Christopher Nolan Discusses The Inspiration For The Dark Knight Rises Plot

A lot of people have been speculating that the storyline for “The Dark Knight RIses” is heavily influenced by the DC Comics miniseries “Knightfall”. While it does draw certain elements from there, director Christopher Nolan has now revealed the true source of inspiration for the plot of the 3rd and final Batman film.

At a press conference early today, Nolan and his brother, screenwriting partner Jonathan Nolan told Comingsoon.net that the plot takes a leaf from a famous literary classic: “A Tale Of Two Cities”. It kind of makes sense, seeing as how the Charles Dickens novel deals with themes of class struggle and a broken society, which are clearly evident in the trailers we’ve seen so far. There are numerous scenes of an uprising and social unrest, led/instigated by the villain Bane. There’s even a sequence of a riot shot on Wall Street, echoing the Occupy Wall Street movement earlier this year.

Nolan said: “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’.”

Comingsoon noted that although “The Dark Knight Rises” was noted for its savvy connection to real-world sociopolitical events, Jonathan Nolan points out that the film’s exploration of class warfare is not limited to a present day struggle.

He said: “Chris and David 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.”

Beyond that, the epic scale of Dickens’ tome also matched the director’s vision of how to conclude his cinematic trilogy. He elaborated: “It just felt exactly the right thing for the world we were dealing with. What Dickens does in that book in terms of having all his characters come together in one unified story with all these thematic elements and all this great emotionalism and drama, it was exactly the tone we were looking for.”

“The Dark Knight Rises” stars Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Morgan Freeman. It premieres 19th July here.