By now, you caught a glimpse of the two Dark Knight Rises Empire covers (look below). But along with exclusive interviews from actors Christian Bale and Tom Hardy, Empire also caught up with director Christopher Nolan, who shares with the magazine a few tidbits concerning the film’s timeline and story development:
“It’s really all about finishing Batman and Bruce Wayne’s story. We left him in a very precarious place. Perhaps surprisingly for some people, our story picks up quite a bit later, eight years after The Dark Knight. So he’s an older Bruce Wayne; he’s not in a great state…With Bane, we’re looking to give Batman a challenge he hasn’t had before. With our choice of villain and with our choice of story we’re testing Batman both physically as well as mentally.”
Speaking of Bane, Hardy also breaks down the madness of his villainous character:
“He’s brutal. Brutal. He’s a big dude who’s incredibly clinical, in the fact that he has a result-based and oriented fighting style. It’s not about fighting. It’s about carnage. The style is heavy-handed, heavy-footed, it’s nasty. Anything from small-joint manipulation to crushing skulls, crushing rib cages, stamping on shins and knees and necks and collarbones and snapping heads off and tearing his fists through chests, ripping out spinal columns. He is a terrorist in mentality as well as brutal action.”
And finally, Bruce Wayne himself gives us an update on Batman’s progress:
“How long will you let the pain and loss define your life? Walking around chasing bad guys is very heroic and attracts attention, but at the end it all accounts for, as a means to deal with the pain of a huge loss. We agreed that Bruce Wayne is absolutely sincere as Bruce Wayne, and as Batman utterly sincere but Bruce Wayne, the playboy, is a pure facade, it’s a lie he has, somehow, to control one side of your soul that’s not really under control. In fact, only Alfred knows who he is. It’s time for Bruce Wayne to face the pain, that has always stirred his life.”
We didn’t expect the third film in the Nolan-Batman series to jump eight years ahead of the last film, so we’re dying to see how much the Caped Crusader has changed from the last film. We’ll see this summer.
