- CHRISTOPHER NOLAN BIDS FAREWELL TO THE DARK KNIGHT RISES
Chris says goodbye |
The Dark Knight Rises director/co-writer/co-producer
Christopher Nolan wrote the foreword to The Art and Making of The Dark Knight
Trilogy, which was released in stores on July 20th, the same day the film was
released in theaters.
Check it out here below:
“Alfred. Gordon. Lucius. Bruce . . . Wayne. Names that have
come to mean so much to me. Today, I’m three weeks from saying a final good-bye
to these characters and their world. It’s my son’s ninth birthday. He was born
as the Tumbler was being glued together in my garage from random parts of model
kits. Much time, many changes. A shift from sets where some gunplay or a
helicopter were extraordinary events to working days where crowds of extras,
building demolitions, or mayhem thousands of feet in the air have become
familiar.
People ask if we’d always planned a trilogy. This is like
being asked whether you had planned on growing up, getting married, having
kids. The answer is complicated. When David and I first started cracking open
Bruce’s story, we flirted with what might come after, then backed away, not
wanting to look too deep into the future. I didn’t want to know everything that
Bruce couldn’t; I wanted to live it with him. I told David and Jonah to put
everything they knew into each film as we made it. The entire cast and crew put
all they had into the first film. Nothing held back. Nothing saved for next
time. They built an entire city. Then Christian and Michael and Gary and Morgan
and Liam and Cillian started living in it. Christian bit off a big chunk of
Bruce Wayne’s life and made it utterly compelling. He took us into a pop icon’s
mind and never let us notice for an instant the fanciful nature of Bruce’s
methods.
Christopher Nolan the Brilliant |
I never thought we’d do a second—how many good sequels are
there? Why roll those dice? But once I knew where it would take Bruce, and when
I started to see glimpses of the antagonist, it became essential. We
re-assembled the team and went back to Gotham. It had changed in three years.
Bigger. More real. More modern. And a new force of chaos was coming to the
fore. The ultimate scary clown, as brought to terrifying life by Heath. We’d
held nothing back, but there were things we hadn’t been able to do the first
time out—a Batsuit with a flexible neck, shooting on Imax. And things we’d
chickened out on—destroying the Batmobile, burning up the villain’s blood money
to show a complete disregard for conventional motivation. We took the supposed
security of a sequel as license to throw caution to the wind and headed for the
darkest corners of Gotham.
I never thought we’d do a third—are there any great second
sequels? But I kept wondering about the end of Bruce’s journey, and once David
and I discovered it, I had to see it for myself. We had come back to what we
had barely dared whisper about in those first days in my garage. We had been
making a trilogy. I called everyone back together for another tour of Gotham.
Four years later, it was still there. It even seemed a little cleaner, a little
more polished. Wayne Manor had been rebuilt. Familiar faces were back—a little
older, a little wiser . . . but not all was as it seemed.
Gotham was rotting away at its foundations. A new evil
bubbling up from beneath. Bruce had thought Batman was not needed anymore, but
Bruce was wrong, just as I had been wrong. The Batman had to come back. I
suppose he always will.
Michael, Morgan, Gary, Cillian, Liam, Heath, Christian . . .
Bale. Names that have come to mean so much to me. My time in Gotham, looking
after one of the greatest and most enduring figures in pop culture, has been
the most challenging and rewarding experience a filmmaker could hope for. I
will miss the Batman. I like to think that he’ll miss me, but he’s never been
particularly sentimental.”
The Dark Knight Trilogy ends here, so make sure to go and
watch The Dark Knight Rises today!
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