Christopher Nolan Discusses Choosing Bane as Villain in DARK KNIGHT RISES

I was excited as hell when I first heard that Bane was going to be the main villain in The Dark Knight Rises, at the same time I was very surprised. I thought for sure they would have gone with a different villain. I love what I've seen of Bane so far and Tom Hardy is the perfect actor to bring this character to life on the big screen. I'm still seeing a lot of complaints about how the character looks, but this is Nolan's last Batman film... there's no way in hell he's going to screw it up. This could very well end up being the best in the trilogy. 

Nolan did a great little interview with the LA Times in which he talked about the film and explains how he came about picking Bane as the main villain.

I didn’t know him very well. David Goyer got me a bunch of stuff on him and we looked into him. I only knew him by name, I wasn’t familiar with his back story. He’s a very cool character. And getting an actor like Tom to take it on, you know you’re going to get something very special. Tom is somebody who really knows how to put character into every gesture, every aspect of his physicality in the way that great actors can. He’s a very, very physical actor. He transforms himself and it’s there in every movement. He’s not afraid to look at a character from the outside as well as the inside so there’s a deep psychological branch to the character but also a very, very specific awareness of how he’s going to use his body and his appearance to express that character too. Christian is like that too, very much.

With Bane, the physicality is the thing. With a good villain you need an archetype, you know, you need the extreme of some type of villainy. The Joker is obviously a particular archetype of diabolical, chaotic anarchy and has a devilish sense of humor. Bane, to me, is something we haven’t dealt with in the films. We wanted to do something very different in this film. He’s a primarily physical villain, he’s a classic movie monster in a way — but with a terrific brain. I think he’s a fascinating character.  I think people are going to get a kick out of what we’ve done with him.

I'm honestly not seeing a downside to this, and I don't understand how people are still complaining about it. Nolan goes on to talk about the 8 year time jump in the story saying,

It will make a lot more sense to people when they see the film. But it’s not a great mystery — it’s the jumping-off point for the film — but it’s hard for me to articulate it. I think the mood at the beginning of the film will make a lot of sense. If I had to express it thematically, I think what we’re saying is that for Batman and Commissioner Gordon, there’s a big sacrifice, a big compromise, at the end of the ‘The Dark Knight’ and for that to mean something, that sacrifice has  to work and Gotham has to get better in a sense. They have to achieve something for the ending of that film — and the feeling at the end of that film — to have validity. Their sacrifice has to have meaning and it takes time to establish that and to show that, and that’s the primary reason we did that. It’s a time period that is not so far ahead that we would have to do crazy makeup or anything — which I think would be distracting — but it gave them something to get their teeth into, particularly Christian in terms of [portraying] this guy who has been frozen in this moment in time with nowhere to go. He really has done  an incredible job figuring out how to characterize that and express that.

Make sure to head on over to the LA Times to read the full interview. There's some other interesting stuff their to read. This movie can't get here soon enough, but I can't wait to see that 6-minute prologue showing with IMAX screening of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.

The movie is scheduled to be released on July 20th 2012, and it stars Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Anne Hathaway, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Juno Temple, Josh Pence, Daniel Sunjata and Nestor Carbonell.

What are your thoughts on what Nolan had to say about Bane?

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