Before you head out this Friday to wrap your hands around a cold brewsky, try wrapping your head around the following description of Aaron Eckhart’s performance(s) as Harvery Dent and Two Face in July’s The Dark Knight. Over at CHUD, Jeremy Smith spills all he knows about what Christopher Nolan has in store for us. It is pretty WTF, so here we go…
“Basically, Nolan shot complementary takes of Eckhart in Two-Face makeup so he could visually represent the duality of Dent in a less cartoony fashion,” says Smith. …[Harvey/Two Face] is a fifty-fifty split of the same actor giving two wildly divergent performances in the same shot.
And because he has two takes of each scene, Nolan has the luxury of shaping Eckhart’s performance in post; it’s just a matter of switching the dial between normal Harvey and bug-fuck Two-Face. Again, both will be present in the shot, but only one will dominate the poor bastard’s conflicted consciousness at any given moment. The technical audacity required in pulling this off may be the reason Two-Face was held back in the trailer.”
So, anyone who was hoping that Nolan’s Dent/Two Face would bear resemblance to Mel Gibson in The Man Without a Face or Tommy Lee Jones in Batman Forever…shame, shame! If the following report is on the money, Nolan is literally going to split Eckhart’s performance in half and launch the film’s crazy factor into outer space. In fact, The Dark Knight might turn out to be one of the darkest, most ruthless PG-13 movies ever, summer or not, from the sounds of it.
Discuss: How do you imagine Nolan’s rather ballsy technique turning out on the big screen?
