’re using visual effects or whether we’re doing things for real.

Q: The Joker was amazing. [The late Heath Ledger] did a great job. Was that more your vision of him, did you coach him? Did he come up with that?  How much was you and how much was him?

A: Well it was a very organic process. I first met with Heath about the character before we had even finished the script, and we had the same core idea — the idea of an anarchist, the idea of someone dedicated to chaos, who is terrifying because he doesn’t in any way obey any kind of sense of structural rules and can’t be negotiated with, can’t be reasoned with and so forth.  That was the starting-off point, and then everything else was a collaboration. 

I mean Heath went away for months and came up with all kinds of fantastic ideas for how he was going to portray this, create this icon, really. And then in combination with his makeup people and wardrobe and everything we sort of gradually put it all together, did film tests, and we’d see him start to move with the coat on, play with the knives and the guns and the things he’d be using in the film.  You sort of saw it grow very, very organically. But he spent many months on his own figuring out how to do this thing.

Q: I was impressed with the speech affectations.

A: The voice is pretty incredible. What he does with the voice is very hard to pin down. It’s got incredible range and incredible complexity to it. It’s been very thought through and put together in a very complex way.