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The Origin of the Pencil Trick in The Dark Knight Revealed

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link=”https://youtu.be/ssA_l5t-o7o” align=”center”][vc_column_text]Want to see a magic trick?

One of the most well-known scenes in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight was when Heath Ledger’s Joker made his entrance to a room full of gangsters who had no idea they were messing with the wrong man in warpaint. It’s a scene that still makes me need to look away, when the Joker decides to make a pencil “disappear” aka in someone’s eyeball.

In an oral history provided via Vulture, the origins of this trick were further explained:

“I think even [director] Chris [Nolan] assumed we were going to have to do some CG. It’s not particularly difficult to build a CG pencil and track it in and kinda make it disappear out. But we shot it in IMAX, so you see it on a giant, great, big canvas. Wherever possible, we tried not to do unnecessary visual effects shots because, digitally, you can never really re-create an IMAX image.” – Nick Davis explained; the movie’s visual effects supervisor.

“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.” – Wally Pfister explained; the movie’s cinematographer.

The henchman who had the unfortunate pleasure of being at the blunt end of that pencil was played by Charles Jarman, who went into detail:

“I remember Christopher Nolan saying to me, ‘Look, we’re going to do a couple of shots where you need to be able to take that pencil away.’ We did a couple of half-speed rehearsals just to get the hand action of my right hand sweeping across, taking the pencil as my body was going down, and my head striking the blank surface. It was a little hairy, because the pencil’s stuck in the table. If, for some reason, I didn’t get my hand in time, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Well, possibly through a Ouija board.”

“As we set the scene up, Heath Ledger was never in the room. I think it was part of his method acting. He would enter the room when he was being the Joker. He would leave the room being the Joker. It was a few days, and you just really didn’t see him in between, apart from the end when he did this kind of ceremonial handshake, and went around to everyone in the room. He was the consummate professional, stayed in character all the time. He only broke character once, which was when he first hit my head, and knocked me out.”

I still think of the genius of the Nolan trilogy and especially Ledger’s unnerving and powerful performance. The pencil trick is still to this day an iconic piece in cinematography.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]