Nolan Says THE DARK KNIGHT RISES Is the Biggest Epic Since the Silent Era
While talking about The Dark Knight Rises in a recent interview with Empire, director Christopher Nolan declared that "I think this is the biggest one I've done," and that it is also "The biggest one anyone's done since the silent era, in technical terms." He went on to explain that,
Shooting on IMAX, you wanna justify that we've put our resources more into what we were shooting on the day than computer graphics. It's not what you're used to seeing. I don't know when someone last did a film with 11,000 extras in a real environment. It is an escalation. You want things to be justifiably bigger and more extreme than what you've done in the last film. As long as the story supports that.
Nolan also discussed the epic scope of the film, and the movies that influenced him in making this final chapter in The Dark Knight saga.
It's all about historical epics in conception. It's a war film. It's a revolutionary epic. It's looking back to the grand-scale epics of the past, really, and for me that goes as far back as silent films. I've been watching a lot of silent films with my kids on Blu-Ray. We've shot over a third of the movie on the IMAX format, and that naturally puts you more in the mode of staging very large events for the camera. It's my attempt to get as close to making a Fritz Lang film as I could. It's also more in the mould of 'Doctor Zhivago,' or 'A Tale Of Two Cities,' which is a historical epic with all kinds of great storytelling taking place during the French Revolution. There's an attempt to visualise certain things in this film on this large scale that are troubling and genuinely to the idea of an American city. Or, to put it another way: revolutions and the destabilising of society have happened everywhere in the world, so why not here?"
Wow. How awesome is that! Knowing the kind of filmmaker that Nolan is though, it's not surprising. Fritz Lang is not only the man who made Metropolis, but he made a ton of other great films that are worth watching. Especially if you're a film buff.
The Dark Knight Rises opens up on July 20th, and I have no doubt that it's going to be an incredibly epic masterpiece. What do you think about what Nolan had to say here in this interview?