Christopher Nolan made his brother Jonathan watch Fritz Lang's The Testament of Dr. Mabuse — a 1933 German thriller in which a criminal mastermind orchestrates chaos from inside an asylum — to understand what the Joker needed to be: not a man who wants things, but a force of entropy who only wants to watch the system collapse. Lang made this film as the Nazis were rising. The Joker's speech about plans is Mabuse.
Fritz Lang's 'M' was an influence, for the idea of a whole city getting caught up in the hunt for a monster, and the idea of what that monster really means.
— Christopher Nolan · LA Times Hero Complex: Christopher Nolan on ‘The Dark Knight’: The full Q&A
We looked at a lot of other films, even down to a Kurosawa film, 'High and Low,' that was an influence on how we were trying to stage certain things and the moral ambiguity of it.
— Christopher Nolan · LA Times Hero Complex: Christopher Nolan on ‘The Dark Knight’: The full Q&A
Films That Influenced The Dark Knight
