Despite the smothering 90-degree heat and the brilliant afternoon sun, despite being interviewed on his own back porch in West Hollywood, just a few feet from the giant trampoline he bought for his four young children, Christopher Nolan, the director of "Batman Begins" and its forthcoming sequel "The Dark Knight," is wearing the same thing he always wears: a trim black suit. It's his uniform. His Batsuit, if you will. He's got 10 more just like it. Nolan is a meticulous guy, and he likes knowing where all his stuff is, including the two passports he habitually keeps in his inside coat pocket, just in case. His movies, especially his latest, match the man: thoughtful and precise, with a coiled, relentless intensity. "The Dark Knight" finds Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) coping with the consequences of his bid to obliterate crime in Gotham. The criminals have stepped up their game as well, led by that heckling hell-raiser the Joker, a psychopath who forces his victims to make unimaginable choices. The Joker, of course, is played by Heath Ledger, whose sudden death in January stunned Hollywood and has only ratcheted up interest in what was already one of the most anticipated performances—and films—of the summer. Nolan wrote a eulogy for the actor in NEWSWEEK that month, and he revisited the subject, along with many others, during a 90-minute conversation. Excerpts:

GORDON: This is a very grim movie.
NOLAN: Yeah, it is grim. But Batman is a grim character. It's a grim world. And that's part of the fun of it—it's operatic. It's exciting. But it's definitely grim.

It's also something of a grim time in our country, which is why so many themes in this movie feel relevant. There's a line about how heroes always become villains if they stick around long enough. The idea is that, eventually, we turn on our heroes.
Yeah, we do. There are all kinds of famous examples. We talk about Caesar in the movie. But also Winston Churchill, who was thrown out of office after World War II. We try to portray Batman as a real person, and if a heroic figure is a real person—someone who the entire population of a city puts their hopes and dreams onto—that hero will inevitably disappoint in some way. We will turn on them.

You also seem to be commenting on the impossibility of heroism in a brutal world, because any hero will inevitably be faced with unthinkable choices, and simply by choosing, the hero becomes a monster to many.
The Joker gets pleasure from taking somebody's rule set—their ethics, their morals—and turning them against each other. Paradox is the way you do that. Giving people impossible choices. What Batman is doing is heroic, but it can be seen in another way: as vigilantism, as a dark force outside the law. That's a very, very dangerous road to go down. He's always riding a knife edge in moral terms.

The film implies that Gotham's latest wave of psychos exist partly because of Batman, not in spite of him. His presence has unintended consequences in the same way that the U.S. presence in Iraq has consequences.
At the end of the first film we introduced the idea of escalation. Batman creates this extreme response to crime in Gotham—putting on a mask and jumping off rooftops. Well, what's that going to inspire from the criminals he's fighting? Batman has changed the world, but not all for the better. The use of force against an enemy is a tricky and fascinating thing to have in a story. And the film tries to make the point that everybody loses in these situations.

So it's not a stretch to look at Gotham and see shades of Baghdad?
Well, where I suppose I would see a parallel is the threat of chaos, which is something we very much deal with in this film. And in today's world, Baghdad is a powerful illustration of that. It's frightening to imagine in one of our own cities.

This is heavy stuff for a summer blockbuster.
[Laughs] In a way, but I hope it's also entertaining stuff. All of the political echoes that we're talking about—they're all things that rattle around in your brain afterward. The movie itself aims to be entertainment. But you've got to have some real fear that things are not going to turn out well. What we're trying for is genuine peril.