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Christopher Nolan’s Heartfelt Farewell Letter To His Epic Batman Trilogy
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Christopher Nolan

This past weekend, audiences came in droves to see Christopher Nolan‘s The Dark Knight Rises, the final epic conclusion of The Dark Knight Trilogy. Having helmed three Batman films for the better part of seven years, Nolan has brought us a hero that we could relate too, but one that’s grounded as well. Now, the filmmaker is sending a message to those who have been following his journey as a director of this grand trilogy.

Nolan admits his hesitation to coming back to doing any of the sequels for Batman Begins even admitting that second sequels are rarely ever any good. But the director was willing to take the risk and helmed two more Batman films – The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises – which together have gone on to be one of the most successful film trilogies in history.

Here’s the full letter, you can find it in The Art and Making of The Dark Knight Trilogy book, which was released this week.

Alfred. Gordon. Lucius. Bruce . . . Wayne. Names that have come to mean so much to me. Today, I’m three weeks from saying a final good-bye to these characters and their world. It’s my son’s ninth birthday. He was born as the Tumbler was being glued together in my garage from random parts of model kits. Much time, many changes. A shift from sets where some gunplay or a helicopter were extraordinary events to working days where crowds of extras, building demolitions, or mayhem thousands of feet in the air have become familiar.

People ask if we’d always planned a trilogy. This is like being asked whether you had planned on growing up, getting married, having kids. The answer is complicated. When David and I first started cracking open Bruce’s story, we flirted with what might come after, then backed away, not wanting to look too deep into the future. I didn’t want to know everything that Bruce couldn’t; I wanted to live it with him. I told David and Jonah to put everything they knew into each film as we made it. The entire cast and crew put all they had into the first film.

Nothing held back. Nothing saved for next time. They built an entire city. Then Christian and Michael and Gary and Morgan and Liam and Cillian started living in it. Christian bit off a big chunk of Bruce Wayne’s life and made it utterly compelling. He took us into a pop icon’s mind and never let us notice for an instant the fanciful nature of Bruce’s methods. I never thought we’d do a second””how many good sequels are there? Why roll those dice? But once I knew where it would take Bruce, and when I started to see glimpses of the antagonist, it became essential. We re-assembled the team and went back to Gotham. It had changed in three years.

Bigger. More real. More modern. And a new force of chaos was coming to the fore. The ultimate scary clown, as brought to terrifying life by Heath. We’d held nothing back, but there were things we hadn’t been able to do the first time out””a Batsuit with a flexible neck, shooting on Imax. And things we’d chickened out on””destroying the Batmobile, burning up the villain’s blood money to show a complete disregard for conventional motivation. We took the supposed security of a sequel as license to throw caution to the wind and headed for the darkest corners of Gotham.

I never thought we’d do a third””are there any great second sequels? But I kept wondering about the end of Bruce’s journey, and once David and I discovered it, I had to see it for myself. We had come back to what we had barely dared whisper about in those first days in my garage. We had been making a trilogy. I called everyone back together for another tour of Gotham. Four years later, it was still there. It even seemed a little cleaner, a little more polished. Wayne Manor had been rebuilt. Familiar faces were back””a little older, a little wiser . . . but not all was as it seemed.

Gotham was rotting away at its foundations. A new evil bubbling up from beneath. Bruce had thought Batman was not needed anymore, but Bruce was wrong, just as I had been wrong. The Batman had to come back. I suppose he always will.

Michael, Morgan, Gary, Cillian, Liam, Heath, Christian . . . Bale. Names that have come to mean so much to me. My time in Gotham, looking after one of the greatest and most enduring figures in pop culture, has been the most challenging and rewarding experience a filmmaker could hope for. I will miss the Batman. I like to think that he’ll miss me, but he’s never been particularly sentimental.

No matter what you thought about The Dark Knight Rises or Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy as a whole, Nolan has changed the way we looked at our heroes.

[Source: The Art and Making of The Dark Knight Trilogy via Collider]


Dark Knight Rises advance tickets

7 Comments »

  1. It would have been nice if he had at least mentioned Aurora…

    Comment by Robin Richard-Grayson Perry — July 24, 2012 @ 4:14 pm

  2. Nope, he is innocent.

    Comment by Александр Батов — July 24, 2012 @ 4:31 pm

  3. the letter was written while still shooting the movie, well before the shootings in Aurora

    Comment by Seankoon — July 24, 2012 @ 4:19 pm

  4. He wrote this while they were making the film. Not today, or even this week.

    Comment by James Waymire — July 24, 2012 @ 5:51 pm

  5. thank you Mr.Nolan for creating such a great trilogy best of luck to you and your family! i’m definitely looking forward for your next film

    Comment by Nina — July 24, 2012 @ 4:54 pm

  6.  He’s not responsible for what happened in Aurora, only one person is.  People should really stop shouldering this event onto the people who worked on the movie.

    Comment by Jeremy Clopton — July 24, 2012 @ 6:11 pm

  7. do a 4th!

    Comment by Ryan Parker — July 25, 2012 @ 9:26 pm

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