Christian Bale's Batman

Christian Bale's Batman

Christian Bale's Batman "faces the pain" in The Dark Knight Rises, plus more clues from Christopher Nolan, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman
By David Bentley on Nov 23, 11 12:07 AM

Christian Bale Bruce Wayne The Dark Knight.jpgWITH every morsel of information about Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises amping up the anticipation, it's hard to imagine how the fanboys will last the eight months that still remain until its release next July.

Shedding a little more light on what to expect, Christian Bale tells UOL Cinema how the end of Nolan's trilogy feels: "It's like saying goodbye to an old friend. When you have the opportunity to play a character so many times, you develop another relationship with him that's more profound."

His portrayal of Batman has always been based on a concept that has developed along with Nolan, as the actor explains: "How long will you let pain and loss define your life? Walking around chasing bad guys is very heroic and attracts attention, but it all begins as a means of dealing with the pain of a huge loss."

The Dark Knight Rises marks the hour of decision for this dilemma, says Bale. "It's time for Bruce Wayne to face the pain that plagued his earlier life."

He and Nolan added another dimension that is, apparently, especially important in this last film. "We agreed that Bruce Wayne is absolutely sincere as Bruce Wayne and absolutely sincere as Batman but Bruce Wayne the playboy is a pure facade, a lie where he somehow has to control a side of his soul that is not really under control. In fact, only Alfred even knows who he is. "

Giving more precise information - beware mild spoilers - director Christopher Nolan reveals to Empire: "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.

Empire cover Tom Hardy Bane.jpg"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. In terms of finishing our story and increasing its scope, we were trying to craft an epic."

Nolan said he chose Bane, played by Tom Hardy, because he wanted something more than a repeat of the mind games of the Joker: "When you're looking to continue the story - in this case finish Bruce Wayne and Batman's story, as we see it - then you certainly don't want a watered-down version of a character you've already done. You want a different archetype. What Bane represents in the comics is the ultimate physical villain."

Hardy says of his character: "He's 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."

Costume designer Lindy Hemming explained the character's mask: "He was injured early in his story. He's suffering from pain and he needs gas to survive. He cannot survive the pain without the mask. The pipes from the mask go back along his jawline and feed into the thing at the back where there are two canisters of whatever it is... the anaesthetic."

Christopher Nolan The Dark Knight holding camera.jpgAnd Gary Oldman spoke to MTV, offering: "There's a conclusion. [Nolan] touches on the first film and weaves it in. It resolves. I think it's a trilogy, it's just great. The story is terrific, it's just epic."

"I think it was smart of Chris to go with a lesser-known villain. We love the Joker but Heath's performance was so dazzling that you got to think, 'How the hell do I top it?' Instead of going for Riddler, instead of going for Penguin, he's gone a slightly different way with the story."

We have seen from set pictures and videos that the resulting story does feature some large-scale conflict and - rather controversially - Nolan was rumoured to be incorporating the Occupy Wall Street anti-capitalism protests into the production.

That didn't happen, and Matthew Modine, who plays a character called Nixon, told IndieWire just why: "The wisdom of Christopher Nolan and his incredible team was that, while it seemed like a good idea to give the protesters an opportunity for work, to give them money, it would send a terrible message.

"At the end of the day, we're making a movie. What's happening down there is more important than that. To co-opt what's happening there and around the country... we didn't want to trivialise it. It was more important to respect what they're doing than to do anything that could potentially trivialise the political situation downtown."