50 Fun Facts About The Dark Knight

Which actor plays Bruce Wayne and Batman in The Dark Knight?

Christian Bale overheard the stunt team planning a shot of Batman on the edge of a skyscraper roof and insisted on doing it himself, so that really is him up there.

Heath Ledger's Joker followed which actor's Joker from Tim Burton's 1989 film Batman?

Jack Nicholson. To find a version of his own, Ledger shut himself in a London hotel room for about a month, keeping a diary and experimenting with voices.

The Dark Knight is the sequel to which 2005 film?

Batman Begins ends on a tease, with a police ally telling Batman about a new criminal who leaves joker playing cards behind, yet its director had not planned to make a sequel.

Which real city stood in for most of Gotham City in The Dark Knight?

Chicago. The director, who partly grew up there, liked that its skyscrapers and underground streets were striking yet less instantly recognisable than New York's.

Which actor plays Harvey Dent, later Two-Face, in The Dark Knight?

Aaron Eckhart said he kept thinking about the Kennedys, and he and the director settled on a half-burned suit in place of the pink-haired Two-Face of Batman Forever.

Who plays Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne's butler, in The Dark Knight?

Michael Caine said that when he first saw Heath Ledger's Joker, on a video in a scene with Batman, it was so stunning that he completely forgot his lines.

Which actress replaced Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes in The Dark Knight?

Maggie Gyllenhaal stepped in because Holmes turned the sequel down to star in the crime comedy Mad Money instead.

Who plays Wayne Enterprises chief Lucius Fox in The Dark Knight?

Morgan Freeman's Fox agrees to run Batman's city-wide spying machine just once, says he will resign if it outlives the job, and ends the film destroying it.

Which actor plays police lieutenant Jim Gordon in The Dark Knight?

Gary Oldman's Gordon is shot at a memorial and believed dead, then turns up alive at the wheel of a police van to arrest the Joker, and is promoted to commissioner.

Which mob accountant moves the gangs' money overseas and flees Gotham in The Dark Knight?

Lau believes his home city puts him beyond extradition, so Batman flies out, snatches him from his own office tower and leaves him for the Gotham police.

Which kind of building does The Dark Knight's Joker publicly threaten, then blow up?

A hospital: the blast is real, staged at a candy factory that had stood abandoned for years.

In The Dark Knight's climax, the Joker rigs two of what with explosives, giving each the other's detonator?

Ferries: one carries ordinary citizens and the other prisoners, and to the Joker's disbelief neither boatload will blow up the other to save itself.

In The Dark Knight, what does Wayne Enterprises consultant Coleman Reese threaten to reveal on live television?

The vigilante's real name: Reese first tries blackmail, and Lucius Fox asks if his plan is really to extort a billionaire who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp, then says, 'Good luck.'

What does Alfred destroy in the closing moments of The Dark Knight?

A letter from Rachel: written before she died, it says she chose to marry Harvey Dent, and Alfred destroys it so that Bruce never learns she would not have waited for him.

In The Dark Knight, how does Two-Face decide the fate of the people he confronts?

Flipping a coin: his lucky coin has two heads, so at first he cannot lose, but the night he is burned leaves one side scarred and turns every toss into a real gamble.

Whom is Harvey Dent holding at gunpoint when Batman tackles him off a building in The Dark Knight?

Gordon's son: Dent blames Gordon for the death of the woman he loved and wants him to feel the same loss, and the fall that saves the boy kills Dent.

In The Dark Knight, what does Alfred say some men just want to do?

'Watch the world burn': Alfred is recalling a bandit in Burma who stole jewels only to throw them away, and he later admits they caught the man by burning the forest down.

In The Dark Knight, Harvey Dent says you either die a hero or live long enough to become what?

The villain: Batman quotes the line back at the end, when he takes the blame for Dent's killings and lets Gotham hunt him so that its fallen hero stays a hero.

In The Dark Knight, what does the Joker make 'disappear' in his magic trick at the mob meeting?

A pencil: he stands it point-up on the table, slams a mobster's henchman face-first onto it and announces, 'Ta-da! It's gone.'

In The Dark Knight, the Joker first blames his scars on his father; whom does his second story involve?

His wife: he tells a guest at a fundraiser he cut his own smile so that his scarred wife would not feel alone, and that she then left him; the film never settles which story, if either, is true.

In The Dark Knight's opening bank heist, what kind of vehicle does the Joker drive away in?

A school bus: he pulls out of the bank and slots into a convoy of identical buses just as the police arrive.

Which Gotham crime boss does Eric Roberts play in The Dark Knight?

Sal Maroni, Falcone's successor: Batman drops him off a fire escape, injuring his legs, and still learns nothing, because no one will cross a man with no rules.

Cillian Murphy returns briefly in The Dark Knight as which old Batman foe?

Scarecrow: Batman rounds him up in a parking garage, along with a gang of gun-toting Batman impersonators who have crashed his drug deal.

Which long-serving US senator and Batman fan faces the Joker in a Dark Knight cameo?

Patrick Leahy plays the party guest who tells the Joker 'We're not intimidated by thugs' and gets a knife held to his face; he said the fear took no acting.

In The Dark Knight, what does Batman turn into a city-wide sonar network to find the Joker?

Mobile phones: every handset in Gotham becomes a microphone that maps its surroundings, and the machine leads Batman to the Joker and is destroyed once the job is done.

The Dark Knight was the first major feature film to shoot scenes with which camera format?

IMAX: the bulky cameras and their film cost roughly four times as much as ordinary 35 mm, so the director had to talk the studio into something that had never been done.

In The Dark Knight, how does Batman leave an overseas skyscraper with his prisoner?

Hooked to a passing plane: a balloon carries a line up for a low-flying cargo aircraft to snag, the real 'Skyhook' system the CIA and US military used to lift people off the ground.

In The Dark Knight, what kind of vehicle did the crew somersault for real instead of using CGI?

An 18-wheel truck: it is the Joker's rig, which Batman upends in the film's big street chase, and the crew really sent one end over end in a city's financial district.

What is Batman's motorbike-like vehicle called in The Dark Knight?

Batpod: it has no handlebars and is steered with the shoulders, and only one stunt rider, Jean-Pierre Goy, could stay on it, after unlearning how to ride a normal motorbike.

In The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne sails off on his yacht with the entire company of what?

A Russian ballet: Harvey Dent and his date arrive at the theatre to find the performance cancelled, because Bruce has taken the whole company on a cruise, which he then leaves by seaplane.

Which painter's distorted portraits shaped the Joker's smeared makeup in The Dark Knight?

Francis Bacon: the director kept referring to one of his paintings during makeup tests, and said the painter's influence brought corruption and decay to the texture of the Joker's face.

Which 1990s comic series, about Batman's pact with a prosecutor and a policeman, shaped The Dark Knight's story?

The Long Halloween sets the same three men against Gotham's crime families, and it ends the same way, with the district attorney scarred into Two-Face.

Which 1995 crime film did Christopher Nolan name as an inspiration for The Dark Knight?

Heat: the director said Michael Mann's film inspired him to tell 'the story of a city', which is why Gotham's politicians, police and reporters all get a part.

Which Oscar category was widened from five nominees to ten the year after The Dark Knight missed out?

Best Picture: announcing the change, the Academy's president admitted he 'would not be telling you the truth' if he said the words 'Dark Knight' had not come up.

Besides Heath Ledger's acting award, which other Oscar did The Dark Knight win?

Sound Editing went to Richard King, in the only category where Slumdog Millionaire, that night's eight-Oscar winner, lost to another film.

Who went on stage to accept Heath Ledger's posthumous Oscar for The Dark Knight?

His parents and sister collected it, but under an agreement with the Academy the statuette belongs to his daughter Matilda, then three, who could not take full ownership until she turned 18.

The Dark Knight's $158 million opening weekend broke a record set a year earlier by which film?

Spider-Man 3 had opened to $151.1 million in 2007; forecasters had the Batman sequel falling short of it, and the studio's own head of distribution admitted he had not thought it could come close.

When The Dark Knight left US theaters in 2009, which film alone had earned more there?

Titanic: even after the studio sent the Batman film back into hundreds of theaters for Oscar season, its $533 million stayed well short of the $601 million record.

Which composer shared The Dark Knight's score with Hans Zimmer?

James Newton Howard took Harvey Dent, giving Gotham's shining prosecutor a brass-led Americana theme, and the two men divided the rest of the film between them by character.

The Joker's musical theme in The Dark Knight is named after which of his lines?

'Why So Serious?' twists its notes until they mimic thunder and razors, and Hans Zimmer said he gave the piece a punk attitude.

Which US institution added The Dark Knight to its National Film Registry in 2020?

The Library of Congress names 25 films a year, none less than ten years old, and the film's director called this pick a tribute to the artists and writers behind decades of Batman stories.

Which make of sports car does Bruce Wayne drive, and wreck, in The Dark Knight?

Lamborghini: the model is a Murciélago, the Spanish word for 'bat', and the company lent the production three of them, one of which was wrecked.

Which 2012 film concluded Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy?

The Dark Knight Rises picks the story up eight years on, with Batman still blamed for Harvey Dent's crimes and Bruce Wayne living as a recluse until Bane forces him back.

Where in England did The Dark Knight's crew stage the warehouse blast that kills Rachel Dawes?

Battersea Power Station: the blast lit up the long-empty London landmark, and people nearby rang the emergency services fearing a terrorist attack.

Warner Bros. kept The Dark Knight out of cinemas in which country, citing 'cultural sensitivities'?

China: the studio blamed pre-release conditions and 'cultural sensitivities to some elements of the film', giving up a cinema market that was growing fast.

Which breed of dog does the Chechen keep at his side in The Dark Knight?

Rottweilers: they maul Batman in a parking-garage fight, and when the Joker takes over the gang he proposes feeding the Chechen to them to see 'how loyal a hungry dog really is'.

In The Dark Knight, Batman travels to which city to seize a fugitive mob accountant?

Hong Kong: the mob's banker thinks he is safe from extradition there, but as the Joker warns the bosses, 'Batman has no jurisdiction.'

Which major award did The Dark Knight's score win in 2009 after the Oscars left it out?

A Grammy, for its score album: the Academy had at first ruled the music ineligible for the Oscars because too many composers were credited.

Under what ruse title did The Dark Knight film in Chicago to avoid attention?

The media quickly uncovered the truth; thirteen weeks of filming were estimated to have generated $45 million for the city.

What do the robbers wear in The Dark Knight's opening bank heist?

Clown masks: the gang members pick each other off one by one for a bigger share, until the last man standing takes his mask off and turns out to be the Joker.