Vulture Magazine recently published a story featuring an oral history on one of The Dark Knight’s most shocking moments, revealing the caveats of how stunt coordinator Richard Ryan, production designer Nathan Crowley, visual effect supervisor Nick Davis and cinematographer Wally Pfister achieved the Joker pencil trick alongside Heath Ledger’s Joker and Director Christopher Nolan.
The scene in question features The Joker with Gotham’s Mobs as he tells them that they need to kill Batman. After some of the mobsters get tired of him, The Joker taunts them and asks if they want to see a magic trick with a pencil. One of the goons is sent to remove the Joker from the meeting but instead ends up dead with the pencil in his head.
Pfister simply says that there never was a pencil to start with:
“There was no trick pencil. There was no pencil when his head hit the table so there is no place it’s disappearing into. There was nothing there when his head hits the table.”
Crowley adds to this saying that they just treated the scene like a magic trick from Nolan’s last movie, The Prestige:
“At the end of the day, you just shoot it twice: one with the pencil and one without the pencil. Then the edit does its magic. The previous film Chris [Nolan] and I did was The Prestige. We spent like a year on this Prestige thing learning magic tricks and how you do tricks of camera.”
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The Christopher Nolan Dark Knight Trilogy is available now in 4K Ultra HD, Blu-Ray and DVD.
Source: Vulture