Day 1: The Dark Knight

[William Whalen]

William Whelan – The Dark Knight

What I learned rewriting my scene is to add strong components to the opening scene.

· Challenging situation: Bank Robbery

· Intrigue: Shot of robber with back to camera carrying a mask and duffle bag waiting to be picked up by the van.

· Interesting Action: Robbers zip lining between buildings; robbers shooting up bank; office worker with shotgun shooting robbers; school bus backing into bank.

· Interesting dialogue: Discussion in van of loot split which foreshadows problems among the thieves on how the money will be divided between them.

· Tone: Sinister – no honor among thieves.

· Lure into story: Violence, intrigue, things not as they appear to be.

· Twist: The Joker is the person killing off the other robbers.

[juan solanas]

• This is the intro of the joker and I suppose also the beginning of the movie. This scene makes a great job for introducing the main character. Very quick we get from here that the joker is clever, unpredictable, complex, pervert, fearless, a-moral and cold as a dead.

  The key for being so efficient is the speed: I feel it’s not an editor inspiration: I was written this way. We are immediately immerse in this intriguing world.

  Thanks for the extreme speed of the event the audience can buy things that are not easy to sell without the speed. Usually super top professionals guy wouldn’t speak so much in the action, wouldn’t tell the partner about killing him, they are pro and stupid at the same time etc etc and more generally just tell us all we need to know. But here with the rhythm of the music, leading a very effective edit and few dynamic camera moves it’s take the audience by speed, and allow us to get surprise without questioning. If the speed would’d be less, all this beautiful mechanic will grip.

  Other Exemple: We see the manager being afraid and passive, but then becoming a bad ass shooter killing a couple of bad guy but then again being not so good running out of amo and not protect him self, then at the end speaking to make himself kill then having his two arms loose and not take out the grenade in his mouth waiting dying ( normally you don’t buy that ).

  All that create surprise and great entertainment and it was made possible because of the frenetic rhythm of the scene plus originals information that build up the scene as the fact of being a mafia bank, the elimination game of the professionals killing each other, us not knowing witch one is the joker because of the mask and being more and more curious to discover him etc etc.

  All together we have a very concentrate delivery of info in a very dynamic, sexy way. Forcing us to be always at the present moment, without the capacity of questioning things, we are surprise and oblige to buy it. That makes the scene very efficient.

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[Deb Johnson]

What makes this scene great… we are immediately put into this strange world where the Joker pulls off a mob bank heist. It begins with thugs zip-lining to the roof, and ends with the Joker, having taken out his accomplices, heading out alone with the money. There is non-stop, interesting action from beginning to end.

There are four levels of conflict:

thugs penetrating the bank

the thugs and the patrons

the bank manager and the thugs

the thugs against the thugs.

I counted nine set-ups/payoffs… with the final reveal of the Joker’s face at the end.

This scene sets up the whole film, by introducing the antagonist (the Joker), his crime against the mob – which is part of the main plot, and the question/theme of ‘how do you stop someone who doesn’t “believe” in anything.’

[Claudia Wolfkind]

I am probably the lone person who does NOT think this is a great scene. I felt it was cartoonish – however, I know that genre was that way, at least in the 50’s and 60’s. The “being thrown right into the action” is good, but the dialogue pulled me out of the action, again and again. I understand they were laying the groundwork to introduce the Joker, but I hated the execution of it. Yes, the action builds on itself and the bank manager gives us a twist (on top of the deaths of all of the robbers, save one)… but I couldn’t help but feel like I was watching something that was making fun of the genre.

[Isti Madarasz]

What I really like is that the whole opening action is a bit chaotic, but still followable. We don’t know who the characters are, we can’t really tell them apart, and their masks reinforce this – but it doesn’t really matter. It’s a fast-paced bank robbery, with this “Joker” in the background – and even if we don’t know what’s going on, he does. I really liked that. And as the plot progresses, we understand more and more, we understand that they’re running out of gangsters, that they’re killing each other and that this whole “knockout” thing is part of a well thought out plan… and I, as the viewer, can sit back and take in the flow of events – even if I don’t understand all the details. But apparently I don’t have to.