Most directors hired to do a superhero movie usually just look to the comic books as inspiration for their narrative. That's an easy way to please hardcore fans, but sometimes those stories don't exactly cross over mediums that successfully. What we're often left with are movies that are all flash with no substance. That's why it's so refreshing to hear that Christopher and Jonathan Nolan relied just as much on classic literature for inspiration on The Dark Knight Rises as they did on the comics.
Speaking to Coming Soon, Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan's brother and screenwriter on The Dark Knight Rises, explained how Charles Dickens' literary masterpiece, A Tale of Two Cities, influenced this final Batman movie.
"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," Nolan explained. "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."
During this conversation, Christopher Nolan also chimed in by saying, "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."
Dickens' novel portrayed the class warfare between the workers and the aristocracy in France during the French Revolution. If The Dark Knight Rises can successfully pull off the brilliant themes that Dickens brought to life in A Tale of Two Cities, it could potentially make every other superhero movie look simply childish in comparison.
The Dark Knight Rises will hit theaters on July 20.
[via Coming Soon]
