As the release date of The Dark Knight Rises draws closer the anticipation levels are soaring, particularly following the reactions from the first batch of press screenings yesterday. Last week we reported Jonathan Nolan's rather frank response to some of the concerns surrounding the number of characters set to feature in the film. Now? We have the writer and director discussing the source of inspiration for the film, starting with Christopher Nolan:
"When Jonah showed me his first draft of his screenplay, it was 400 pages long or something. It had all this crazy stuff in it. As part of a primer when he handed it to me, he said, ‘You’ve got to think of A Tale of Two Cities which, of course, you’ve read.’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’ I read the script and was a little baffled by a few things and realized that I’d never read A Tale of Two Cities. It was just one of those things that I thought I had done. Then I got it, read it and absolutely loved it and got completely what he was talking about… When I did my draft on the script, it was all about A Tale of Two Cities."
Jonathan Nolan added: "Chris and David [Goyer] started developing the story in 2008 right after the second film came out. Before the recession. Before Occupy Wall Street or any of that. Rather than being influenced by that, I was looking to old good books and good movies. Good literature for inspiration… What I always felt like we needed to do in a third film was, for lack of a better term, go there. All of these films have threatened to turn Gotham inside out and to collapse it on itself. None of them have actually achieved that until this film. A Tale of Two Cities was, to me, one of the most harrowing portrait of a relatable, recognizable civilization that completely folded to pieces with the terrors in Paris in France in that period. It’s hard to imagine that things can go that badly wrong."
The Dark Knight Rises is out on 20th July.
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