1. BEHIND-THE-SCENES – WALL STREET
“I’m exhausted. Every bone in my body is aching from training and now it’s the big fight scene. So it’s suck it up! Suck it up!” Tom Hardy bursts into laughter. Less than an hour later – surprising both him and Bale, who were expecting this to be a much longer day – Empire finds Hardy out of the costume and mask, and despite his professed knackeredness, in fine fettle indeed. After a friendly bear-hug welcome, he’s kindly brewed us a heady espresso, and we sit next to a half-eaten burrito and a pile of Bane publicity photos that Hardy dutifully autographs with a silver Sharpie while we talk.
“It’s a lot of business out there, isn’t it?” he says, nodding to the continuing carnage beyond the trailer wall (Nolan has plenty more to shoot with the brawling extras). With his head shaved bald and sporting a goatee, Hardy looks more like the imposing Bronson of Nicolas Winding Refn’s film than the slick Eames of Nolan’s Inception. “It’s very overwhelming,” he continues. “When you’re training in a rehearsal room you go, ‘Okay, I have a contact with seven people. This guy I chin, this one I slip and I punch, this one I pick up and suplex, this guy I kick in the face, and this one, he stops a hammer with his head. And then I meet Batman. That’s all right in a rehearsal room, but then you add 1,000 people that are all dressed the same as the seven you’re supposed to hit – ‘cause they’re all police officers – and I don’t know where my police officers are. But the stuntmaster’s like, ‘Don’t worry. They will find you.’”
2. FAMILIARITY WITH BANE
Hardy has quite a task on his hands, and it’s not just finding the right policemen to GBH. (He actually went through more than he was supposed to out there – “So, I apologise to whoever they were! I’m sure we’ll find out in the accident report…”) Not only does he have to deliver the requisite villainy to help this final chapter top all that’s gone before, he has to do it with a bad guy who arrives after Heath Ledger (figuratively) smacked gobs with his astonishing take on The Joker in The Dark Knight, and who, let’s be honest, would score a big, fat X on a Family Fortunes Batman villain poll.
Hardy himself hadn’t heard of Bane before he was offered the role – “I’m fairly incubated” – and for that matter, neither had his multi-million-dollar sparring partner.
“I wasn’t familiar with Bane,” admits Christian Bale when EMPIRE catches up with him, similarly freed from his battle-gear in his own trailer just next door. “Although I vaguely remembered just a crazy ‘roid-looking guy with a mask.” We wonder if that was from the ill-conceived and ill-received Batman & Robin, in which the character appeared as a mindless, luchador-masked megachump. “You know what? I remember him less actually on screen, and more people telling me that – and wincing just like you did,” Bale chuckles. “I just trust and have faith in Chris. I knew he wasn’t gonna mess around with making a poor decision on who the bloody villain was!”
Precisely how that villain, created by Chuck Dixon, Doug Moench and Graham Nolan (no relation) in 1995, has been reinterpreted by Christopher Nolan’s purposes is something nobody will reveal at this early stage. (Just as, for now, talk of Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman or the other supporting characters is also off-limits.) Although costume designer Lindy Hemming does drop hints when describing Bane’s look (see Section 9. Bane Clothed).
3. PROLOGUE & IMAX
More will be revealed on December 21 when, repeating a strategy that worked well with his Joker reveal almost four years earlier, Christopher Nolan releases the prologue to The Dark Knight Rises in select IMAX cinemas, 65mm being the director’s format of choice; much more of this film’s action is shot in IMAX than even The Dark Knight’s. “The prologue is basically the first six, seven minutes of the film,” explains Nolan two days later, during what must be a highly valued day off. “It’s the introduction to Bane, and a taste of the rest of the film.”
4. HINTS ON HOW BANE FITS INTO THE STORY
Until then, for the uninitiated and those Family Fortunes contestants who went for The Joker, Riddler and Penguin, we can only examine the character’s graphic-literary formation. Bane was a child raised within the walls of a harsh prison in a fictional Caribbean country (Santa Prisca), who was transformed into a fearsome, hulking man-machine via a physique-enhancing intravenous drug called Venom. Bane’s most celebrated storyline is Knightfall, in which he snaps Batman’s spine like a dry twig.
“With Bane, we are looking to give Batman a physical challenge that he hasn’t had before,” says Nolan. “With our choice of villain and with our choice of story we’re testing Batman both physically as well as mentally. Also, in terms of finishing our story and increasing its scope, we were trying to craft an epic, so the physicality of the film became very important.”
Nolan and co-writer David Goyer had settled on Bane as the main villain three-and-a-half years earlier, when they first put the story together just after The Dark Knight’s release. “What our IMAX prologue is aiming at showing is that Bane’s a very different kind of villain than the ones 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.”
5. THE RIDDLER
Between Nolan and Goyer’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.”
6. BANE AND BRUTALITY
“Physical” seems 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 jot about Bane’s agenda or his motives, but he’ll talk in detail about his methods. Specifically his fighting style.
“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: *beep* 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.”
7. CASTING TOM HARDY
Hardy was Nolan’s first choice for the role, although it at first 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 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: *beep* 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 the majority of his face hidden.
“I felt that if I could get somebody 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 disjunction between the expressiveness of the voice and the stillness of the movement of his body. He’s found a way to play 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.”
8. BRUCE WAYNE & BATMAN
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 Knightfall’s backbreaking storyline. Bale smiles apologetically. “I’m sure you’ve experienced it before, and you’re about to experience it right 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 originated from great pain and he has to address that – but at what point does it become indulgence? The question is: how long do you allow pain to dominate your life? He has to try and 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.
“Then I look in the mirror. And I hit him back. Twice as hard.”
9. BANE CLOTHED
Costume designer Lindy Hemming talks us through the latest Bat-villain’s style
THE MASK
“I wanted it to be like an animal. I looked at things like silverback gorillas, and snarling teeth and fangs coming up and fangs coming down.”
THE BREATHING MECHANISM
“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 the back, where there are two canisters of whatever it is – the anaesthetic.”
THE ARMOUR
“Here he has nods to the straps of the wrestling suit he started with in the comics, but he’s much more of a warrior/mercenary than a wrestler.”
THE TECH
“His stuff has been made on the move over the mountains of the world. So there is a slightly clunky element to him, and that’s part of his story.”
10. WHAT IS THE STORY?
EMPIRE considers the clues we’ve detected over the last six months. The spoiler-sensitive might want to look away in case we’re right about any of it!
MARION COTILLARD AND JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT
We know they’re in the film, and we know they play Miranda Tate (a Wayne Enterprises board member) and John Blake (a cop) respectively, but who are they really? We expect one to be a friend and one a foe. But which is which.
BATMAN FLIES!
Pap snaps have revealed the new vehicle – or at least, the practical FX-element of it – and it flies. No-one’s officially calling it the ‘Batwing’, though, and judging by how it’s been used in street scenes, we’re saying it’s more chopper-based than jet.
SCARECROW’S BACK?
Nolan regular Cillian Murphy was spotted on set in late September, which makes a Dark Knight-esque Scarecrow cameo highly likely. We’re not convinced there’s a direct link to the reports of a prison breakout scene shot in Pittsburgh (that could just as well be part of a Bane origin scene), but he must get out of Arkham somehow…
THE CAT
No secret Catwoman’s in it, and we all know she’s played by Anne Hathaway, but there are still scant details. We don’t think we’d win any prizes for suggesting she may be playing off Batman and Bane against each other. And those ‘cat ears’? They’re her night goggles, flipped up.
TUMBLERS!
Yes, there are three more tumblers in this movie, but they’re not additional Batmobiles; they’re desert camo-styled, and part of Bane’s arsenal. Has someone been sneaking schematics out of Lucius Fox’s vault…?
RA’S AL GHUL?
Josh Pence (the digitally-replaced-by-Armie-Hammer twin in The Social Network) is reported to be playing “Young Ra’s al Ghul”, while Liam Neeson was spotted on set in June. Don’t expect a resurrection, though – more likely flashbacks which could connect up with the fact that Bane’s likely leading a revitalised League of Shadows, perhaps in conjunction with Talia al Ghul, Ra’s’ daughter – another character rumoured to be appearing.
11. THE ANATOMY OF GOTHAM
The five cities that make up Nolan’s Bat-turf
CHICAGO (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight)
Most of the exterior shots of Gotham in the first two films were The Windy City.
LONDON (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises)
Our own capital only makes bit-part appearances as Gotham, but is the only city to appear in all three films.
LOS ANGELES (The Dark Knight Rises)
LA makes its Nolan-Batman debut with The Dark Knight Rises.
PITTSBURGH (The Dark Knight Rises)
“We did an enormous amount here,” says Nolan – including a gigantic set-piece at Heinz Field.
NEW YORK (The Dark Knight Rises)
“We didn’t have the resources to film there on the first two movies,” says Nolan, so he was keen to get the real Gotham into his finale.
