Nadat regisseur Christopher Nolan de zes minuten durende proloog van The Dark Knight Rises had laten zien, sprak hij met de LA Times. Hij geeft toe dat hij in eerste instantie niet bekend was met het door Tom Hardy gespeelde personage Bane en zijn belang binnen het Batman universum.

"I didn’t know him very well. David Goyer got me a bunch of stuff on him and we looked into him. I only knew him by name, I wasn’t familiar with his back-story. He’s a very cool character. And getting an actor like Tom to take it on, you know you’re going to get something very special. Tom is somebody who really knows how to put character into every gesture, every aspect of his physicality in the way that great actors can. He’s a very, very physical actor. He transforms himself and it’s there in every movement. He’s not afraid to look at a character from the outside as well as the inside so there’s a deep psychological branch to the character but also a very, very specific awareness of how he’s going to use his body and his appearance to express that character too. Christian is like that too, very much.”

Nolan wilde voor het laatste deel een vijand die fysiek een stuk sterker is dan de villains in Batman Begins en The Dark Knight.

“With Bane, the physicality is the thing. With a good villain you need an archetype, you know, you need the extreme of some type of villainy. The Joker is obviously a particular archetype of diabolical, chaotic anarchy and has a devilish sense of humor. Bane, to me, is something we haven’t dealt with in the films. We wanted to do something very different in this film. He’s a primarily physical villain, he’s a classic movie monster in a way — but with a terrific brain. I think he’s a fascinating character. I think people are going to get a kick out of what we’ve done with him.”

De vertoonde openingssequentie speelt zich voornamelijk in de lucht af in een CIA vliegtuig waarmee gevangenen worden getransporteerd.

“We had a lot of fun on it. It was a tricky sequence to shoot but a lot of very talented people worked very hard on it. And I’m thrilled with the result. We shot it in Scotland. We braved the weather — it rains all the time there, a terrible place to do an aerial sequence, which is why no one has sort of done it before. You usually wind up in the desert or something for very practical reasons. But it really came off. We got very lucky with the weather and a lot of good planning went into it. I think it had a very unique look.”

Tot slot gaat Nolan in op het feit dat de film zich acht jaar na de dood van Harvey Dent in “The Dark Knight afspeelt. Batman is veranderd van een vigilante in een voortvluchtige.

“But it’s not a great mystery — it’s the jumping-off point for the film — but it’s hard for me to articulate it. I think the mood at the beginning of the film will make a lot of sense. If I had to express it thematically, I think what we’re saying is that for Batman and Commissioner Gordon, there’s a big sacrifice, a big compromise, at the end of the ‘The Dark Knight’ and for that to mean something, that sacrifice has to work and Gotham has to get better in a sense. They have to achieve something for the ending of that film — and the feeling at the end of that film — to have validity. Their sacrifice has to have meaning and it takes time to establish that and to show that, and that’s the primary reason we did that.”

Voor de rest van het interview klik je hier. Vanaf 25 juli 2012 in de Nederlandse bioscoop.