groveChuck
U-matic Member
Three is the hardest number. Francis Coppola tripped on it ( The Godfather Part III). So did George Lucas ( Return of the Jedi) and David Fincher ( Alien 3) and Sam Raimi ( Spider-Man 3) and the Wachowski brothers ( The Matrix Revolutions). Peter Jackson pulled it off with The Lord of the Rings, but all of those movies came from the same book and were shot back-to-back.
One of the most striking things about The Dark Knight Rises, the third entry in director Christopher Nolan’s trilogy of Batman movies, is how bold and confident and precise it is — as if the filmmaker had always known how the story that started in 2005’s Batman Begins and continued in 2008’s The Dark Knight would turn out.
The truth is, Nolan was making it up as he went along.
“I’ve always thought of this trilogy as Bruce Wayne’s story, and every story has a beginning, a middle and an end,” he says. “The ending is the most important part to me: That’s the first thing I had for The Dark Knight Rises. The trick is to know it on a subliminal level — have the idea of it — but not write it down and make it concrete until you’re ready...
“The third movie in every trilogy is supposed to go into the toilet,” says Michael Caine, who reprises his role in The Dark Knight Rises as Wayne’s faithful butler Alfred. “But when I read the script for this one, I knew it would be special — and I’m not just saying that because I’m in the movie! Christopher [Nolan] is an incredible caster of actors, he’s an incredible director and he’s also an incredible writer. He’s all three of those things, and that’s something I’ve never encountered before in this business.”
Nolan’s previous two Batman films were celebrated for grounding the superhero genre in a grittier, darker reality. But The Dark Knight Rises pushes things even further: The epic-length movie (two hours and 45 minutes) contains a long and surprisingly grim stretch in which Gotham is overrun by anarchy and civilization breaks down. The film plunges into the abyss instead of just peering into it, and Nolan works the audience over with the confidence he’s gained from making risky, daring movies ( Memento, Inception, The Prestige) that found mainstream acceptance. He knows just how long he can push without turning off the viewer.
“That was very much at the forefront of our thoughts: How far do we want to take things?” Nolan says. “It was a long and torturous process to get that right. There are ways we offset the bleakness of the story. For example, we don’t go to a post-apocalyptic place, like Mad Max did. We drew more on the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, which gives the movie more of a feeling of a historical epic.
“But ultimately, we’re testing the characters in this movie, and we’re also testing the audience’s relationship to them. You want to mine the depths of despair and push the story to an extreme place, so the heroic figure of Batman is needed more than he has ever been needed. His symbol achieves an even greater stature.”
Unlike most makers of big-budget blockbusters, Nolan writes his own scripts (the only exception was 2002’s Insomnia, which was a remake of a Norwegian thriller). His canvases are enormous, but he sneaks his personal obsessions and interests into the corners. When Nolan’s planned biopic of the wealthy recluse Howard Hughes was derailed by Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, he simply incorporated aspects of Hughes’ life into The Dark Knight Rises, turning Wayne into an eccentric hermit who rarely leaves his mansion and has started to go a little batty.
Geoff Boucher, a pop culture writer for The Los Angeles Times and founder of HeroComplex.com, says the heroes and villains in Nolan’s trilogy are often two sides of the same coin.
“Gotham City is an affliction: It changes people,” Boucher says. “These characters, in a way, are all the same person: Bruce Wayne, Jim Gordon, Ra’s al Ghul [Liam Neeson’s villain from Batman Begins], the Joker, Harvey Dent. They just made specific choices that led them down their various paths. You could argue that the title of The Dark Knight Rises refers to [four different characters] in the movie. That’s just Nolan being a lot smarter than the rest of us. He likes the complexity and ambiguity of things like Blade Runner, which he cites as his favorite movie. He believes films should be like a fever dream you debate with your friends for years. Inception and The Dark Knight were unlike any summer movies we had ever seen. They were cerebral and complex and throwbacks to another time: They reminded me of A Clockwork Orange in a way. The Dark Knight Rises does, too.”
The Kubrick comparison is apt: He, too, was a master of simple yet eloquent images. The haunting final shot in Inception was a spinning top, wobbling ever so slightly, the implications grave and deep. There are moments in The Dark Knight Rises that generate a furious surge of emotion that The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man combined couldn’t muster. But even at its most heated, the movie remains elegantly cool.
“There’s something consistently dark and either blue or gray — something overcast — to all of Nolan’s films after Memento,” says Peter Debruge, senior film critic for Variety. “I associate the word ‘portentous’ with his work — this sonorous undertone that rumbles underneath his movies. He’s a very classical director, which makes the Dark Knight films stand out from other comic-book movies. Those rely more on visual technology and effects. Nolan is grounded in an old-school aesthetic, even though he’s making these huge movies.”
Like most of the filmmakers of his generation, Nolan, who turns 42 on July 30, admits to having been influenced primarily by 1970s cinema. But although he works in the Hollywood-blockbuster arena, he doesn’t cite the expected names as inspirations — no Spielberg, no Lucas.
“The great filmmakers of the past — Terrence Malick, Kubrick, Nicolas Roeg, all those guys — created very experimental and interrogative works that pushed the grammar of film forward,” he says. “I’ve been inspired by some of the more outrageous cinema I’ve seen. But I have found a way to use that influence in a much more mainstream way. I was talking to Christian Bale, who is making a movie with Malick right now, and I joked that whatever Malick is up to, I’ll be ripping it off in five years, but making it really understandable to people.”
“Kubrick was inimitable: You can’t really try to do what he did, because it was very abstract and unique. But he had a way of calmly achieving an image that expressed a lot of emotions without firing in too many directions at once. He inspired me to always find the simplest, most direct way of getting an idea across. In hindsight, when I look at what I’ve done … it’s a cliché to say you steal from the best, but there is some truth to the idea.”
The combination of high-minded filmmaking and pulpy source material is one of the reasons Nolan’s trilogy will endure as a standalone epic, regardless of how soon the inevitable Batman-reboot arrives.
With The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan also achieves something that has never been done in the realm of comic-book movies: He has given a finite end to a story involving a character that will continue to live forever, in countless incarnations, in the popular culture.
The combination of high-minded filmmaking and pulpy source material is one of the reasons Nolan’s trilogy will endure as a standalone epic, regardless of how soon the inevitable Batman-reboot arrives.
With The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan also achieves something that has never been done in the realm of comic-book movies: He has given a finite end to a story involving a character that will continue to live forever, in countless incarnations, in the popular culture.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/07/16/v-fullstory/2895351/the-dark-knight-rises-brings-the.html
One of the most striking things about The Dark Knight Rises, the third entry in director Christopher Nolan’s trilogy of Batman movies, is how bold and confident and precise it is — as if the filmmaker had always known how the story that started in 2005’s Batman Begins and continued in 2008’s The Dark Knight would turn out.
The truth is, Nolan was making it up as he went along.
“I’ve always thought of this trilogy as Bruce Wayne’s story, and every story has a beginning, a middle and an end,” he says. “The ending is the most important part to me: That’s the first thing I had for The Dark Knight Rises. The trick is to know it on a subliminal level — have the idea of it — but not write it down and make it concrete until you’re ready...
“The third movie in every trilogy is supposed to go into the toilet,” says Michael Caine, who reprises his role in The Dark Knight Rises as Wayne’s faithful butler Alfred. “But when I read the script for this one, I knew it would be special — and I’m not just saying that because I’m in the movie! Christopher [Nolan] is an incredible caster of actors, he’s an incredible director and he’s also an incredible writer. He’s all three of those things, and that’s something I’ve never encountered before in this business.”
Nolan’s previous two Batman films were celebrated for grounding the superhero genre in a grittier, darker reality. But The Dark Knight Rises pushes things even further: The epic-length movie (two hours and 45 minutes) contains a long and surprisingly grim stretch in which Gotham is overrun by anarchy and civilization breaks down. The film plunges into the abyss instead of just peering into it, and Nolan works the audience over with the confidence he’s gained from making risky, daring movies ( Memento, Inception, The Prestige) that found mainstream acceptance. He knows just how long he can push without turning off the viewer.
“That was very much at the forefront of our thoughts: How far do we want to take things?” Nolan says. “It was a long and torturous process to get that right. There are ways we offset the bleakness of the story. For example, we don’t go to a post-apocalyptic place, like Mad Max did. We drew more on the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, which gives the movie more of a feeling of a historical epic.
“But ultimately, we’re testing the characters in this movie, and we’re also testing the audience’s relationship to them. You want to mine the depths of despair and push the story to an extreme place, so the heroic figure of Batman is needed more than he has ever been needed. His symbol achieves an even greater stature.”
Unlike most makers of big-budget blockbusters, Nolan writes his own scripts (the only exception was 2002’s Insomnia, which was a remake of a Norwegian thriller). His canvases are enormous, but he sneaks his personal obsessions and interests into the corners. When Nolan’s planned biopic of the wealthy recluse Howard Hughes was derailed by Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, he simply incorporated aspects of Hughes’ life into The Dark Knight Rises, turning Wayne into an eccentric hermit who rarely leaves his mansion and has started to go a little batty.
Geoff Boucher, a pop culture writer for The Los Angeles Times and founder of HeroComplex.com, says the heroes and villains in Nolan’s trilogy are often two sides of the same coin.
“Gotham City is an affliction: It changes people,” Boucher says. “These characters, in a way, are all the same person: Bruce Wayne, Jim Gordon, Ra’s al Ghul [Liam Neeson’s villain from Batman Begins], the Joker, Harvey Dent. They just made specific choices that led them down their various paths. You could argue that the title of The Dark Knight Rises refers to [four different characters] in the movie. That’s just Nolan being a lot smarter than the rest of us. He likes the complexity and ambiguity of things like Blade Runner, which he cites as his favorite movie. He believes films should be like a fever dream you debate with your friends for years. Inception and The Dark Knight were unlike any summer movies we had ever seen. They were cerebral and complex and throwbacks to another time: They reminded me of A Clockwork Orange in a way. The Dark Knight Rises does, too.”
The Kubrick comparison is apt: He, too, was a master of simple yet eloquent images. The haunting final shot in Inception was a spinning top, wobbling ever so slightly, the implications grave and deep. There are moments in The Dark Knight Rises that generate a furious surge of emotion that The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man combined couldn’t muster. But even at its most heated, the movie remains elegantly cool.
“There’s something consistently dark and either blue or gray — something overcast — to all of Nolan’s films after Memento,” says Peter Debruge, senior film critic for Variety. “I associate the word ‘portentous’ with his work — this sonorous undertone that rumbles underneath his movies. He’s a very classical director, which makes the Dark Knight films stand out from other comic-book movies. Those rely more on visual technology and effects. Nolan is grounded in an old-school aesthetic, even though he’s making these huge movies.”
Like most of the filmmakers of his generation, Nolan, who turns 42 on July 30, admits to having been influenced primarily by 1970s cinema. But although he works in the Hollywood-blockbuster arena, he doesn’t cite the expected names as inspirations — no Spielberg, no Lucas.
“The great filmmakers of the past — Terrence Malick, Kubrick, Nicolas Roeg, all those guys — created very experimental and interrogative works that pushed the grammar of film forward,” he says. “I’ve been inspired by some of the more outrageous cinema I’ve seen. But I have found a way to use that influence in a much more mainstream way. I was talking to Christian Bale, who is making a movie with Malick right now, and I joked that whatever Malick is up to, I’ll be ripping it off in five years, but making it really understandable to people.”
“Kubrick was inimitable: You can’t really try to do what he did, because it was very abstract and unique. But he had a way of calmly achieving an image that expressed a lot of emotions without firing in too many directions at once. He inspired me to always find the simplest, most direct way of getting an idea across. In hindsight, when I look at what I’ve done … it’s a cliché to say you steal from the best, but there is some truth to the idea.”
The combination of high-minded filmmaking and pulpy source material is one of the reasons Nolan’s trilogy will endure as a standalone epic, regardless of how soon the inevitable Batman-reboot arrives.
With The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan also achieves something that has never been done in the realm of comic-book movies: He has given a finite end to a story involving a character that will continue to live forever, in countless incarnations, in the popular culture.
The combination of high-minded filmmaking and pulpy source material is one of the reasons Nolan’s trilogy will endure as a standalone epic, regardless of how soon the inevitable Batman-reboot arrives.
With The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan also achieves something that has never been done in the realm of comic-book movies: He has given a finite end to a story involving a character that will continue to live forever, in countless incarnations, in the popular culture.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/07/16/v-fullstory/2895351/the-dark-knight-rises-brings-the.html
