With Tenet hitting UK cinemas in a week’s time, Empire Online is celebrating with Nolan Week – looking back at the iconic films of a modern-day master. Across The Dark Knight Trilogy, Christopher Nolan changed not only the superhero landscape, but that of blockbusters full-stop. Published in the run-up to The Dark Knight Rises arriving in cinemas, read Empire’s feature charting the course of the trilogy, from the origins of Batman Begins, to the anarchy of The Dark Knight, and the final instalment that brought it all full circle.
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It begins with an ending.
Autumn 2008, and The Dark Knight has exceeded all expectations, becoming not only the biggest film of the year, but one of the biggest in history. Two of its creators, Christopher Nolan and co-writer David S. Goyer, who had previously collaborated on Batman Begins, meet for lunch in an LA diner. They discuss a possible new instalment, which Nolan is determined will be the last, although neither can yet see how to top this latest one. Besides, how many great second sequels are there anyway? Count them on three fingers. Then, as Goyer recalls (with the caveat that, “Chris may remember this differently”), something suddenly occurs. Not a beginning, or even a plot. Not the villain, or villains. But literally the final scene of the film, and of the trilogy. He describes the denouement he’s just in one synaptic flash envisioned.
Nolan smiles.
“The final scene of The Dark Knight Rises is exactly that scene we talked about then,” says Goyer, speaking to Empire from his LA office almost four years later. “It remained completely unchanged. We both knew in our hearts that we were onto something special. I have to tell you, having finally seen everything strung together a little while ago and seeing that scene, I got a complete lump in my throat.”
But wait. They don’t do this in Hollywood, do they? Take a massively successful superhero franchise and just finish it. That’s it. No more. We’re done. The. End. Shouldn’t these things keep spinning indefinitely, or at least until they don’t work anymore? Nolan, it would seem, is committing commercial sacrilege.
“Yup,” agrees Goyer. “That’s why it’s fucking exciting!”
———
The Crowd Roars. 6 August 2011, and Empire is peering out of the press box nestled high in Pittsburgh’s Heinz Field football stadium. We take in a vast arena wrought from 12,000 tons of steel, home (appropriately) to the Pittsburgh Steelers, many of whom are out on the pitch in old-school-Batman black and yellow to portray fictional team The Gotham Rogues. Across from us, on the home side, around 11,000 extras wave self-crafted Rogues placards and yell deliriously, as instructed by megaphone-waving assistant director Nilo Otero.
It’s an oppressively humid day; yet in Gotham it’s mid-winter. Which means the assembled throng, most of them Pittsburgh locals here voluntarily, are sweltering in thick jackets and scarves. The potential ordeal is leavened by an ongoing prize raffle, and during the lunch break three desert-camouflaged Tumblers — those bespoke Lamborghini-Hummer-hybrid attack vehicles introduced and sprayed none-more-black in Batman Begins – trundle out. One performs a few speedy circuits. Atop another sits Steelers star player Hines Ward, waving and smiling. The third is cannon-mounted. It fires off a blast. The crowd roars.
And soon after, screams. People scramble out of their seats and struggle for the exits. From Empire’s (thankfully air-conditioned) God’s-eye perspective, it looks like someone’s just dropped a neatly packed box of marbles. Panic is orchestrated. Something terrible is happening.
The ‘terror’ comes later. First we see stuntmen-footballers sprinting across the field and falling into crashmat-lined craters, which pock a jagged-edged, raised-platform section laid over a quarter of the pitch. Next come the detonations. BAM BAM BAM BAM. More than 50 dirt-piles explode in seven blasts, leaving the air writhing with dark smoke. Heavily armed mercenaries storm the area. And then, striding in his fur-lined great-coat, face swathed in a metal, snarling-baboon maw mask and trailed by some strange, trolley-mounted, spherical doomsday device, arrives Tom Hardy’s Bane, powerhouse antagonist of The Dark Knight Rises. “This is the moment where Bane makes his plans known,” explains producer Emma Thomas, also Nolan’s wife. Big plans.
Empire has never before seen filmmaking on this scale. This is indisputably jaw-dropping. Huge. And it’s no boast to say that to witness such a spectacle is a precious rarity in the early 21st century. This stadium set-piece is more reminiscent of the genuine cast-of-thousands era of Ben-Hur — and we’re thinking as much of the 1925 version as William Wyler’s Chuck Reston-fronted ’59 one. These days we’re more used to scale segments built on studio lots or in cavernous, green-walled soundstages with digitally cloned CG extras in the stalls. It’s funny how for years we were all so impressed by Hollywood’s new digital, reality-replicating flourishes when, all along, they were nowhere near as extraordinary as, well, reality. Nobody makes movies like this anymore. Or rather, nobody else.
Far below, calmly pacing the turf, quietly consulting his heads of department (Stetson-hatted director of photography Wally Pfister; VFX and SFX supervisors Paul Franklin and Chris Corbould; stunt co-ordinator Tom Struthers; costume designer Lindy Hemming), is the orchestrator himself. Sandy haired, navy suit-jacketed, his tea flask never far away. Director, producer, co-writer.
“I think this is the biggest one I’ve done,” he’ll tell Empire in the rather more intimate surroundings of his converted-garage edit suite in Hollywood, mid-April 2012. “The biggest one anyone’s done since the silent era in truth, in technical terms.” His tone isn’t immodest, merely matter-of-fact. “Shooting on IMAX,” — and more than a third of the movie, an hour, has been shot on the large, luxurious film format — “you wanna justify that we’ve put our resources more into what we were shooting on the day than computer graphics. It’s not what you’re used to seeing. I don’t know when someone last did a film with 11,000 extras in a real environment. It is an escalation. You want things to be justifiably bigger and more extreme than what you’ve done in the last film. As long as the story supports that.”
———
The doorbell chimes. It is a Sunday morning. Michael Caine is relaxing in his country home, but he happens to be near the front door and opens it himself. A man, smartly dressed, blond, in his early-to-mid thirties stands there with an oblong package tucked under one arm.
“Hello,” he says. “My name’s Christopher Nolan.”
Caine recognises him. He’s seen, and loved, two of Nolan’s previous films, Memento and Insomnia. He sees the package, a script, now in Nolan’s hand, and suspects he’s being offered a small, dark thriller.
“I’d like you to read this and let me know if you want to do it,” says Nolan.
“Okay, leave it with me and I’ll give you a call tomorrow,” replies Caine, cheerily.
“No. I want you to read it now. And then I’m going to take the script away with me.”
Caine continues: “So he sat and had a cup of tea with my missus whilst I went to my office for about half an hour and read it. As I said, I was expecting a Memento/Insomnia-style thriller. And I got Batman Begins. Which completely took me by surprise. I thought that this was a big risk by Warner Bros. Giving this massive, expensive movie to a guy that directed two very small-budget thrillers. But I needn’t have worried...”
When David S. Goyer first heard from his (and now Nolan’s) agent that Christopher Nolan was attempting to revive the Batman franchise left dormant since 1997, he had to chuckle. He’d heard that one before.
“I’m friends with Boaz Yakin. He had done a Batman Beyond attempt. And with Andrew Kevin Walker, who’d done Batman Vs. Superman. It just seemed like every year or so you heard about a new one and I thought, ‘This is gonna be one of those.”’
But then Nolan, who Goyer had known via mutual friends since Memento, phoned Goyer himself. “Other than it being sort of an origin story, there wasn’t yet much to talk about.” Still, as a lifelong Batman fan who, as a writer, had already achieved comic-adaptation success with the first two Blade movies (although even Goyer isn’t a fan of the third, which he himself directed), Nolan valued his input. Despite having waited his whole life for a call like this, Goyer was too busy to commit. He happily spit-balled with Nolan, offered up his thoughts for free and left it there. “But he called me back a few weeks later and said, ‘You have to do it.’ And that’s how it happened.”
The germ of the idea for Batman Begins is profoundly relevant to Batman’s end, so to speak, in The Dark Knight Rises. During those early chats, Goyer and Nolan identified a huge gap in the character’s origin story. We see him walking out of that opera (or movie theatre) and his parents killed by Joe Chill, then he’s an adult in his study with a bat flying through the window, and then in the next panel he’s already in cape and cowl. “How the fuck did he get from A to B?” wondered Goyer. The only series that really explored that was Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, but “even that begins with Bruce arriving back in Gotham after five, six, seven years and he’s already had the idea planted in his head”. There was still an untold story there. An untapped, subterranean reservoir of drama.
Crucially, they also both felt “that the films were always just marking time until the guy was in the costume. So we thought, ‘If we can get the audience to care about Bruce Wayne and not even care or not if he’s in the costume, then we will have properly rehabilitated the franchise.’”
That they did. In one fell swoop the director of Following, Memento and Insomnia proved that he could easily handle grand-scale action, having also insisted he shoot with only a single unit. (“He said to the studio, ‘Why would I want to direct an action film where I hire another director to direct the action?’” says Wally Pfister. “It seemed insane, but it made all the sense in the world to me!”) Batman Begins earned $373 million worldwide, making it the biggest Batman movie since Burton’s Batman (1989). “Here’s how any great franchise should start,” enthused The Washington Post. “With care, precision and delicately wrought atmosphere.”
“What drew me to Batman in the first place was Bruce Wayne’s story,” confirms Nolan, “and that he’s a real character whose story begins in childhood. He’s not a fully formed character like James Bond, so what we’re doing is we’re following the journey of this guy from a child who goes through this horrible experience to becoming this extraordinary character. That, for me, became a three-part story. And obviously the third part becomes the ending of the guy’s story.”
That word again. Nolan remains insistent that The Dark Knight Rises represents his final visit to Gotham. Despite its immense success, artistically, critically and commercially, he is slamming the lid on this series.
“It’s the right way to end it — to blow the whole thing up!” laughs Nolan’s brother, Jonathan, co-writer on The Dark Knight and this final instalment. The younger Nolan, who prefers to be called Jonah and now show-runs TV drama Person Of Interest, cheerily barks at us down his cellphone while making his way out of Manhattan to catch a flight to the West Coast. Interestingly, unlike his sibling, for whom the polite, crisp English half of his dual nationality is the dominant, Jonah speaks with a broad, curse-studded American twang. “It’s better than trying to spin the thing out indefinitely and make it into the Bond franchise. I mean, they’ve successfully pulled it off with Bond, but at certain costs. Certainly at the cost of continuity. I think with almost every other franchise it’s a mistake to try and keep those plates spinning. You want stakes. You want tectonic plates to shift. And as a writer you wanna feel you’ve worked on a complete story, with a beginning, a middle and an end.”
Batman Begins was formulated as Bruce Wayne’s story, and The Dark Knight Rises will conclude as that same Bruce Wayne’s story rather than perpetuating an excuse to work through the canon’s rogues’ gallery. “Bruce has the mental health guardian, Alfred,” says the man himself, Christian Bale. “Alfred asks: ‘How long is this gonna go on for? It’s not gonna be forever, is it?’ That to me has always been fascinating about Bruce Wayne. And it’s no secret — in The Dark Knight Rises we come back to the original ideas of what’s happening in here,” Bale taps his head. “It circles back.”
It’s not clear exactly when Batman Begins and its sequels first firmly cohered as ‘The Dark Knight Trilogy’. “The answer is complicated,” admits Christopher Nolan. “You’ll hear contradictory answers.”
Too right.
“Never!” cries producer Charles Roven. “It was never conceived as a trilogy. It was always just going to be a single movie. Obviously, we knew there were multiple Batmans before Chris was involved, but we actually consciously forgot about those.”
“Right from the start!” insists Michael Caine, still butler Alfred to Bale’s Bruce, still “good luck charm” to Nolan since first working with him on Batman Begins. “Well, no-one ever said it would be a trilogy...”
“My understanding is that there was no thought towards making a trilogy out of this from the beginning,” Jonah Nolan says. “The only guiding principle was, ‘Let’s try to make a great movie. If you have good material, put it in this movie. Don’t hold on to it. Don’t save it.’ But I think Chris often has a plan that he doesn’t share with the rest of us.”
“We had a very clear idea of Bruce’s story from fairly early on;” confirms Christopher Nolan. “The backbone of the thing was set from a fairly early stage.
But in terms of what was gonna happen around that skeleton, that has been a developing process.” He reaches for an appropriate analogy. “The Lord Of The Rings is a trilogy, but when the books were being written [Tolkien] had to write from the beginning to the end. If you’re writing a story you do a plan — I certainly would do a plan for any film — but you do the filling in from the beginning to the end. I think the difference with movies is once you have a movie’s worth of story then it’s time to present it to the audience. So in a sense the audience is seeing a work in progress over a number of years. It’s a very naturally developed trilogy, if you like.”
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The theatre goes quiet. Summer 2008, and Jonah Nolan is on the Warner Bros. lot, watching The Dark Knight for the first time with an audience — of friends and family, about 300 people. On screen, Heath Ledger’s sweating, twitching, cackling Joker has just presented Batman with a horrifying conundrum familiar to most movie superheroes. Superman’s faced it before. Spider-Man’s certainly had to deal with it. The impossible decision, phrased by Jonah as “choose your girlfriend or the tramload of innocent civilians”. In this case: save Gotham’s greatest hope, DA Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), or the love of his life, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal).
Invariably, the superhero will find a way to untangle this Gordian Knot of a situation and rescue both. Hooray. But here, in The Dark Knight, Batman makes his choice.
And the other person dies.
“You could hear a fucking pin drop,” says Jonah. “The audience was so accustomed to that inviolable rule that the superhero would always find a way to rescue everybody. It was a great rule to break.”
The stylistic shift between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight was obvious even during the latter’s first few seconds; during that IMAX camera-glide over Chicago-for-Gotham rooftops towards a dark-tinted, suddenly shattering window. There was much more action during daytime. A far greater proportion was shot on location rather than soundstage. Gotham, and its inhabitants, felt more familiar. Nolan had moved Bruce Wayne’s universe several steps closer to our own, both geographically and temporally.
“There was almost a romanticism to Batman Begins because the story dealt with the character’s history,” he says. “The Dark Knight was very much more in the present tense.” Aside from enabling him to step back from the more fantastical elements that suited his hero’s origin story and towards a grittier, crime movie idiom, this was also a creative decision inspired by his experience making the small movie that came between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, namely his fin-de-siecle sci-fi magical-mystery, The Prestige.
“We did Victorian London in downtown LA— on location,” says Nolan, who found that keeping his cast and crew on the move invigorated them creatively. “So when we made The Dark Knight we quite specifically moved around. We started in Chicago, went to London, went back to Chicago which is a massive production no-no; you’re never supposed to go back to the same place. But it meant we constantly challenged people to work in a new environment on a daily basis.”
If that was the influence of The Prestige on The Dark Knight, then the influence of Nolan’s last movie, Inception, is felt in the sheer scale and multi-layeredness of The Dark Knight Rises. “In returning to Gotham I wasn’t worried about how many characters it was gonna be. I wasn’t worried about those kinds of complexities because I knew after Inception we could trust the audience to go with us on this journey.”
The Dark Knight was, as Nolan himself once put it, like a Michael Mann crime opus with two bizarrely costumed freaks running through it. What, then, is The Dark Knight Rises?
“It’s all about historical epics in conception. It’s a war film. It’s a revolutionary epic. It’s looking back to the grand-scale epics of the past, really, and for me that goes as far back as silent films. I’ve been watching a lot of silent films with my kids on Blu-Ray. We’ve shot over a third of the movie on the IMAX format and that naturally puts you more in the mode of staging very large events for the camera. It’s my attempt to get as close to making a Fritz Lang film as I could. There’s an attempt to visualise certain things in this film on this large scale that are troubling and genuinely threatening to the idea of an American city. Or, to put it another way: revolutions and the destabilising of society have happened everywhere in the world, so why not here?’’
Set eight years after The Dark Knight, it opens with Batman long-absent and Bruce Wayne still wounded, a near recluse. Gotham, meanwhile; is peaceful and prospering. But, to borrow a line from the trailer, a storm comes in the form of Bane (his precise agenda won’t be confirmed by anyone) —a storm that threatens to tear down the very fabric of its society.
The first two chapters of Nolan’s trilogy were a product of the era of the War On Terror, both in the nature of the threat and the moral dangers of the solution Batman presents. This gave them a heft and resonance that most other hero movies lack; Avengers Assemble may have made a billion and counting at the time of writing, and may be great fun, but its escapism is blissfully untouched by relevance. While not intentionally political, the undercurrents coursing through Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are born out of Goyer and both the Nolans’ insistence on writing honestly and considering what in the real world troubles them most. The Dark Knight Rises intensifies the terror while drawing from the current Occupy Wall Street climate: “You can’t really deal with Bruce Wayne without eventually acknowledging the massive wealth he’s part of,” says Nolan. “So the film does take that on. When you deal with the action film genre with larger-than-life characters, then you are looking for a universality. You’re also looking to create situations that require a larger-than-life heroic presence. You’re looking to put on screen things that can be genuinely terrifying.”
“I always recall the fire truck in The Dark Knight,” says Pfister (for whom this seventh collaboration with Nolan marks another ending — he is retiring as a DP and moving on to his directing debut). “There’s a really grim shot of a fire truck burning and I think Chris and his brother really know how to push those buttons in American culture to give people a chill up their spines. Six years after 9/11 to show a fire truck like that… Chris takes iconic American things crumbling to ashes to show you how bad the bad guy is. That’s certainly the case with the football stadium in this film.”
The vast expansion of scope is evident to Empire both at Heinz Field and when we later join the shoot on Wall Street, that other button-pushing location (even though it’s doubling for its fictional Gotham counterpart). It’s evident in the list of locations: “We’ve done India, England, Scotland, Pittsburgh, LA and New York,” confirms Emma Thomas. It’s evident in the most recent trailer, and the showreel which Nolan revealed to exhibitors at the CinemaCon event in Las Vegas. And it’s all in the service of entertainment. For instance, to counter attack Bane’s devastation of Gotham, Batman has pulled a new toy out of Lucius Fox’s box. A flying one.
“It is called The Bat,” says Nolan. “I spent a long time trying to figure out clever names for ‘bat-something-that-would-fly’, then you go: ‘Oh, it’s a bat.’” He points in the direction of a few prototype models adorning a table to the left of the edit-suite screen, assemblages of black armour-plating that wouldn’t feel out of place in a mecha anime. “It’s very much based on a double-bladed helicopter idea, once again a realistic approach to military hardware. We had Corbould and his guys build it full-scale and come up with this great driving rig for it so we could photograph it in real streets, and there’s a big computer-graphics component to it as well. It’s fun to take Batman to the next level in terms of his transportation and weaponry — in terms of his ability to fight people.”
Just as The Dark Knight Trilogy escalates the scale of Batman and Gotham’s plight, so it has escalated Nolan’s standing in Hollywood. Few directors wield such creative independence at this level of filmmaking. Despite still being only in his early forties, he occupies the same stratum as Spielberg, Cameron, Jackson. “I’ve done five pictures with Chris now, and having worked with him all this time I now believe he is one of the best directors in the world,” says Michael Caine. “He’s up there with David Lean, and I knew David Lean very well.”
Yet, while he may not intend to be so, Christopher Nolan has achieved all this despite being something of a rule-breaker. (Or should that be because?) His refusal to compromise means he continually refutes the generally accepted way of crafting large-scale cinematic entertainments. He’s self-taught. He resists CGI whenever possible (describing the extravagant use of digitally produced imagery as animation). He won’t delegate to second unit directors. He will not shoot on digital video, let alone 3D. He still cuts a negative. And he kills the girlfriend.
“He has an encyclopedic knowledge of film,” says Jonah Nolan. “He understands what’s been done before and respects it. And then he figures out some way to tweak it, turn it, break it, snip it, fuck it up. I think that’s a big part of the reason why people respond to the films.” His influence is certainly being felt at Warner Bros. — Man Of Steel, directed by Zack Snyder, conceived by Goyer and produced by Nolan, sees that other original DC hero, Superman, re-imagined along the same ‘what if this really happened?’ lines as Batman.
Ask any of his collaborators how they’ve seen him change while making this trilogy and you will receive a unanimous answer: not at all. “I actually see the same Chris Nolan,” says Charles Roven. “He certainly has all the attributes now that he had at the beginning.” And, despite the growth in the magnitude of his pictures, he has always remained almost superhumanly serene. “He’s not a screamer,” says Gary Oldman, returning as Commissioner Jim Gordon. “I’ve never heard him raise his voice. To anyone.” One can only imagine the intense pressures of putting together a movie like The Dark Knight Rises — or Inception, or The Dark Knight. How on earth does he keep his calm? He is no machine. As we sit and talk in the battered leather seats of the edit suite, it strikes us how exhausted Nolan is looking, how often he rubs his eyes. And yet here is no discernible diminishment of lucidity, or of fervour.
“I’m just doing the thing that I love and I know what I want and I know whether I’m getting it or not,” he shrugs. “All I’m doing is being an audience member, I suppose, and trying to put together a shot that I want to see as an audience member. I’ve spent my whole life loving movies and it’s just a great pleasure to be there on set. Yes, it’s a lot of pressure. I certainly feel a lot of pressure and there are all kinds of times when I’m extremely frightened. But you can’t show that to the crew because they need you to know what you want and to project that. There are days you fake that, there are days you just pretend to know what you’re doing, but you have to do that because an important part of the job is having an answer for everybody.
“Also, making the film is nowhere near as frightening as showing it to people. The pressures that come with that are enormous. Because they’re things you can’t affect.”
———
The hatch slams shut. November 5, 2011, and Empire has just been invited by one of Chris Corbould’s SFX crew, Andy Aitken, to sit inside one of those Tumblers that three months earlier wowed the crowd at Heinz Field, but which now squats imposingly on the corner of William Street and Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. Although no-one has confirmed it, we’re sure this particular ‘Batmobile’ is part of Bane’s arsenal. As we gingerly clamber in, taking ‘cues as to where best to place our feet’ and hands, Aitken rather worryingly calls, “Do NOT press the red button.” Then down clunks the doorway.
For fear of accidentally hitting said button, Empire scans the crude dashboard from the cramped, single seat. We’re worried that, given this is the cannon-mounted tumbler, we could accidentally set off an explosion in New York’s financial district which probably wouldn’t best please Nolan, who is outside in the midst of mounting another grand-scale composition, this time a sprawling, frantic gun-and-fistfight battle between Bane’s shock troops and a Dark Knight-led Gotham PD. As it happens, we can’t find the button and suspect a gentle hoax. Should we flip the switch marked “HORN” just to show Aitken and co we give as good as we get?
While we wonder how the hell even the most seasoned stunt-driver could pilot this beast — with virtually no view out of what passes for a windshield, a small monitor appears to be the key — we note that Aitken is letting us spend rather a long time in here. We perceive a muffled kerfuffie just outside. A minute passes. Then, finally, just as Empire is in danger of having the novelty wear off, the hatch reopens. Aitken pops his head in and reveals they were having problems with the door. They were worried we’d been locked in. “Bit of a stiff latch, that one!” he chirps.
It’s then that we clock the design on the front of his black, woolly hat. A Batman logo, with three red, vertical scratches through it like claw-mark numerals. And underneath two words: “Nice Kitty”.
Just as this trilogy was never fully mapped out from the start, there was no preordained arc of villainy. The choice of Ra’s al Ghul and Scarecrow for Batman Begins descended from the need to have, in the case of Ra’s (Liam Neeson), a villain with, as David S. Goyer puts it, “a paternal quality” who could work as a father figure to the fatherless Bruce; meanwhile Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy) was a perfect fit for the theme of phobia.
Says Goyer, “With these three films, and with Man Of Steel even, we always said, ‘What kind of story do we wanna tell about our protagonist, what kinda challenges do we want to have them face?’ And then, ‘What character in the rogues’ gallery will be best equipped to put our hero through those?’”
The choice of The Joker (Heath Ledger) and Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) for The Dark Knight withstands the application of that logic: the former to represent the acceleration caused by Batman’s war on crime and ultimately ‘create’ Two-Face; the latter to make it impossible for Bruce Wayne to hang up his cloak and lead a normal life — Dent being the legitimate crime-fighting “white knight” who’s fallen. “I think people were surprised we killed off Harvey Dent at the end of The Dark Knight. I think they assumed, ‘Oh, he’ll be the primary villain for the next film,”’ adds Goyer. “But Chris hates sequel bait.”
Harvey is definitely dead, then — just in case you thought Nolan was trying to pull a fast one. “There are tricks that are fair and there are tricks that aren’t fair,” says the director. “You do see him dead. It was quite an expensive visual effect to stop his chest moving!” he laughs. Dent does, though, remain a presence in the latest film and The Dark Knight Rises deals very directly with the legacy of his demise. The all-too-real real heartbreak of Heath Ledger’s death, however, will not be touched upon. “We’re not addressing The Joker at all,” says Nolan. “That is something I felt very strongly about in terms of my relationship with Heath and the experience I went through with him on The Dark Knight. I didn’t want to in any way try and account for a real-life tragedy. That seemed inappropriate to me. We just have a new set of characters and a continuation of Bruce Wayne’s story. Not involving The Joker.”
It’s in selecting The Joker’s replacement that The Dark Knight Rises arguably takes its biggest risk. Bane is far less familiar. There has already been a negative reaction to the vocal stylisation of the character, as revealed in the IMAX prologue last December (a reaction that failed to concern Nolan: “I don’t worry about it”). The easier option would have been to have gone with a Joker-like antagonist; Goyer recalls studio suits at The Dark Knight premiere saying of the next villain that “obviously it’s gonna be The Riddler, and we want it to be Leonardo DiCaprio...” Easier option? No chance.
During the writing of The Dark Knight, Jonah Nolan was tasked with focussing in particular on The Joker and describes Ledger’s Oscar-winning performance as “probably one of the absolute highlights of my career”. Yet that doesn’t prevent his palpable excitement at having Tom Hardy’s Bane take over as Wayne’s ultimate nemesis. “The fact is that The Joker is an anarchist. He has a plan, but not really, but kinda sorta he does... And the question that energises The Dark Knight is: does he really wanna kill Batman or not? And the twist is that he doesn’t. He wants to kill everybody else. That opened up the possibility for a third film in which you have a more literal villain. This is a much more driven character. Bane is a resourceful, cunning and committed villain who knows exactly what he wants. He wants Batman dead and Gotham in ruins. That’s fitting for a third film.”
While speaking with Goyer, Empire suggests that Bane’s arrival at the end of this trilogy might just mark the return of the first film’s League Of Shadows. “Uh-huh. Interesting.” Goyer won’t be drawn. “But I will say this: Tom Hardy is fucking amazing in it. He blew me away.”
When we meet Hardy in his trailer on the New York shoot, he greets us with a friendly bear-hug. His physique is so imposing, we’re almost surprised our spine hasn’t snapped. Even so, he’s no monster, and we ask him how he feels to be representing the next level of jeopardy up from Ledger’s Joker.
“Look, I appreciate that I am five-foot-nine and I weigh 185lbs wet-through with bricks in my pockets. But there’s a certain level of militancy and violence and damage that I guarantee you I’m gonna bring to this.” He suddenly brings his fist down on the table between us. “I guarantee it.”
In a sense, there are closer parallels between Catwoman and The Joker than Bane and The Joker. Ask anyone who the best-known character is after Batman and there’s every chance they’ll say her either just before or after The Joker. Furthermore, like The Joker (Jack Nicholson’s), we have already seen a heightened, fanciful Tim Burton-conceived version of Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer’s) that audiences treat as definitive.
Until now, Christopher Nolan has been reluctant to discuss Catwoman specifically. But when we join him in the converted garage of his Hollywood home, a day before he flies to London to oversee scoring with Hans Zimmer, he decides that rather than just tell us, he’ll also show, and asks editor Lee Smith to roll the first six or so minutes of The Dark Knight Rises, following the spectacular plane-jacking prologue we saw in IMAX cinemas last December. Here, finally, is the arrival in the Batman Nolanverse of Selina Kyle, as portrayed by Anne Hathaway, who won the role after Nolan considered, met with and auditioned a long list of actresses. When we speak later that week, we tell Hathaway about how we’ve already witnessed her entrance. “Oh did you?” she says. “How did it work out?”
Very impressive. Especially the backflip. Nolan told us that was all her own work.
“Yeah. That’s me. “
“[Catwoman] is a very iconic figure in the Batman pantheon,” says Nolan. Then he hints as to why he’s previously avoided detailing her inclusion in his Bruce Wayne trilogy. “I was nervous about how she would fit into our world. But Jonah was very much convinced that there would be a great way to do it and eventually turned me around. Once I got my head around the idea of looking at that character through the prism of our films, saying, ‘Who could that person be in real-life?’, we figured it out. She’s a bit of a con-woman, something of a grifter. A hard-edged kind of criminal.”
Empire puts it to Jonah that it’s all thanks to him that Catwoman’s even in this movie, which delights him. “Chris often comes from a position of, ‘Why should we do this?’ You know, presumed guilty. But I said, ‘What we’re endeavouring to do here is tell a complete take on the Batman mythos. And a complete take on the Batman mythos without that character for me was sacrilegious. You’ve gotta have her, because she has a delicious greyness to her that helps define who Batman is.” The latest trailer leads us to believe that Selina Kyle (who Christopher Nolan confirms is never actually referred to as Catwoman in the script) is more ally than enemy to Bruce Wayne, although she patently resides on the wrong side of the law. “She keeps wavering on this line of, ‘Is she a good guy or a bad guy?”’ continues Jonah. “Well, she’s kind of neither. And that’s why, to me, that relationship and that character only enhances the universe — and the Batman character. I think Anne is spectacular in the film. She threatens to steal the show.”
When we ask Bale how he feels about this, he laughs heartily. “I never stop finding it funny as a grown adult — supposedly — talking about me as the man who dresses as a bat. Am I happy that the lady who dresses like a cat is in this one? Like The Joker, she’s a character who in many people’s minds has already been defined, yet when we did the screen tests, Anne very much wore the clothes rather than letting the clothes wear her. There was no intimidation. There was just ownership.”
Hathaway believes that projected sense of ownership came from the attitude she forced herself into while auditioning. “There is a real possibility of this being the only day of your life where you have a legitimate claim to saying, ‘I am this character,”’ she told herself. “Come tomorrow, someone else may have the part, so enjoy it to the end of every breath, enjoy every single part of it. And just have fun with it.”
———
The comissioner laughs. It’s night time, winter, the twilight of 2011. Gary Oldman stands on a rooftop in Manhattan. It is his wrap day on The Dark Knight Rises and he’s just performed his very last moment as beleaguered but honest-to-the-end police commissioner Jim Gordon. He is presented with a parting gift. It is a box frame containing Gordon’s badge, a pair of his glasses and something that has particularly tickled him, a moustache, — “retired”, as he puts it, from one of his stunt doubles. Once the laughter has subsided, he turns to his director, delight giving way to wistfulness.
“Wow, this feels weird,” he says. “You know, this is it.”
“Yeah,” replies Nolan. “This is the end. Unless you want to go whore your ass to someone for Batman IV!”
Nobody involved in The Dark Knight Trilogy is under any illusion that this will be the last time we see Batman in the multiplex. With Sony restarting Spider-Man a mere five years after Sam Raimi’s trilogy and Warner Bros. having already attempted a Justice League Of America movie, for which Armie Hammer was cast as Batman, the character’s cinematic journey will inevitably continue. “He’s there to be reinterpreted by future filmmakers,” says Nolan. “I’ll be excited to see those things.”
“It would be ridiculous to expect that Warner Bros. wouldn’t attempt to do something,” asserts David S. Goyer, who himself has been rumoured as being involved with a possible Batman re-reboot. “From time to time there are rumours and people say, ‘Will you do this?’, but no. I never thought I would get Superman! Although now I’m happy that I did.”
Goyer’s Superman concept, as mid-wifed by Christopher Nolan, is now Zack Snyder’s Man Of Steel. But once he’s completed The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan isn’t exactly going to be moving to that other Metropolis. “It’s Zack’s movie so it’d be a bit rude of me to turn up and say I’ve got a few ideas now! My big point of responsibility was helping shepherd David’s script. When I’m finished with this I’ll be there for whatever Zack wants from me, but it’s very much his movie.”
Instead, says Nolan, he will take some time off and figure out what he wants to do next. His once-mooted Howard Hughes biopic is definitely off the cards (“Luckily I managed to find another extremely wealthy, quirky character who’s orphaned at a young age!”), and while his desire to tackle 007 remains unequalled and he has in the past met with the Bond producers, he insists, “It would have to be the right situation and the right time in their cycle of things.” Right now, he’s too busy saying his multi-million-dollar farewell to Batman to give much thought beyond that. “I will miss Batman very much,” he says warmly. “It’s an incredibly fun arena to work in and incredibly rewarding, so I will look back on it very fondly. But I’m done with it.”
Haven’t we heard that one before? After Batman Begins, Nolan was uncertain he’d return. Following The Dark Knight he told Empire, “I’m not sure I’ll do another.” Chris always has a plan, as Jonah Nolan likes to say. And yet, like all those who work with Nolan, we sense that this time he really does mean it.
Although Christian Bale isn’t quite so sure. “My understanding is that this is the last one,” he begins. We sit together in his trailer in Manhattan, shortly after he’s removed his Batman armour following one of the hero’s final battles, against Bane. “I think it’s appropriate, it’s going out at the right time. But, look, Chris always plays his cards very close to his chest so I...” Bale catches himself. Why the hesitation?
“I’ve had that experience with another thing of thinking a fourth one could work and it didn’t really happen — and that’s — a thorn in my side. So if Chris came to me with a script and said, ‘You know what? There is another story,’ then I would love the challenge of making a fourth one work.”
The Dark Knight Returns, perhaps? Could Nolan and Bale take the route Frank Miller once took in his celebrated series and one day show us a much older Batman? “That could be an interesting one, couldn’t it? Twenty years down the track.”
———
It ends with a beginning. Christopher Nolan’s first-ever feature, in fact: Following, shot on the hoof and a shoestring during weekends while Nolan and his friends-and-family cast toiled at their day jobs. Find it on DVD. Go to Chapter 4, 00:22:27. Look at the door to the flat, in real life actually the home of the actor playing ‘The Young Man’, Jeremy Theobald. There, in plain view, is a Batman logo.
Empire reminds Christopher Nolan of this odd fact and wonders if he’s superstitious enough to see it as a black-and-yellow omen of his rise to power in Hollywood.
Nolan smiles.
“Pure coincidence! I’m not superstitious. It is kind of an odd thing when you screen that film for an audience and that logo’s there. Luckily, I haven’t been sent a cease-and-desist letter from DC Comics...” He laughs. “I’ve never actually asked Jeremy why he had that on his door, to be honest. I probably should at some point.”
We have asked: Theobald simply bought and stuck it up in 1989, the year Tim Burton’s Batman dominated pop culture. “Right,” acknowledges Nolan. “That symbol is very evocative. There’s something about it that’s just never gone away and that’s really what we’ve been tapping into with these movies. There’s something about the character that’s elemental. He’ll be around forever.”
And Nolan himself will be around for a very long while yet, we suspect. Questioning the accepted way of mounting blockbuster pictures. Resisting homogeneity. Taking the harder options. Meeting the challenges. “Completely unwavering, unswerving,’’ says his brother. “He just keeps on trucking.”
Originally published in Empire Magazine in July 2012