The Dark Knight VFX Artist Breaks Down Harvey Dent’s Face (& Why Nolan Broke His Own Style For It)

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The Dark Knight VFX artist explains Harvey Dent’s iconic Two-Face look and why director Christopher Nolan breached his typical style for the look. Played by Aaron Eckhart, Two-Face is the alter-ego of Harvey Dent, the former district attorney of Gotham City. A long-time Batman villain, The Dark Knight’s Two-Face took on a different approach to the role as Dent’s character was far less over-the-top than in previous renditions of the role.
The Corridor Crew welcomed one of The Dark Knight's VFX artists to break down Eckhart’s iconic Two-Face look.
The team explained that Two-Face’s disfigured visage had to be achieved with CGI because of the nature of the technology being subtractive. Prosthetic makeup is additive, meaning it would extend the face and add layers to it, whereas CGI has the ability to remove elements of the face in a way that a prosthetic could not. According to the Corridor Crew, Nolan typically is “all about making stuff absolutely real,” but Two-Face's look was one thing he did not want to be too real.
Why Harvey Dent’s Face Worked in The Dark Knight

The Corridor Crew went on to explain how Harvey Dent’s eye, which appears bug-like protruding against his scars, was rendered for The Dark Knight. Eckhart himself has an ostensibly real eye, that the VFX team could not just remove, as the Corridor Crew jokes. So, through motion capture, The Dark Knight VFX team removed most or all of Eckhart’s eye, but “wherever [they] could, [they] kept the little bits that [they] could” such as Eckhart’s actual pupil.