We have heard Christopher Nolan reference A Tale Of Two Cities as the inspiration for his final Batman movie, but he never really went into any detail about it. At this morning's press conference for the movie, Nolan reveals that it was actually his screenwriting partner Jonathan that got him interested in the ideas and themes in Dickens' story of class struggle in Europe in the late 18th century..
"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'."
"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."
Between this and the rumors that the movie would incorporate the "Occupy Wall Street" protests into the plot, many fans assumed that
TDKR would be setting out to make some kind of staement about the current sociopolitical climate, but not according to Jonathan Nolan..
"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.
Click the link back to SHH below for some more from Jonathan Nolan.