Not that the movie really needs any more excitement drumming up, but following on from Chris Nolan debuting the Bane-flavoured, six-minute prologue to The Dark Knight Rises last week, he sat down with the LA Times to talk about the selecting the villain and that eight-year time jump between the end of The Dark Knight and where Rises picks up.
Nolan admits from the off that he wasn’t familiar with Mr Bane’s background or his importance in the universe of Bruce Wayne and co. I didn’t know him very well,” Nolan tells the paper’s Hero Complex blog. “David Goyer got me a bunch of stuff on him and we looked into him. I only knew him by name, I wasn’t familiar with his back-story. He’s a very cool character.”
And what about the decision to punt the story forward eight years? “It will make a lot more sense to people when they see the film. But it’s not a great mystery – it’s the jumping-off point for the film – but it’s hard for me to articulate it. I think the mood at the beginning of the film will make a lot of sense. If I had to express it thematically, I think what we’re saying is that for Batman and Commissioner Gordon, there’s a big sacrifice, a big compromise, at the end of the The Dark Knight and for that to mean something, that sacrifice has to work and Gotham has to get better in a sense. They have to achieve something for the ending of that film – and the feeling at the end of that film – to have validity.
“Their sacrifice has to have meaning and it takes time to establish that and to show that, and that’s the primary reason we did that. It’s a time period that is not so far ahead that we would have to do crazy makeup or anything – which I think would be distracting – but it gave them something to get their teeth into, particularly Christian in terms of portraying this guy who has been frozen in this moment in time with nowhere to go.” You can read the rest of the interviewat the Hero Complex site.
For loads more – including some exclusive set access and interviews with the major players, check out the latest issue of Empire, which is in shops and on them there fancy iPads right now.