In 1985, a 15-year-old Christopher Nolan was on a school trip to London’s Tate Britain when a poster caught his eye. It’s easy to see why. A streaked, shifting face hangs in darkness, its expression at once serene and tortured. The poster was for an upcoming retrospective on Francis Bacon and isolated the left-hand panel of the painter’s Triptych (1972).

As an aspiring filmmaker, Nolan took the poster with him, pinning it to the walls of his London apartments until it was, in his words, “a tattered mess.” To Nolan, art is a means of expressing that which cannot be captured by dialogue and narration. Bacon is his favorite artist. This makes sense. Bacon, after all, is a painter known for his moody atmospherics and distortions of time and space.

Triptych was a fitting, if brutal, early spark. Part of Bacon’s “Black Triptychs” series, it follows the death of Bacon’s model and lover George Dyer, whom the London-based artist painted obsessively. Bacon appears on the right-hand panel and Dyer on the left. In both posture and affect, they echo one another, each one’s lifeblood oozing out onto the pale floor. Behind them, the void awaits. In the central panel, the two bodies morph together in embrace, an image Bacon drew from Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of wrestlers. They are alone, together, and entirely not themselves.

“Triptych August 1972” by Francis Bacon at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, 2019. Photo: Mladen Antonov/AFP via Getty Images.

Nolan showed the image to Heath Ledger as the actor was preparing to play the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008), which pitted Batman against the enduringly wily, chaotic antagonist. Ledger understood the image, its violence, the way its subjects were both victims and victimizers, tortured and torturing. It too provided a spark. Together with the film’s makeup artist, John Caglione Jr., Ledger delved into a book of Bacon’s paintings as they sought to a create new Joker, one who was more threatening, visceral, and real world than previous iterations.

“We looked at a lot of different distortions in the Bacon paintings,” Nolan said in a discussion of the painter and the Joker character with Tate. “We thought about how the paint would run together and mix to give it a worn through and sweaty quality.” The result, Nolan said, was that Ledger was able to use his face as a canvas to display himself as a menace.

Beyond Triptych’s warped faces, another aspects Nolan admires is its blank spaces. It reminds the director of the limitations of building a cinematic universe. “You never have the resources to create everything in a film, [the key] is to use those gaps intelligently rather let the audience feel the limitations.” In Bacon’s work, the blank spaces turn the focus back to the viewer who is forced to contemplate its emptiness.

“It might be emotionally uncomfortable,” Nolan said, “but the bleakness makes you think about the limitations of the human experience.”

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