I had a follow-up sort of similar question. The Joker in the script, I’m not sure how much of that was in the script and how much of it was Heath and how much of it was sort of made up right….

David Goyer: Chris is always, you know, in these films like kind of the last writer on and so if there’s any revisions to be done on the set that Chris is doing that and you’d have to ask Chris that in terms of being privy to what was going on between him and Heath, but I will say that Chris is…he likes to have his “I’s” dotted and his “t’s” crossed before he starts shooting.

Jonathan Nolan: He’s pretty meticulous.

David Goyer: Yeah, it’s not like oh, we’ll figure it out when we’re shooting, you know?  Even in the story stage it was definitely…there weren’t a lot of big gaping holes. 

Jonathan Nolan: I think the philosophy was make it work on the page first and then when you get on the set with--we’re done by the time he gets there--you get on the set with some amazing actors and they get to take it to a whole other place.

Following up with that actually, about the Joker and how the script was working out, so in the movie he keeps obviously saying different stories about how he became the Joker, you know before the character’s back story or just so that everyone knew.  Is there a set story on how he became the Joker?

David Goyer: No, that was the whole point.

Jonathan Nolan: It grew from a little bit in part from a detail in The Killing Joke—the Allen Moore book—where he talks about if he had a past--he had to have a past--he’d want it to be multiple choice.  And very much we sort of did a…felt like a little bit of a riff on that idea.  To me, the most interesting version of that character—The Joker—is one who’s elemental, almost like he’s conjured out of thin air, so the idea that he has a back-story, different ways to do it but in this world it feels like it would be reductive for him.

David Goyer: I also think that if we had had a scene in which The Joker told you his origin story or did a flashback when he was a kid or something like that, I don’t think you guys would have appreciated the character as much.  I mean he’s much more interesting. He kind of doesn’t have a beginning and he doesn’t have an end and I actually think it’s a little sloppy sometimes in movie making over the last 20 years or so to like, well every villain has to have a motivational character or we need to know that like…

Jonathan Nolan: Well, it’s a great setup for this character because the most terrifying character is one whose motivation it either completely inscrutable or he doesn’t have one.

So is that from the beginning to avoid?  You know, the classic version of The Joker is he fell into a vat of chemicals.

Jonathan Nolan: But I think you’re…there’s an esthetic component to that.  How does he wind up looking the way he looks?  In my imagination….

David Goyer: But we didn’t want to talk about that.

Jonathan Nolan: Yeah. Because when you go all the way back—Batman I—he’s just there and it’s terrifying and we kind of dug that and it felt appropriate for this film.

I have to ask you guys just real quickly, because it kind of shocked everyone when we heard that Warner Brothers was moving forward with “The Justice League” film, that it was going to kill “Batman” and the whole thing and it had elements from “Batman Begins”, you know the whole Raz Al Ghoul thing.  Were you guys just as shocked?  Did you guys look into that or did you guys just want to avoid that completely?  What was your guy’s reaction?

Jonathan Nolan: We were just busy making a movie.

David Goyer: Yeah.  I mean, I think that Warner Brothers is a big company and DC, you know, there’s obviously there’s a Batman cartoon on right now.

Jonathan Nolan: One of the cool things about working on the franchise is that you get to work within this world that’s been fleshed out by all these incredible artists and writers, which is amazing when it comes time for the script there’s all these amazing ideas that have been played out and we go read all these incredible books and draw inspiration from them.  The flip side of that is you kind of know you’re just the last couple of guys on and they’ll make another movie and they’ll make other movies with these characters.

David Goyer: I’m sure they’ll be…

Jonathan Nolan: Just like the comic books have always had….

David Goyer: They’ll be another iteration of The Joker 10 years from now just like Caesar Romero and Jack Nickleson did iterations before Heath did.

So I came out of this movie just exhilarated kind of like seeing a great movie that only took half a year to get to this.  And my friend I saw it with liked it too, but he’s going “I don’t know. Is Warner Brothers worried about this?  It’s so awfully dark.”  To which I said, “What do you mean?  There was a whole fairy sequence.  If anything wants to give you hope for mankind and hope for the future of urban life maybe, which seems to be a theme in this, that sequence really does it and really earns it.  I just wanted to ask you how do you work kind of overall social themes into this crazy superhero?

Jonathan Nolan: It didn’t feel particularly conscious.  It really felt like we….

David Goyer: You write the character, you write the story.

Jonathan Nolan: Yeah, you hew to the consistent themes of the Batman world for 70 years now.  They have a lot of echoes in contemporary world and I think that’s a testament to how cool the stories were from the beginning. And the idea was not unremitting gloom.  I mean, that’s not the kind of movie I’d like and I think the idea has been to embroider some lightness into it, but the character, to me, growing up as a Batman fan, reading the book, he definitely felt like he was one the darker side of the equation, of looking at this question of vigilantism, which is really central to superhero comic books, but it’s the biggest question of the Batman story, really trying to pick apart how far is too far?

Can you talk about your other projects?

David Goyer: It’s not fair.

Well following up on that, when “Batman Begins” is sort of an unusual blockbuster in that it opened it didn’t like break all the records, and then it had these incredible legs.  And so when you guys came out with the 2^nd you wanted to make it sweeping.  You wanted to make it sprawling, this gigantic crime epic. Was Warner Brothers on-board from the beginning?  Did it take convincing that you were going to go to these darker places or were they just real cool?

Jonathan Nolan: No, from my perspective and again, I get a limited view of it, but it always like we always had the complete support of the studio.

David Goyer: Yeah, they were extremely happy with “Batman Begins” and most of that is a testament to Chris and they said, “what do you guys want to do?” and we said, “This” and that’s what we did, you know?