Christopher Nolan completed his famous Dark Knight trilogy in 2012 with the final film Dark Knight Rises. But he confided that Rises stood out from the previous 2 Batman movies in a significant way.
Christopher Nolan wasn’t sure about directing ‘The Dark Knight Rises’
It may seem to some that Nolan planned to direct his Dark Knight trilogy all along. But the filmmaker asserted that he didn’t approach his Batman movies with a sequel in mind. His goal was always to focus on individual movies before coming up with ideas for a sequel. For instance, he had no idea he’d do Dark Knight after finishing up Batman Begins.
“When we reveal the Joker card, that very much felt like the appropriate ending for Batman Begins,” Nolan once recalled to The Hollywood Reporter. “It wasn’t really about setting up a sequel. I wanted [the audience] to leave the theater with their minds just spinning, Batman has arrived. That was always the snap of the ending. It wasn’t really until months after the film came out that I said, ‘Ok, now I want to know who the Joker is?’”
After The Dark Knight’s success, many were wondering what Nolan had planned for the sequel. But Nolan’s wife Emma Thomas, who’s also a producer on his films, shared that Nolan wasn’t sure he had sequel plans.
“After The Dark Knight, it was a much quicker phone call from the studio asking, ‘What about the third?’ Chris really had to think about whether or not he wanted to do that; we were very happy with the way we had tied up The Dark Knight,” Thomas said.
Christopher Nolan labeled ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ a disaster movie
When Nolan signed on to do Rises, he opted to make the film different than the other two Batman films. Still, Nolan felt Rises needed to bring his Batman story full circle. It was one of the reasons why Nolan brought back the villainous group the League of Shadows that was featured in Begins. The group was led by Batman’s nemesis Ra’s Al Ghul, who also appeared in Rises.
“Moving on to Dark Knight Rises, I knew that the League of Shadows had to come back,” Nolan said. “I knew that we had to return to Batman Begins and those philosophical ideas of Ra’s Al Ghul, those challenges – that all had to come back.”
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Rises, however, would have a different tone and message than Begins or The Dark Knight.
“Batman Begins is very much an origin story, and Gotham is viewed in quite symbolic, quite romantic terms. With The Dark Knight, we really switched genres. We’re looking at the media, the police, the wealthy, the poor; Gotham takes on that sort of crime epic idea of what a city is,” Nolan explained. “Then, in Dark Knight Rises, we really move more into the disaster movie.”
It was a plotline that Nolan’s brother and Rises co-writer Jonathan Nolan revealed was teased in the previous movies.
“What I always felt like we needed to do in a third film was, for lack of a better term, go there. All of these films have threatened to turn Gotham inside out and to collapse it on itself. None of them have actually achieved that until this film,” Jonathan once told Coming Soon (via Collider).
Why Christopher Nolan didn’t direct another Batman movie
Most feel that the ending to Rises offered a conclusion that was up to interpretation, giving hope to a potential sequel. But Nolan was adamant that Rises would be the last Batman movie he’d direct.
“For me, The Dark Knight Rises is specifically and definitely the end of the Batman story as I wanted to tell it, and the open-ended nature of the film is simply a very important thematic idea that we wanted to get into the movie, which is that Batman is a symbol. He can be anybody, and that was very important to us,” Nolan once said in an interview with Film Comment.
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