Christopher Nolan: The Dark Knight Rises Was Inspired by Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities

Posted on July 11, 2012

Christopher and Jonathan Nolan discussed their inspiration for the last Batman movie they are doing, The Dark Knight Rises.

The film deals with current topics such as class warfare, but Christopher says he wasn't influenced at all by Occupy Wall Street or current events. In fact, the inspiration was Charles Dickens' classic novel A Tale of Two Cities.

Jonathan Nolan explained to SuperHeroHype: "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."

The Dark Knight Rises stars Christian Bale and Anne Hathaway. It opens in wide release on July 20, 2012.