Secret of The Joker’s “Disappearing Pencil” Trick from THE DARK KNIGHT Revealed
Josh Millican
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You never get a second chance to make a first impression and, as The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger made quite a first impression on a band of thugs early in Act 1. In an attempt to soften up a tough crowd, the scourge of Gotham performed a magic trick: He made a pencil disappear—into the brain of an ancillary tough-guy!
While it’s easy to assume the disappearing pencil trick was achieved using CGI, visual effects supervisor Nick Davis explained why digital trickery wasn’t an option in a recent interview with Vulture:
“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.”
So how was the “trick” achieved if there was no computer-generated tomfoolery? It used a tactic that magicians have been employing for years: Sleight of hand. In the same interview, stuntman Charles Jarman explains what it took to pull off the illusions (including 22 attempts to get just right):
“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.”
While Ledger’s untimely death in 2008 means he was never able to reprise the role he made iconic, we’re looking forward to Todd Phillips’ Joker, an origin story for the clown-faced criminal, arriving in US theaters on October 4th. That film stars Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, and Zazie Beetz.
Are you surprised the disappearing pencil trick from The Dark Knight was done without CGI? Are you excited to check out Joker next October? Let us know in the comments below or on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram!
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