Can you remember the movie that made you want to work in film? That memory is a little hazy for me. I had a few distinct childhood periods of hyperfixation that certainly contributed, including a paleontology phase inspired by Jurassic Park and a space obsession triggered by Apollo 13 and Star Wars. Soon I had stolen my family's camera and was making videos whenever I could wrangle my cousins as crew.
It's always interesting to see those inspiration points in other storytellers, too. What about Timothée Chalamet?
In 2024, the actor gave an interview to The New York Times alongside Denis Villeneuve in which they discussed the making of Dune: Part Two. During the discussion, he revealed the movie that made him want to be an actor was Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight.
He would have been 12 years old at the time. It's safe to call this a formative experience for him. Isn't it wild how some moving images on a screen can change a person's life?
We want to look at that phenomenon today. What did Chalamet see in the film, and what can filmmakers learn?
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Why the Screening Changed Everything
Chalamet was asked about whether he'd been offered superhero roles, which the reporter noted had started to fizzle out in the zeitgeist.
"Well, Leonardo DiCaprio said to me, 'No superhero movies, no hard drugs,'" he replied. "Which I thought was very good."
Villeneuve asked which particular bit of advice he was following.
"I follow them both!" he said. "But the movie that made me want to act is a superhero movie, The Dark Knight. If the script was great, if the director was great, I'd have to consider it."
This isn't the first time Chalamet has mentioned the movie's impact on him. In 2018, he received the Best Actor award at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards for Call Me by Your Name. He said (via IndieWire):
"When I was 12 years old, after attending one of my sister Pauline's [ballet] performances, I petitioned my Mom and grandma to see Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight with me. We went to AMC Empire 25 in Times Square for a 7:30 screening. I left that theatre a changed man, and I'm serious about that. Heath Ledger's performance in that film was visceral and viral to me, and I now had the acting bug. I didn't know that around that time, Mr. Ledger was accepting the award for Best Actor at the New York Film Critics Circle for Brokeback Mountain. I didn't know that a brilliant director halfway across the world named Luca Guadagnino was beginning preproduction on a film called I Am Love. I didn't know that Michael Stuhlbarg was wowing audiences in The Pillowman on Broadway. I didn't know that a nervous Armie Hammer was getting prepared to audition for David Fincher in The Social Network. I did not know that a genius author named André Aciman was in a small apartment on the Upper West Side putting the finishing touches on a book called Call Me By Your Name. And there was certainly no idea that I would get to collaborate with all of these incredible artists some eight years later in northern Italy for three months, an immersive acting experience I will use as a model to prepare for all my future roles."
Imagine being a young aspiring performer soon to build all these connections, including with Nolan, with whom he worked on a small role in Interstellar.
'The Dark Knight’ Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
What Made The Dark Knight Hit So Hard
Chalamet names Ledger as a key inspiration in 2018, for good reason. The role of the Joker continues to resonate across the industry as not only one of the strongest performances in a comic book adaptation, but also one of the best portrayals of a villain of all time.
Ledger famously worked extremely hard to bring the character to life. In 2009, he told Empire:
I sat around in a hotel room in London for about a month and I just locked myself away and formed a little diary and experimented with voices. I ended up landing more with in the realm of like a psychopath, someone with no empathy. Very little to no conscience towards his acts. Which is fun, because there is no real limit on the boundaries to what he'd say or how you would say something or what he would do. And I don't know; it's always a very personal process in terms of how you land in the character's shoes, so to speak. It's a combination of reading all the comic books I could and the script and then just really closing my eyes and meditating on it.
Visually, Nolan was drawn to Francis Bacon's paintings. If you've never stood in front of one of those visceral, dark pieces, they're kind of hard to explain—usually daunting in size, with almost violent applications of paint. Conor O'Sullivan, prosthetics supervisor, said Ledger helped use that inspiration to apply the character's makeup.
During a 2024 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Nolan said he showed Ledger one of Bacon's triptychs, "and he instantly sparked to its tortured and torturing humanity. It informed the makeup for the character in the most tactile of ways" (via The Guardian).
While Ledger and the rest of the creative team were busy nailing down the character's look and behavior, Nolan and DP Wally Pfister were blazing a technical trail using IMAX cameras for the first time in major feature film history. The Dark Knight includes six IMAX sequences, including that beautiful Joker opening sequence.
All this together led to one of the most ambitious comic book movies most of us had ever seen at the time, including young Chalamet.
The Lesson for Filmmakers
Okay, so most of us will never work at a scale that Christopher Nolan does. And that's okay. The point is that you never know who's sitting in the back row of a screening of your indie film at a festival, or who is watching you work on a set, or who you might ultimately inspire.
And if you love a film or filmmaker, those creatives might just become your collaborators later. In 2021, Chalamet talked about being able to be in a movie scored by Hans Zimmer.
"The Dark Knight was the movie that made me want to act," he told Deadline. "That movie had a score by Hans Zimmer, and he has done the score for Dune. … It's a pinch-me moment all over."
