Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker was based on one of Francis Bacon’s triptychs, the Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan has revealed ahead of a new exhibition of Bacon’s work.

Nolan is one of several leading creative figures who have spoken of Bacon’s influence on their life and practice to mark the opening on Thursday of the National Portrait Gallery exhibition, Francis Bacon: Human Presence.

“Sometime in my teens, on a field trip to Tate Britain, I spotted a poster for a Bacon retrospective, which featured a face from one of his triptychs,” the director said.

“The pale, streaked features grabbed me and never let go, gracing various walls in different flats until it was a tattered mess. Years later I showed the image to Heath Ledger while he was preparing to play the Joker in the Dark Knight, and he instantly sparked to its tortured and torturing humanity. It informed the makeup for the character in the most tactile of ways.”

Nolan, known for his Hollywood blockbusters with complex storylines, such as Memento, Interstellar, Tenet and the Dark Knight trilogy, said that to see a Bacon “in the flesh” was to understand how medium informs the message.

“Perhaps that’s why I see Bacon as cinematic – distortions of matter and time evolve from the oil and canvas themselves,” he said. “Famously averse to both sketches and illustration, it’s as if Bacon wanted the painting itself to have the productive vagueness of a sketch, to bypass the literal and connect us with the emotional possibilities embedded in the paint.

“His work inspires me in many ways, not least as a reminder that to merely illustrate a narrative is to miss the power that unconscious gestures and intuitive image-making can achieve.”

The exhibition charts Bacon’s career across more than 50 years, exploring the artist’s engagement with portraiture from the late 1940s. Alongside Bacon’s self portraits, it includes portraits of sitters including Lucian Freud, Isabel Rawsthorne, and his lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer.

The portraits will be displayed alongside rarely seen photographs and portraits of Bacon from the NPG’s collection, captured by photographers including Cecil Beaton, Arnold Newman and Bill Brandt.

Other figures who have paid tribute to Bacon and his work are the designer Bella Freud, painter Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and John Maybury, who directed the Bacon biopic Love is the Devil.

Freud, the daughter of painter Lucien – who was one of Bacon’s closest friends – recalled first seeing Bacon’s work at the age of 11 during a visit to the Tate with her stepfather.

“He suddenly clapped his hand over my eyes and said: ‘You mustn’t see this, it’s immoral’. We were standing in front of the triptych of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion … I have loved his work ever since.”

Freud said she met Bacon a few times with her father and remembered “his brilliantly irreverent conversation, shockingly, wonderfully funny.

“I was too shy as a 14-year-old to utter a word and silently drank in everything. I have always looked at his work to get a feeling of excitement. I used to take one of his catalogues down to my local paint shop to get them to mix good oranges and violets when I was looking for colours for interior design projects.”

Quinn, known for his collage-style composite portraits that feature disfigured faces, said when he saw an exhibition of Bacon’s paintings in 2022 he was brought to tears.

He added: “Riddles plaguing my studio practice suddenly succumbed to solutions with remarkable clarity. Ever since, the permanence of that transcendent experience remains, as though Francis Bacon and I are somehow related.”

And John Maybury recalled being an art student “living in a squat” in South Kensington in the late 1970s and seeing Bacon “scuttling along, or coming out of Dino’s diner”.

“He was part of my ‘How to be a poof pantheon’, along with Andy Warhol and William Burroughs. There were so few role models,” Maybury said.

“Bacon was living the life – bold as brass, pan stick and shoe dye drag. For me it was a fact that he expressed the full lexicon of outcast queer power in paint … without knowing it, he was an amazing teacher whose impact still resonates to this day.”