Pictures and Christopher began shortly after Batman Beginss theatrical release, and development began following the production of Christopher's The Prestige (2006). Writing Goyer and Christopher collaborated for three months to develop The Dark Knight core plot points. They wanted to explore the theme of escalation and the idea that Batman's extraordinary efforts to combat common crimes would lead to an opposing escalation by criminals, attracting the Joker, who uses terrorism as a weapon. The joker playing card scene in Batman Begins was intended to convey the fallacy of Batman's belief his war on crime would be temporary. Goyer and Christopher did not intentionally include real-world parallels to terrorism, the war on terror, and laws enacted to combat terrorists by the United States government because they believed making overtly political statements would detract from the story. They wanted it to resonate with and reflect contemporary audiences. Christopher described The Dark Knight as representative of his own "fear of anarchy" and Joker represents an "somebody who wants to just tear down the world around him." Although he was a fan of Batman (1989), starring Jack Nicholson as the Joker, Goyer did not consider Nicholson's portrayal scary and The Dark Knights Joker to be an unknowable, already-formed character, similar to the shark in Jaws (1975), without a "cliché" origin story. Christopher and Goyer did not give their Joker an origin story or a narrative arc, believing it made the character scarier; Christopher described their film as the "rise of the Joker". They felt the threat of cinematic villains such as Hannibal Lecter and Darth Vader had been undermined by subsequent films depicting their origins. With Christopher's help, his brother Jonathan spent six months developing the story into a draft screenplay. After submitting the draft to Warner Bros., Jonathan spent a further two months refining it until Christopher had finished directing The Prestige. The pair collaborated on the final script over the next six months during pre-production for The Dark Knight. Jonathan found the "poignant" ending the script's most interesting aspect; it had always depicted Batman fleeing from police but was changed from him leaping across rooftops to escaping on the Batpod, his motorcycle-like vehicle. The dialogue Johnathan considered most important, "you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain", came late in development. Influenced by films such as The Godfather (1972) and Heat (1995), and maintaining