Jonathan Nolan Reveals the Literary Inspiration Behind The Dark Knight Rises. It’s Not a Batman Comic.

You couldn’t really be blamed if you thought that The Dark Knight Rises was based on previous Batman story arcs such as Knightfall or No Man’s Land, or heck even the Occupy Movement from the very real world. You’d however be wrong, as Jonathan Nolan, brother of Christopher and co-writer of The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, has flat-out said what it’s based on. And it’s much older than you might have thought. Read on for the full quote from both brothers:

Jonathan Nolan: ”Chris and David [Goyer, co-story writer on the series] 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. ‘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.

Christopher Nolan: “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.”

So there you have it. Your multimillion dollar mega blockbuster about a guy dressed as a bat clashing with a guy wearing a gas mask is based on Charles Dickens‘ A Tale of Two Cites. The influence kinda makes sense when paired with the original rumor that the film would simply be titled ‘Gotham‘.

Christopher also went on to say how his Dark Knight saga is less episodic than the average superhero trilogy, with each subsequent installment being very much a direct continuation of a chain of cause & effect. I’d agree with him.

In other Nolan news, because there’s an abundance of it these days, Christopher has come out and said that he will not have any involvement with the purported Justice League film, stating that his time with the Bat is now completely over. It would seem then that his role as producer on Zack Snyder‘s Man of Steel will be his last involvement with the DC universe. Hey, if you love something, set it free. That kinda goes for Nolan and DC both.