Warner Bros.
Given the way that The Dark Knight ended, it seemed as though, if Christopher Nolan decided to return to the franchise, Heath Ledger’s Joker would be a character he returned to. Following Ledger’s tragic passing just months before the release of the film, however, that obviously wasn’t possible.
After Ledger’s death, Nolan needed a bit of convincing to return for a trilogy-capping film, which ultimately became 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises.
According to Christopher Nolan’s brother Jonathan, one of the issues with returning to the franchise was that they weren’t sure what villain to use, especially considering the fact that they’d be following one of the greatest villainous cinematic performances of all time.
“I was unsure about [Bane] at the story stage. Chris understood that what we had done and what Heath [Ledger] had done with [Joker] — you didn’t want to go anywhere near it. I started to play with the idea of the Riddler and what could be done with that character,” Nolan said in an interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.
Nolan then explained they ultimately decided on Bane because he represented such a different threat than the one Joker did.
“But it did feel like close enough to the space of what we had done with Heath, and you really needed to [change direction]. There’s another genre shift there. One of the things I was excited about for The Dark Knight Rises was that if you do a kind of urban crime genre for [The Dark Knight], the third one was a post-apocalyptic film. You sort of go: Batman always saves the day and the city survives. Why can’t we destroy Gotham and see what happens afterwards?'”
The desire to explore Riddler certainly tracks with what we’ve heard in the past as there have long been stories that the producers were eyeing Leonardo DiCaprio for the role.
Jonathan Nolan is out on the marketing trail promoting his new series Fallout, which is now streaming on Prime Video.