As the follow-up to the action hit Batman Begins, The Dark Knight reunites director Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale, who once again plays the man behind the cowl and cape.

The Dark Knight takes Batman across the world in his quest to fight a growing criminal threat. With the help of Lieutenant Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) and District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), Batman has been making headway against local crime…until a rising criminal mastermind known as The Joker (Heath Ledger) unleashes a fresh reign of chaos across Gotham City. To stop this devious new menace--Batman’s most personal and vicious enemy yet--he will have to use every high-tech weapon in his arsenal and confront everything he believes.

Maggie Gyllenhaal joins the cast in the role of Rachel Dawes, which was played originally by Katie Holmes. Returning from Batman Begins are Gary Oldman as Lieutenant Jim Gordon; Oscar winner Michael Caine as Alfred; and Oscar winner Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox.

DCM was able to chat on the phone with Christopher Nolan as he was in the final stages of finishing the film and here’s what he had to say about The Dark Knight and other bat stuff:

DCM: How many IMAX sequences did you shoot and how many will be included in The Dark Knight?

Christopher Nolan: There will be five scenes in the finished film. The film is pretty much done except for some odds and ends. I love the IMAX cameras and even watching the dailies on large screen the quality is just incredible. Were it not so expensive, I would have loved to have shot the whole movie with the IMAX camera. I used the camera for more of the big action beats of the film, such as the opening bank robbery and introduction scene with the Joker.

DCM: How did you select the scenes to be shot in IMAX?

Nolan: I started with the biggest action beats, but then we actually started shooting some of the quieter moments as well. The interesting, quieter, montage moments. We thought we’d try that. It’s just the best, most extraordinary image there is in motion pictures, so it’s kind of addictive. You start wanting to use it more and more.

DCM: The Joker in this film, based upon the images released so far, seems to draw the most from the early Batman comics, where he was described as “a grim jester.” With all the many incarnations of the Joker throughout the years, why did you select that one as opposed to the Joker from “The Killing Joke,” which is one most of the fans always seem to talk about?

Nolan: We looked at all of them. We didn’t look at those first stories until after we’d come up with our story and my production designer came onboard. It’s a weird thing. Halfway through his job he said, “By the way, have you looked at his first and second appearance recently?” And I think maybe years ago I’d seen them. I think David Goyer (Batman Begins Screenwriter) had told me about them. We went back and looked at them and we saw that we wound up at a place that’s drawn very directly from that stuff, but we arrived at it in our own way by researching a lot of the more recent Joker stuff and how he’s been done through the decades, and thinking about what this icon is when viewed through the prism of Batman Begins. It is our take on the material and it had to fit into our universe that we set up or it wouldn’t work right. The tone we set for the first film was so powerful that we had to follow it. And what we arrived at is somebody who is quite a serious guy, really, considering his name’s the Joker and that turned out to be quite similar to his original conception.

DCM: Judging from all the stills we’ve seen thus far, he hardly ever smiles. Do you think others have misinterpreted the character and thought he was supposed to be funny when he may actually be meant to be more ironic?

Nolan: There are different types of being funny. The bank robbery sequence preview [which everyone saw if they went to I Am Legend in the IMAX theaters] has a very dark sense of humor to it, I think. Very sardonic sense of humor to what he’s doing and that’s the way in which he’s funny. And, yes, it’s very easy to confuse that with a lot of smiling and a lot of laughing but what he does in the film is very difficult to capture in stills to be perfectly frank. It’s one of the reasons we wanted to show bank robbery IMAX scene in the previews before I Am Legend as well, to get his introduction out there. It’s the total package. It’s the way he moves, the way he is, it’s the way he inhabits the character. I’m just so excited by it. I think people will be really blown away by it. Still photos just don’t capture anything as definitive as a performance.

DCM: How would you describe Joker’s walk? It’s not quite a limp. It’s the first thing I noticed about the character from the trailer. There’s something...off.

Nolan: There’s just a feel to it and you can’t put your finger on it, and that’s what I love about it. It’s very original and very unique. It’s a unique combination of elements. He would just blow me away every single day on set. It was an incredible thing to watch.

DCM: How did you ever think to cast Heath Ledger? For most fans, he was way off the beaten path from what they were thinking of what the Joker was going to be like..

. Nolan: I don’t exactly remember when it came to pass. I’d met with Heath several times on projects in the past and nothing had ever come of it. And I think he’d heard I was looking for someone to play the Joker before we had a script, and I’d heard that he was really actually into the idea. And we met and we both had exactly the same concept in our heads of who that guy would be in this film in the way that we’d interpreted it. It wasn’t specific to, “Oh, he’s going to look like this or talk like that” at all. It was about a psychological concept. His thought process. It was about a character concept. It was about the threat of anarchy. It was about anarchy being the most frightening thing there is. Chaos and anarchy in this day and age, and I think it is. It's certainly the thing I’m most afraid of.

DCM: And what about the decision to have the Joker wear make-up rather than be altered by chemicals. Was it just easier from a storytelling perspective to have him wear make-up than to explain how chemicals changed him?

Nolan: Well, we never wanted to do an origin story for the Joker in this film. The arc of the story is much more Harvey Dent’s; the Joker is presented as an absolute. He’s just there. It’s a very thrilling element in the film, and a very important element, but we wanted to deal with the rise of the Joker, not the origin of the Joker, if that makes sense.

DCM: In addition to Ledger, there are a lot of other actors in the cast, such as Eric Roberts and Anthony Michael Hall, whom people might not have thought to cast.

Nolan: Well, we have a terrific casting director, John Papsidera, who just comes up with great ideas. He introduced me to fantastic people. And then you think about an actor like Eric Roberts, who is just incredibly talented. So if you can convince someone like that to join your film, you’re filling out the world of the film with incredibly talented people who can support the main actors and that gives everything depth and breadth. A great actor like Eric or any of these guys can just take a scene and take a character and find something in him, in a moment and give you more depth in a moment than you’d otherwise have.

DCM: Was there any concern about including a new reporter character (played by Anthony Michael Hall) in the film since the 1989 Batman film had the reporter character of Alexander Knox in it?

Nolan: No, there’s plenty of other films, whether it’s Daredevil or something, where reporters come into it and there’s a reason for it. The reason being, particularly in the case of The Dark Knight, we’re attempting to tell a very large, city story or the story of a city. In the same way that, I don’t know, Michael Mann’s films, like Heat or something. That was sort of an inspiration. If you want to take on Gotham, you want to give Gotham a kind of weight and breadth and depth in there. So you wind up dealing with the political figures, the media figures. That’s part of the whole fabric of how a city is bound together by its’ media outlets.

DCM: So is that where you got the idea to cast William Fichtner as the bank manager in your robbery sequence? From Heat?

Nolan: [Laughs] Yeah, I know! Exactly! It’s a bit of a nod to that. He’s just an incredible talent and I wanted somebody who’d jump off the screen in our first six minutes because he’s really the only actual face you see for most of it.

DCM: So Christian Bale’s casting in the next Terminator series has been confirmed. Does that mean he’s no longer involved with the Batman franchise and will be doing that instead? Did you only plan to make two Batman movies?

Nolan: [Laughs] No, it’s great. He’s an incredible actor and will bring something great to that production. They’re very lucky to have him, but he’s not afraid to take risks and take on all kinds of different projects. That’s one of the reasons why I like working with him. I would like to do one more Batman and I think Chris would too and then walk away. The Hollywood trilogy is what is looked upon as a perfect model. They could always make more, so who knows what my involvement would be that far in advance. Hollywood is a strange creature and you can never look too far ahead because things fall through all the time.

DCM: So it’s somewhat expected that the third film will focus more on Two-Face, though he’s set up and running in this movie. Will it be a solo story for him or will there be another, secondary villain included in the third movie?

Nolan: [Laughs] I don’t want to give away too much about this film, but the thing I will say, and I said it a lot about Batman Begins and it was genuinely the truth, is I don’t think in terms of sequels. I think in terms of making this film the best film it can be and the most complete film it can be. I think you can start to run into problems early on if the scope of what you want to do is really large. It would have been a problem for me at any rate. Filmmakers like George Lucas and Peter Jackson think on much bigger scales. I like to take them one at a time.

DCM: Why do think the original franchise stalled out so badly?

Nolan: Well, I think that when Tim Burton made his film in 1989, which was a brilliant film - visionary and extraordinarily idiosyncratic, it’s a very stylized movie - when you go down that road to get to four films, you’re bound to hit a dead end at a certain point. It’s just so extreme in its approach.