Aaron Eckhart Reflects on Film’s Enduring Legacy, “The Movie Lives Beyond Entertainment”

Eckhart says that the movie endures, in part, because it “wasn’t just special on the screen.”

Aaron Eckhart, who played Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight, says he never gets tired of fans gushing about the movie — in part because he is pretty impressed by it, too. Speaking with ComicBook.com in support of his new movie Chief of Station, Eckhart said the movie has continued to be iconic in part because how holistically it was put together, with a great script as well as great performances and direction. He praised filmmaker Christopher Nolan for managing to take all the best elements of the screenplay and get all of them onscreen just the way he (Eckhart) imagined.

The film told the story of how Eckhart’s character evolved from a morally-upstanding district attorney into the disfigured supervillain Two-Face, although as with most characters in the Nolan movies, it was just the one adventure before the villain was gone.

“That movie’s extraordinary, that movie’s special, and it wasn’t just special on the screen,” Eckhart told ComicBook.com. “It was special in the script. It was special in the writing. I’ll tell you a story about that. I was at home and a guy came to my house with the script. He handed me the script, and he waited outside for two hours while I read that script, and then I handed it back to him and he left. And I remember reading that script going, oh, I felt like I just read a novel, a good novel. And I thought, how in the world can you incorporate this many main characters into a plot, into a movie, into a script, and make it work? But there it is, and Chris put everything that was in that script up on the screen. And if you look at Gotham City and what’s going on in Gotham City now, before that, Chris made that movie real. And of course you had Heath who just went off the charts. But look what happened. It’s a big city that has feckless and cowardly politicians, corrupt politicians who have given that city over to a mafia. And now the people who cannot walk the streets at night cannot. They have to entrust themselves into somebody to come save them. And if you think about it, how pertinent and how relevant that storyline is, it’s oppression. And so I think the movie lives beyond entertainment and cinema.”

In Chief of Station, “Ben is a former CIA station chief whose world comes crashing down after his wife, a former operative, dies in a terrible accident. Soon, a cryptic message sends him back into the shadowy underworld of Eastern Europe, teaming up with a former adversary to unravel a conspiracy that challenges everything he thought he knew about his wife and the agency that he worked for.”

Chief of Station releases theatrically on Friday, May 3.