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Volume 410
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Sunday, December 30, 2012
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Page 1 of 5
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This is from hollywoodreporter.com
Deciphering Bane, turning Anne Hathaway sultry and more as Warner Bros. wraps up its $2.45 billion franchise.
When writer-director Christopher Nolan completed Batman Begins in 2005, he had no plans for a sequel, let alone a trilogy. But seven years later, with The Dark Knight Rises,
he has not only completed a cycle of films that has built in intensity and grandeur but also redefined what superhero movies can be -- while also grossing nearly $2.5 billion
worldwide.
Movies that attract more than $1 billion at the box office -- as was the case with 2008's The Dark Knight and its follow-up this year -- almost never are personal films. They
rarely come encoded with social allegory and political overtones and an overwhelming sense of human decay. Instead, they are more usually candy colored, lightweight, frothy.
But while there are many words that can be used to describe The Dark Knight Rises -- which finds Christian Bale's tarnished hero battered and broken -- "frothy" isn't one of them.
"Brutal." "Serious." Maybe even "apocalyptic."
"We've gone to some very extreme places with the content of the film and how much we've been
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allowed to explore, ideas of society, of corruption and decay," says Nolan, sipping his morning tea by a fire in the drawing room of New York City's Greenwich Hotel in mid-December.
"People often interpret the films as political; they're not. They are examining social issues, and we're really pleased to have been able to follow the threads."
Those threads began with Batman Begins, which introduced audiences to Bale's Bruce Wayne, orphaned member of Gotham City's upper class, who decides that the way to fight the crime
plaguing Gotham is to dress up as a bat and punch people in the face. But what could've seemed silly -- and was silly, when director Joel Schumacher famously put nipples on George
Clooney's Batsuit for 1997's Batman & Robin -- became a bracing new, serious standard for comic book fare, one that Warner Bros., in partnership with Legendary Pictures, was happy
to embrace.
"They had been trying to do a reboot, they had been trying to come up with a reconstruction of the character for a number of years, unsuccessfully," recalls producer Charles Roven.
"Until Chris came in with his vision."
"Previous incarnations of Batman -- particularly Tim Burton's very brilliant films -- were based on creating a very gothic world in which Batman felt quite natural," Nolan explains.
"We were trying to do something very different when we came to do
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