De laatste editie van Empire Magazine bevat naast mooie covers en enkele foto's ook een flinke lap tekst over The Dark Knight Rises. Onder meer Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale en Tom Hardy spreken over de DC Comics/Warner Bros. superheldenfilm, die de trilogie van Nolan moet afronden. In het nieuwsbericht van gisteren was al een passage te lezen van de uitlatingen van Nolan. Hieronder volgt de rest van het stuk, inclusief de quotes van Bale en Hardy.


Regisseur Christopher Nolan over het plot van zijn derde Batman film, na de eerder verschenen Batman Begins (2005) en The Dark Knight (2008):

"It's really all about finishing Batman's and Bruce Wayne's story. We left him in a very precarious place at the end of The Dark Knight. His reputation in tatters, on the run. And I think perhaps surprisingly for some people, out story picks up quite a bit later. He's not in great state. He's frozen in time, he's hit a brick wall. Batman Begins was very much about the explaining the logic of the suit, and how it belonged in the shadows, in a position of stealth where he's able to intimidate people with it as his new entity. And then through The Dark Knight we would him out during the magic hour and we changed the suit accordingly so he withstood that kind of exposure. But also the character himself has the reputation now, so he;s able to expose himself more and still intimidate people. And with the third film we're pushing that further...but plenty of it takes place in the dark too."

Nolan spreekt ook uitgebreid over het personage Bane en de reden waarom voor deze villain is gekozen:

"The Prologue is basically the first six, seven minutes of the film. Its the introduction to Bane and a taste of the rest of the film. With Bane we are looking to give Batman a physical challenge that he hasn't had before. He's a great sort of movie monster, but with an incredible brain, and that was a side of him that hand't been taped before. Because the stories from the comics are very epic and very evocative---very much in the way that Bruce Wayne's origin story is epic and evocative. We were looking to really parallel that with our choice of villain. So he's a worthy adversary. I felt that if I could get somebody as talented as Tom to agree to hide himself in the character I would get something very special. What I really feel with a great actor is every movement, every hand gesture, every step, has performance in it. Tom completely got it. It's an incredible challenge to remove motion of the face so that you can't put things across in the usual way, and you just have the eyes and a bit of the scalp and the arms and legs. What I knew is that from Tom I would get something where you get a total character and everything has incredible thought applied to it. And a lot of what he's doing is very counterintuitive. He has this incredible disjunct between the expressiveness of the voice and the stillness of the movement of his body. He's found a way to play a character who is enormous and powerful with a sort of calm to it, but also is able to incredibly fast at times. Unpredictable. He just has a raw threat to him that's extraordinary. It's a very powerful thing when you see it come together, beyond what I have ever imagined. That's what you get from working with great actors."

"The world of Batman indeed the world of all graphic novels, deals with archetypes, and there's a very real sense in which the Joker is an extreme and an absolute. So when you're looking to continue the story, 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 enemy.


Ook Tom Hardy laat zich kort uit over zijn personage Bane.

"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. He's a smashing machine. He's a wrecking ball. If we're going to shoot somebody, shoot the pregnant woman or the old lady first. Make sure everybody stands up. He's a terrorist in his mentality as well as brutal actions. He's horrible piece of work."

Hardy spreekt ook over de enorme vechtscene die er in de film plaatsvindt met meer dan 1.000 mensen:




Christian Bale laat zich ook uit over Bane, die we eerder zagen in Batman & Robin (1997). De film van regisseur Joel Schumacher zette een definitieve punt achter de eerdere Batman filmreeks.



Bekijk hier scans van de pagina's uit Empire Magazine. Hieronder een nieuwe foto van Batman op zijn Batpod, ook uit Empire: