Video: “How I Wrote ‘The Dark Knight’”

A compilation of first-person clips which explore Christopher Nolan’s writing process and his psychological take on the Bruce Wayne / Batman Protagonist.

With the release of The Batman, the latest iteration of the iconic Bruce Wayne character, I thought it would be interesting to revisit a previous take, specifically The Dark Knight, screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan, story by Christopher Nolan & David S. Goyer, characters by Bob Kane.

Here is a terrific video which compiles actual audio excerpts of Christopher Nolan talking about his writing process and his rather psychological take on not only Bruce Wayne, but other key characters in the movie including Harvey Dent and, of course, Joker.

Here’s a quote which resonated with me:

“One of the story elements I’m continually drawn to the Protagonist who suffers. I think if that comes from inside themselves, if they are somehow responsible for their own predicament, I find that evocative. I find that very much more moving than if it’s as simple as, ‘Here’s a bad guy and he’s doing bad things.’

Not to get too pretentious, but from Shakespeare and all the rest, that’s something that’s struck a chord in me. It’s this idea that the seeds of your own destruction, they really are internal, they really are coming from inside yourself, it heightens everything. It heightens the sense of tragedy to do with everything. In the case of Batman and this story, it’s a question of finding the positivity, it’s a question of saying, ‘Here is a character, like the Protagonists in my other films, who is driven by extraordinarily negative things, but what makes him a heroic figure is that he’s able to channel these negative impulses into something positive, into something altruistic into helping other people, rather than the notion of personal vengeance.”

This idea of how a Protagonist’s “predicament” comes “from inside themselves” recalls another quote:

“The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict.”

This is a key aspect of the world view of Carl Jung, founder of analytical psychology, and in many ways is the foundation of my book The Protagonist’s Journey: An Introduction to Character-Driven Screenwriting and Storytelling. The basic idea as it relates to writing a story is this: The inner psychological state of the Protagonist creates the outer experiences of their journey, not only through the choices they make, but that the actual events which occur and characters with whom they intersect are directly related in a synergistic manner to that inner state of being.

In The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne seeks to bring “something positive” (Nolan’s language) to his heroic efforts, provide a sense of order in Gotham City. Given the tragedy he experienced as a youth — the murder of his parents — it makes sense (from a writer’s perspective) that the character must confront Joker, a total agent of chaos, the opposite of order.

Earlier in the video, Nolan talks about creating a “sense of inevitability” with The Dark Knight. In my book, I write about this very thing: Narrative Imperative. This again derives from and is driven by the Protagonist’s inner state of being as they grapple with the influence of their initial state of Disunity (my language).

I don’t know this for a fact, but I believe that Nolan must have read Carl Jung (I wrote about this in my article Inception: Carl Jung’s Wet Dream). “When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate.” To me, that is the essence of the Protagonist’s journey. The journey they take is the one they must take. It is inevitable because the psychological dynamics at play in their inner nature drives the emerging plot.

Watch the video. See if you agree.

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