tomhardyvariations:

…from EMPIRE MAGAZINE…

Christopher Nolan: “The Prologue is basically the first six, seven minutes of the film. It’s the introduction to Bane and a taste of the rest of the film. Our story picks up EIGHT years after The Dark Knight.”

ON BANE:

“He was injured early in his story. Hes suffering from pain and he needs gas to survive. He cannot survive the pain without the mask. The pipes from the mask go back along his jawline and feed into the thing at the back where there are two cannisters of what ever it is..the anasthetic.”

Costume designer Lindy Hemming also lets drop a few clues to his backstory as she talks about Bane’s look. On the mask, she says, “He was injured early in his story. He’s suffering from pain and needs gas to survive. He can’t survive the pain without the mask. The pipes from the mask go back along his jawline and feed into the thing at his back, where there are two cannisters.”

“What our IMAX prologue is aiming at showing is that Bane’s a very different kind of villain than Batman has faced before in our films,” Nolan continues, “He’s a great sort of movie monster, but with an incredible brain, and that was a side of him that hadn’t been tapped 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 is a worthy adversary.”

“It’s really all about finishing Batman and Bruce Wayne’s story. We left him in a very precarious place. Perhaps surprisingly for some people, our story picks up quite a bit later, eight years after The Dark Knight. So he’s an older Bruce Wayne; he’s not in a great state.

“With Bane, we’re looking to give Batman a challenge he hasn’t had before. With our choice of villain and with our choice of story we’re testing Batman both physically as well as mentally.”

[ADD] …the Joker is an extreme and an absolute and Batman is an extreme and an absolute. So when you’re looking to continue the story - in this case finish Bruce Wayne and Batman’s story, as we see it - 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 villain.”

Physical seems like a mild way to describe the mayhem on Wall Street, but it’s a word that keeps coming up. Bale, for example, confirms, “It’s the first time in Chris’ movies that we’ve had an adversary who’s physically superior [to Batman]”. And the physicality is something in which Hardy appears to revel. He won’t reveal a lot about Bane’s agenda or his motives, but he’ll talk in detail about his methods. Specifically his fighting style.

TOM ON BANE:

“He’s brutal,” Hardy enthuses. “Brutal. He’s expedient delivery of brutality. And you know, he’s a big dude. He’s a big dude who’s incredibly clinical, in the fact that he has a result-based and orientated fighting style. The result is clear.” He laughs boisterously. “Do you know what I mean? It’s: fuck off and die. Quicker. Quicker. Everything is thought out way before. He’s hit you, he’s already hit somebody else. It’s not about fighting. It’s just about carnage with Bane. He’s a smashing machine. He’s a wrecking ball. 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. It’s anything he can get away with.” 

This is a 12-certificate film, isn’t it?

“Yeah, but I’m not approaching it with a 12-certificate attitude. If we’re going to shoot somebody, shoot the pregnant woman or the old lady first. Make sure everybody stands up. And listens. He is a terrorist in his mentality as well as brutal action. So he’s horrible. A really horrible piece of work.”

Hardy was Nolan’s first choice for the role, although it seemed he wouldn’t be available as, at the time, he was about to start on George Miller’s Mad Max reboot (now Hardy’s next project after The Dark Knight Rises). As soon as Nolan heard about that film’s delay, the director gave him a call. According to Hardy (who does an uncanny Nolan impression, by the way), the conversation went something like this…

Nolan: Tom. I was just considering doing a new Dark Knight and I was just wondering… There’s a character in it, which I think you would be perfect for. You might not be interested, because I appreciate… Um, I’m asking quite a bit of you as an actor to… wear a mask. For six months. It’s something I’d like to talk to you about if you’re interested and maybe you might consider, um, having a think about it. He’s a villain. I think we’re going to go big on this last one.

.

Hardy: Are you saying I’d have the access to all the stunt coordination team that I want to play with, martial-arts wise, all the weapons I could possibly want to play with, and I get to hang out with you for six months? And all I have to do is wear a mask?

Nolan: Yeah, basically.

Hardy: Fucking sign me up, man.

The mask, it turned out, wasn’t much of a problem for Hardy. He describes any issues he has as “psychosomatic - if I panic it’s not easy [to breathe], and if I’m chilled it’s fine.” But Empire wonders how Nolan dealt with his villain having to emote with his face hidden. 

“I felt that if I could get someone as talented as Tom to agree to hide himself in the character I would get something very special,” he says. “What I really feel with a great actor is every movement, every hand gesture, every step has performance in it.” This, he explains, is the reason he doesn’t hire doubles to do insert work (such as when you see a character’s hand take a gun out of a drawer). “Tom completely got that. 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 the 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 with a character who is enormous and powerful with a sort of calm to it, but also is able to be 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 had ever imagined. That’s what you get from working with great actors.” 

But what of The Dark Knight himself? Empire asks Bale, back in the batsuit for the third and final time, if this film contains even a flavour of Knighfall’s backbreaking storyline. Bale smiles apologetically. “I’m sure you’ve experienced it now,” he says. “The wall of silence where I go, ‘You’re gonna speak with Chris, aren’t you? Right. I’ll let him decide if he’s going to answer that one or not.’”

As it turns out, Nolan won’t answer that one, either, but he will reveal this: “It’s really all about finishing Batman 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, our story picks up quite a bit later. Eight years after The Dark Knight. So he’s an older Bruce Wayne. He’s not in a great state.” Nolan laughs. “Not that he was ever in a great state! He’s frozen in time. He’s hit a brick wall.”

Bale expands on this. “It does harken back to that notion that this guy is originated from great pain and he has to address that - but at what point does it become an indulgence? The question is: how long do you allow pain to dominate your life? He has to try to answer that and move on.” 

The Dark Knight Rises is also notably the first of Nolan’s Batman films to show his main character operating in daylight. A bold decision; after all, this is hardly the Adam West TV show. “We felt to some degree we’d earned the right to do that with the character,” explains Nolan. “Batman Begins was very much about 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 a new entity. And then through The Dark Knight we would bring 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 just pushing that further… 

“But,” he adds, “plenty of it takes place in the dark, too!” 

If Hardy is to be believed, Batman’s move into sunlight has done nothing to diminish the power of his presence during their combat scenes. “He does look really intimidating! There’s a three-year-old in me that’s going, ‘Oh my God, that’s Batman! That’s Batman and he’s going to hit me! But I love Batman!’”

He shoots Empire an evil grin.

“The I look in the mirror. And I hit him back. Twice as hard.”

WHY RIDDLER WAS OUT:

Between Nolan and Goer’s decision to cast Bane in the prime antagonist role and its announcement, the rumour mill ground out talk of The Riddler. But Nolan insists that, after Heath Ledger’s Joker, The Riddler was never a contender.

“The world of Batman, indeed the world of all graphic novels, deals with archetypes,” he says, “And there’s a very real sense in which The Joker is an extreme and an absolute and Batman is an extreme and an absolute. So when you’re looking to continue the story - in this case finish Bruce Wayne and Batman’s story, as we see it - 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 villain.”

The Dark Knight Rises is also notably the first of Nolan’s Batman films to show is main character operating in daylight. A bold decision; after all, this is hardly the Adam West TV show. “We felt to some degree we’d earned the right to do that with the character,” explains Nolan.

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