Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” is now 10 years old. I wrote about this important anniversary earlier this summer, but it seems like the op-eds just keep on coming.
Vulture has published an article on that now infamous pencil trick scene, which had Heath Ledger’s Joker making a pencil "disappear" by jamming it into a gangster’s head. The film's cinematographer Wally Pfister, speaking to Vulture, believes that that scene alone should have gotten the film an R-rating.
“It’s kind of shocking that ‘The Dark Knight’ ended up being PG-13,” Pfister said. “All of Chris’s movies would be PG-13 to open it up to a wider audience. Somehow, he always had some magic with the MPAA. Lo and behold, he has the pencil and I’m like, ‘You are not getting the PG-13 with that. There’s no way this is going in. He’s driving this pencil through a guy’s head!’ And I was wrong.”
“Chris was always right, whether you liked it or not,” Pfister continued. “You’d be like, ‘Fuck you, you were right again.’ With this pencil trick, I thought, If it has the right amount of levity, we’ll sell this and it won’t come off as being violent but it’ll come off as being a magic trick and it’ll come off as being a punchline. And it was!”
You can read the whole playbook on how they managed to pull-off that pencil scene [via Vulture].
As expected, Snyder's latest is being torn apart by TIFF attendees. No mercy given. The film, which had its world premiere this evening, is being called by some one of the worst movies to ever premiere at the festival.