Chris Nolan calls The Dark Knight Rises the biggest film anyone has done since the silent era!

Last Updated on July 23, 2021

Christopher Nolan isn’t mincing words when it comes to hyping up his latest feature, THE DARK KNIGHT RISES. Not necessarily known for boastful talk, Nolan is comparing his film to the massive productions of the silent age and calling it a “revolutionary epic” in a new interview with Empire Magazine (which was transcribed by The Playlist).

“I think this is the biggest one I’ve done,” he tells Empire, “The biggest one anyone’s done since the silent era, in technical terms. Shooting on IMAX, you wanna justify that we’ve put our resources more into what we were shooting on the day than computer graphics. It’s not what you’re used to seeing. I don’t know when someone last did a film with 11,000 extras in a real environment. It is an escalation. You want things to be justifiably bigger and more extreme than what you’ve done in the last film. As long as the story supports that.”

The silent era isn’t the only thing on his mind, however. Inspirations as varied as Charles Dickens and Fritz Lang were cluttering up Nolan’s brain while he worked on it.

“It’s all about historical epics in conception. It’s a war film. It’s a revolutionary epic. It’s looking back to the grand-scale epics of the past, really, and for me that goes as far back as silent films. I’ve been watching a lot of silent films with my kids on Blu-Ray. We’ve shot over a third of the movie on the IMAX format, and that naturally puts you more in the mode of staging very large events for the camera. It’s my attempt to get as close to making a Fritz Lang film as I could. It’s also more in the mould of ‘Doctor Zhivago,’ or ‘A Tale Of Two Cities,’ which is a historical epic with all kinds of great storytelling taking place during the French Revolution. There’s an attempt to visualise certain things in this film on this large scale that are troubling and genuinely to the idea of an American city. Or, to put it another way: revolutions and the destabilising of society have happened everywhere in the world, so why not here?”

Here’s a very intriguing SPOILER regarding the Joker’s presence in the film; consider yourself warned…

“We’re not addressing The Joker at all. That is something I felt very strongly about in terms of my relationship with Heath and the experience I went through with him on The Dark Knight. I didn’t want to in any way try and account for a real-life tragedy. that seemed inappropriate to me. We just have a new set of characters and a continuation of Bruce Wayne’s story. Not involving The Joker.”

To read all of Nolan’s quotes related to the finale of his Batman trilogy, head on over HERE. THE DARK KNIGHT RISES opens on JULY 20th.

TDKR star Marion Cotillard