How Christopher Nolan was coaxed back to finish his Batman trilogy
After The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan was reluctant to make another Batman film. He agreed only once he, his brother Jonathan and David S. Goyer found an ending worth telling. The result, shot largely on IMAX cameras across three continents, closed the trilogy in 2012 and became the highest-grossing Batman movie so far.
The story picks up eight years after Harvey Dent's death. A law bearing his name has broken organised crime, Commissioner Gordon has quietly let Batman carry the blame for Dent's killings, and Bruce Wayne has become a grieving recluse. Nolan built the plot from three comic arcs: the 1993 Knightfall storyline in which the villain Bane first appeared, the 1986 series The Dark Knight Returns, and 1999's No Man's Land.
Tom Hardy's Bane, an outcast of the League of Shadows, bankrupts Wayne with a raid on the stock exchange, breaks Batman in a fight, and dumps him in an ancient pit prison while turning a Wayne Enterprises fusion reactor into a bomb and cutting Gotham off. Nolan picked the character because he wanted Batman tested physically and mentally, and the costume designer explained that Bane's mask feeds him a painkilling gas. The twist belongs to Marion Cotillard's Miranda Tate, revealed as Talia, daughter of Ra's al Ghul, with Bane as her protector. Batman finally hauls the bomb out over the bay in his aircraft, the Bat.
Filming ran from May to November 2011 in places ranging from Jodhpur and Glasgow to Pittsburgh and Newark. Nolan shot much of it with IMAX 70 mm cameras, including the first six minutes. Anne Hathaway, who auditioned without knowing which part she was up for, called Selina Kyle the most physically demanding role she had played, and Christian Bale said it would be his last outing as Batman.
It premiered in New York on July 16, 2012, and was praised as a fitting conclusion. The American Film Institute named it among the year's ten best films, and it earned $1.085 billion worldwide, the second Batman film to pass a billion. Its ending leaves hints that Bruce survived, and hands the cave to a young officer whose first name turns out to be Robin.
Source: The Dark Knight Rises
