Part 2 -
Like her co-star, Marion Cotillard was also a Batman fan to the point that seeing him in the flesh—as embodied by Christian Bale—had a visceral effect on her. “
I couldn’t even say hello because I was so impressed,” she recalls. “
I’ve always loved Batman, and I thought that Chris totally reinvented this character, so I was proud to be in this movie. I couldn’t believe I was in this amazing world.”
Cotillard plays
Miranda Tate, who, like Bruce Wayne, is a wealthy philanthropist in Gotham who is passionate about environmental causes. “
They don’t know each other initially, but they meet and kind of understand each other right away,” Cotillard describes. “T
hey both have a lot of money and are trying to use it in a good way, but there’s also tension between them.”
Though she was thrilled to be invited to be in the film, initially the Oscar-winning actress (for
La Vie en Rose) did not know if it would even be possible for her to play a role. “I
had a big project in my life that was growing in my belly,” she laughs, referring to her infant son, whom she was expecting at the time. “
So, I called Chris and told him that it was unbelievable for me that he would think about me for his next movie because I had such a great experience on Inception. I would love to work with him again but it was impossible because he was starting the movie in May, and my son was born on May 19th. So, I told him, ‘If you ever find a way I could come later, I would really love to be a part of it.’ And he did it. When he called me, my son was not born yet and he said, ‘Do you think you will be able to work in June?’ and I said, ‘Yeah!’”
Having an infant on set was not as challenging given the family environment the Nolans engender on all of his film sets. “They are strong family people,” she says. “So, even though it’s a huge production and there are so many people on set, you really feel that you’re part of a family. All of these people have known each other for years, and the way they welcome newcomers is beautiful. It’s a beautiful way to work.”
Tom Hardy agrees, noting, “The thing about Chris is that he creates such a safe place to work, but it’s also challenging because this is a guy who flips trucks for real. So, you never know what you’re going to be asked to do. There are all kinds of pressures involved in a movie like this. It’s like test-flying a brand new aircraft for the military. There’s pressure that you’re going to crash it. But at the end of the day, if I opted out of the pressure then I wouldn’t be doing my job.”
Hardy plays Bane, the film’s destructive villain who presents a real threat to Gotham City and to Batman. “Bane is a serious piece of kit,” Hardy describes. “He’s not there to joke. He’s come to do business and there’s no frivolity or messing around. It’s very blunt and militant, very aggressive from the start.”
Nolan agrees, calling Bane “extremely efficient. He’s driven by a very specific set of actions and plans. Nothing is wasted. He’s much more of a physical adversary. In the first two films, we’d never presented Batman with a physical challenge, somebody who would literally stand toe-to-toe with him and battle in a physical sense. That’s an important part of who Batman is. He’s trained in fighting. He has honed his body. He’s an incredibly physical hero. So, we really wanted him for the first time in our movies to meet his match in somebody who’s truly a monstrous figure.”
After working with the director on Inception, Hardy leapt at the chance to do another film with Nolan and signed onto The Dark Knight Rises without even reading the script. “Chris actually called me on the phone and said, ‘Tom, there’s a character you might be quite good for but I’m not sure if it’s something you’d be interested in because it’s going to demand you to wear a mask, and I appreciate that as an actor you probably wouldn’t want to wear a mask for six months,’” the actor recalls. “He couldn’t tell me anything about the character, just that he had a mask and he was a bad, very bad guy. And I said, ‘Let me get this straight. You want me to come away and work with you around the world and I have the use of an entire stunt team and as many weapons as I want for six months and all I have to do is wear a mask?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, pretty much.’ So, I said, ‘I’m in. Absolutely,’” Hardy laughs.
The actor sees the mask as an indelible part of Bane’s identity. “If you look at mask work over history, they all have their own character,” he says. “Each mask is built specifically to draw out a specific character in Italian theater and whatnot. So, actually, a lot of the work is done by being camouflaged. You’re not self-conscious.”
That camouflage came in handy for some of Hardy’s more intense stunts. “I was on a walkway, holding onto the side of a building and very delicately walking out onto a platform about sixty feet high,” he remembers with a wry smile. “I wasn’t very manly, or masculine without the mask.”
“Bane is a phenomenally strong-minded character,” Bale adds. “So, you’ve got to be bold, and you’ve got a bold actor right here. Tom goes the distance. I mean, he goes way beyond what most other actors would do. He’s created a phenomenal villain.”
In The Dark Knight Rises, there is also a wild card in the form of an enigmatic cat burglar named Selina Kyle. “In this movie, we have two really strong female characters, which is always something that I’m happy about,” says Emma Thomas. “And Selina Kyle is great. You don’t quite know where you are with her as a character and she injects enormous amounts of fun and interest into the movie. I don’t really want to talk too much about it; I want people to see her because Anne’s great in the movie.”
Hathaway describes Selina Kyle as “intensely private and very mysterious,” the actress says in a separate interview. “She has her own code of ethics, which sometimes involves doing things that other people might consider questionable. I’m sure if you were to talk to her, she would be able to explain them to you. But she’s very private. She doesn’t give a lot away. That’s kind of all I can say about her.”
With her appearance in a black catsuit and spiked heels, she looks like every inch of Catwoman, but with a caveat. “Our version of Selina Kyle and Catwoman very much sits within the Chris Nolan version of Gotham City in the way that I think all of the characters fit within our universe,” Thomas says.
That quality is no more apparent than in the cat ears she wears. “She has these night vision goggles that she uses for safe cracking,” Nolan describes. “But they flip up when she doesn’t need them and they just happen to look like cat ears. That was an idea Lindy Hemming, our costume designer, and her concept artist really ran with and made work very well, because she’s Catwoman—she’s got to have that to be this icon.”
Hathaway’s personification of Selina Kyle seems the polar opposite of some of the comic roles the actress has played in the past. “I think what Anne has done will be extremely surprising to people,” comments Christopher Nolan. “I don’t think people have any idea what they’re in for with this character. She owns it in a way that was far beyond anything I could have hoped for and she makes it possible for you to believe in this extraordinary, beautiful, sexy, frightening, dark character. She makes it completely believable and compelling. I think people are going to be stunned when they see what she’s done.”
For her part, Hathaway relished sinking her claws into such a legendary figure. “It’s Catwoman,” she says, “one of the most famous, if not the most famous, comic book characters for a woman. But, also, it’s Catwoman in this franchise. I’m such a huge fan of Chris Nolan and the first two films, so the idea of being a part of it was really exciting. Just the fact that the opportunity was available when I was an appropriate age to play it seemed like the luckiest thing that could ever happen.”
On the film as a whole, Hathaway is equally enthusiastic. “I think that it will be surprising but very, very satisfying. I say, ‘In Nolan we trust.’”
As with The Dark Knight, production spanned the world to capture the kinds of real environments that define the look and feel Nolan hoped to create with the film. In addition to location shooting in the American cities of Pittsburgh, New York and Los Angeles, the filmmakers took cast and crew to the familiar stomping grounds of Cardington Studios, a massive airplane hangar where he also shot portions of The Dark Knight and Inception.
Early in the production, they touched down in a remote expanse near Jodhpur, India. “The locals thought we were nuts,” Bale says with a laugh. “We were out in 120-degree heat. I thought it was a great induction by fire into the whole thing.”
“We wanted a sequence that needed to be in the middle of nowhere, and the place where we shot is beautiful and clearly very remote,” says Thomas. “We actually went there with a very small crew, and it was an exciting way to start the movie.”
“It was nice to mix it up and go to different places,” Bale adds. “It makes it an adventure.”
The crew also took to the skies above Scotland to shoot the heart-pounding aerial sequence glimpsed in the prologue that was sneaked in theaters months before the film’s release. “The high aerial photography we did for real on camera,” Nolan comments. “We did a lot of aerial stunts. We did a lot of things with huge numbers of extras. Our biggest day we had 11,000 extras. We really tried to get a lot of scale and not resort to trickery until it was necessary. So, we have a very small number of visual effect shots in the film. What you’re seeing on the screen, despite there being a lot of technical wizardry from our CG guys, has a basis of reality. It’s something that we went out there and shot right down to Batman’s flying vehicle, The Bat, which is obviously not something we could really fly around. But we actually built it full-size. We built a rig for it to be able to move through environments in a realistic way.”
Producer Roven recalls The Bat being wheeled down a busy urban street during production and the incredible attention it attracted. “Wherever it goes, it attracts a huge following,” he says. “And it’s a great thing. The Batmobile was great, and the Bat Pod was a great piece of equipment, and then for Batman to have this sort of urban warfare mixture of a plane and helicopter ... it’s a really cool toy. We all should have one,” he adds with a smile.
Special effects supervisor Chris Corbould has delivered miracles for Nolan on his past films but feels he was truly put to the test with The Dark Knight Rises, particularly the new flying vehicle dreamed up by Nolan and production designer Nathan Crowley. “When Chris came to me with the script, I knew after Batman Begins and The Dark Knight it was going to be a rough ride and he didn’t prove me wrong,” Corbould comments with his famously wry delivery. “They were tough films but this one has been relentless action from start to finish, with massive special effects. Obviously, one of the biggest creations was The Bat. It took a team of guys a long while to create that. It was Chris Nolan and Nathan Crowley’s creation and we just made it work. That was probably the biggest, biggest event.”
All of the action is captured with Wally Pfister’s Oscar-winning cinematography, a good portion of it using IMAX cameras. “We were looking for an operatic quality, for a large canvas feel,” Nolan states.
The Dark Knight marked the first time ever that a major feature film was partially shot with IMAX cameras, and Nolan has not gone back since. “When we projected it as prints on those large IMAX screens, it was clear to anyone who got to see it in that form that it’s a form of filmmaking utterly unlike anything else,” Nolan states. “The resolution of the image, the quality, the scale of storytelling that you’re allowed to do in that format—there’s simply nothing else in the world that lets you do that. It went very smoothly in The Dark Knight, and so in coming back to that world, we decided to shoot a lot more of the film that way.”
On The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan estimates over an hour of footage was shot with IMAX cameras. “All of the major action in the film is on IMAX,” he says. “We’re going to have a hundred of those screens around the world and I’m going to encourage as many fans as possible to really try and experience it that way because they’ll be seeing something completely unique that no one has ever done before. It’s going to be a very out-of-the-world experience. It won’t be to everybody’s tastes. But for people who are up for the ride, it’s going to be incredible.”
From Batman Begins to The Dark Knight to, now, The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan feels a great sense of completion at being afforded the rare opportunity to tell a complete story with such depth and breadth. “We’ve managed to put everything into this movie that I wanted to do with the character,” he reflects. “It’s done for me. And I’m very hopeful that audiences will respond to that because there is nothing more exciting than the conclusion of a very long story that you’ve been invested in. I’ve felt that in making the film, and I’m really hopeful that the audience is going to feel that way in watching it. That’s the great thing about entertainment, and I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to finish the tale.”
Opening in theaters and IMAX on July 20, The Dark Knight Rises stars Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Morgan Freeman.
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