IT’S TIME FOR THE DARK KNIGHT’S CURTAIN CALL.
LOS ANGELES — Competing with past glories is a demanding proposition. That is especially true if you happen to be over-achieving filmmaker Christopher Nolan.
The director earned a great deal of credibility, and more than $1 billion US at the box office, with his second Caped Crusader movie, The Dark Knight, in 2008. He also received credit for helping the dearly departed Heath Ledger win an Oscar for his Joker portrayal.
As an encore, there was Nolan’s Inception in 2010. The sci-fi thriller earned fantastic reviews and $825.5 million US at the box office world wide.
So, the question is this: Can he keep his good-luck streak going with the highly anticipated The Dark Knight Rises, which opens on July 20?
Don’t bet against him. Preparation has more to do with his success than luck.
“I would say most of that pressure that you get with a sequel is trying to give the audience a reason to come back to Gotham City,” said Nolan, who was with his cast at the Beverly Hilton Hotel recently.
“Once we knew we had a story that we really wanted to see, then everything else started to fall into place.”
In Nolan’s third and final Batman film, eight years have passed since our last encounter with Batman (Christian Bale), who went into hiding. As a fugitive, the crime fighter’s being blamed for the Joker’s anarchy, and the death and destruction caused by District Attorney Harvey Dent.
Gotham City residents are about to forgive Batman, however. A new threat surfaces in the form of the allpowerful Bane (Tom Hardy), a determined League of Shadows outcast obsessed with seizing control of Gotham by wiping out its citizens with a nuclear bomb.
On the fringes of the Bane army is Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway). Her cunning, Catwoman-type personality just might be perfectly devastating for anyone who stands in her way.
Returning are the good guys; Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), Alfred the butler (Michael Caine) and Wayne Enterprises CEO Lucious Fox (Morgan Freeman). They help resurrect Batman, so he can battle Bane and fend off Catwoman with some surprising results.
Besides Hardy’s Bane, there are two other Inception co-stars making the transition into the Batman universe. Joseph GordonLevitt plays a beat cop with a Caped-Crusader attitude. Marion Cotillard is rich environmentalist Miranda Tate, a potential love interest for Bruce Wayne.
For all concerned, it was a long and demanding 115-day shoot at a cost of more than $200 million US. Principle filming began in England last spring, moved to Pittsburgh in the summer, and ended in New York this past November.
By now Bale knows the best way to survive the journey. “It’s one day at a time with these movies,” he said. “If you go, ‘Oh, I only have 124 days left,’ it gets tricky to get up at 4:00 in the morning.”
Fatigued or not, the cast rallied around Nolan and his narrative, which has the onerous task of introducing familiar Batman villains from the comics while still making them seem fresh and relevant in the Nolan movie world.
Indeed, some images of Bane’s terrorist bombings are especially jarring in The Dark Knight Rises.
“That’s something that I have always found uncanny,” said Bale. “It’s Chris’ ability to make good movies very topical.”
Nolan, who co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Jonathan and David S. Goyer, hedged a little when he discussed the unnerving sequences of bridges exploding and a football game being interrupted by consecutive blasts.
“Really, these films are about entertainment,” Nolan said. “But we try to be very sincere in things that frighten us or motivate us or we’re worried about.”
He was quick to add that the incidents are meant to be superhero fantastic, not sensationalist.
“You’re dealing with a heightened reality,” Nolan insisted. “You’re not dealing with Chicago or New York. You’re dealing with Gotham. That gives you a very interesting world to be able to play with in a heightened and very operatic way.”
However, he fully embraced the notion that his new female characters become fully formed and multi-dimensional. And he doesn’t necessarily take all the credit for it.
“One of the products of doing a second sequel is you know you’re going to have to expand your story in one direction as you introduce characters,” Nolan said.
“So, some of (the depth) comes from the script, but a lot of it is in getting to lean on Anne Hathaway and Marion Cotillard, and rely on them to construct a very credible, psychological basis for the characters.”