Batman had to come back, says Christopher Nolan

New Delhi: Despite ‘not so favourable’ reviews, ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ has done well at the box office. Said to be the epic conclusion of the Batman franchise, the film is the third and the last film of the series after ‘Batman Begins’ and ‘The Dark Knight’. The director of the series, Christopher Nolan was aware of the hype and expectations of the common movie goers, thus he had written a piece during the shoot of ‘The Dark Knight Rises’. This article, published on the website www.reddit.com, is actually the foreword of the 'The Art and Making of The Dark Knight Trilogy' book.

He writes, “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.”

His growth as a filmmaker was simultaneous with the development of Bruce Wayne’s story, “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.”

Nolan further writes, “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.”

The write-up is an example of how objective can a filmmaker be, “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 mindless shooting at a Colorado theater has dampened the spirit of movie enthusiasts but let’s hope that it won’t take long before the Dark Knight rises again, in his fans’ hearts.