Whatever one thinks of The Dark Knight Rises, it is quite clear that we owe Christopher Nolan a big debt because he basically saved and reinvented the Batman franchise.
It’s very exciting when a new director comes on the scene, he got a lot of attention for his wonderfully inventive Memento, and it’s fascinating to see the new hotshot on the block can do with a big studio movie.
Sure, a director could ho out and play the big studio game, or they can keep their unique sensibilities and create something very cool that also has mass appeal. Of course Nolan can keep riding the Batman train the rest of his life if he wants to, but he is indeed done with it, and ready to move on to other things.
Now as Collider and Cinema Blend report, Nolan’s written somewhat of a goodbye note to the franchise, it’s actually the forward to the book The Art and Making of The Dark Knight Trilogy, and here are some tidbits from his final summing up of everything.
“Alfred. Gordon. Lucious. Bruce…Wayne,” Nolan writes. “Names that have come to mean so much to me. People ask if we’d always planned a trilogy. This is like being asked whether you had planned on growing up, getting married, having kids.”
When Nolan and screenwriter David Goyer started working on the new model Batman, “we flirted with what might come after, then backed away, not wanting to look too deep into the future. I didn’t want to know everything that Bruce could; I wanted to live with him.”
Nolan claims, “I never thought we’d do a second – how many good sequels are there? Why roll the dice? I never thought we’d do a third – are there any great second sequels? But I kept wondering about the end of Bruce’s journey, and once David and I discovered it, I had to see it for myself.”
Of course, in The Dark Knight Rises, 8 years pass where Batman feels he’s no longer needed, but then a new evil comes along that puts Gotham at a standstill.
“The Batman had to come back. I suppose he always will.” Nolan ultimately concludes, “I will miss the Batman. I like to think that he’ll miss me, but he’s never been particularly sentimental.”
Maybe not, but he sure isn’t going to be the same without you.
