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1. Who plays the Joker?
Heath Ledger
Ledger shut himself in a hotel room for weeks to find the voice and the laugh, and kept a diary in character. He died in January 2008, six months before the film opened, and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor the following year.
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2. Who directed the film?
Christopher Nolan
It's the middle film of Nolan's trilogy, after Batman Begins and before The Dark Knight Rises. He wrote it with his brother Jonathan, from a story the two of them worked out with David S. Goyer.
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3. How does the Joker leave his first scene, the bank robbery?
He drives a school bus out through the wall
He slips the bus into a line of others on a school run, the first sign of how far ahead he plans. The scene was shot inside a disused main post office and was shown months early, in front of I Am Legend.
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4. Which city stood in for Gotham?
Chicago
The truck chase runs down LaSalle Street and the Joker's bank is the old main post office. Pittsburgh took over the job for the third film.
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5. Harvey Dent, the new district attorney, is played by...
Aaron Eckhart
Dent is the 'white knight' the film sets against Batman's dark one. Tommy Lee Jones and Billy Dee Williams had played him in earlier Batman films, in 1995 and 1989.
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6. Which magic trick does the Joker perform at the mob meeting?
He makes a pencil disappear
By slamming a thug's head down onto it. It's over in a second and was done with a pencil that collapsed; the stunt team worked out how to make it look that clean.
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7. Who plays Alfred?
Michael Caine
Caine tells the story about the bandit in Burma, the one that ends 'some men just want to watch the world burn'. The other three all played Alfred too, in the 1960s series, in 2016, and in the Burton and Schumacher films.
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8. What does the Joker do with his share of the mob's money?
He burns it
A pile of it the size of a house, with the accountant Lau sitting on top. 'It's not about money,' he tells the Chechen. 'It's about sending a message.'
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9. Which cameras did Nolan use for several sequences, a first for a major feature?
IMAX cameras
Six sequences, about half an hour of the film, including the opening heist and the Hong Kong skydive. The cameras were so heavy and loud that dialogue scenes were out of the question, and one was destroyed during the truck chase.
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10. Who replaced Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes?
Maggie Gyllenhaal
Holmes chose not to return and Gyllenhaal stepped in. Anne Hathaway joined the series later, as Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises.
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11. How did the Joker get his scars?
He tells a different story every time
He tells the gangster Gambol it was his father and tells Rachel it was his wife, and starts a third version before he's interrupted. The chemical vat belongs to the 1989 film.
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12. What vehicle does Batman use after the Tumbler is wrecked?
The Batpod
It ejects from the wreck, with wheels big enough to turn the whole machine on its side. The stunt rider was Jean-Pierre Goy, one of very few people who could handle it; Christian Bale wasn't allowed to try.
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13. How does the Joker's experiment with the two ferries end?
Neither boat blows the other up
The big convict throws the detonator out of the window, and the civilian who volunteered can't bring himself to turn the key. It's the one bet in the film that the Joker loses outright.
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14. How many Academy Awards did it win?
Two
Ledger's, and Best Sound Editing, from eight nominations. Its absence from the Best Picture list caused enough anger that the Academy doubled the number of nominees the following year.
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15. Who composed the score?
Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard
The two had scored Batman Begins together and split the work again: Zimmer took the Joker, a two-note sound like a razor blade drawn across a cello string, and Howard took Harvey Dent. Elfman wrote the theme for the 1989 Batman.
