‘Dark Knight Rises’ skips ahead 8 years

Empire has a new cover story on ‘The Dark Knight Rises’, and in addition to some new details about Bane, they interview director Christopher Nolan who revealed that, while ‘The Dark Knight’ began almost right where ‘Batman Begins’ left off, ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ skips ahead 8 years.

“It’s really all about finishing Batman and Bruce Wayne’s story. We left him in a very precarious place. Perhaps surprisingly for some people, our story picks up quite a bit later, eight years after The Dark Knight. So he’s an older Bruce Wayne; he’s not in a great state.”

So if you’re sitting there confused and wondering what happened to the last 8 years, now you know what Lindsay feels like during those rare moments when she isn’t drunk.

Tom Hardy on Bane and his “just smash shit” fighting style:

“He’s brutal. Brutal. He’s a big dude who’s incredibly clinical, in the fact that he has a result-based and oriented fighting style. It’s not about fighting. It’s about carnage. The style is heavy-handed, heavy-footed, it’s nasty. Anything from small-joint manipulation to crushing skulls, crushing rib cages, stamping on shins and knees and necks and collarbones and snapping heads off and tearing his fists through chests, ripping out spinal columns. He is a terrorist in mentality as well as brutal action.”

Costume designer Lindy Hemming on the mask Bane wears and why he needs it.

“He was injured early in his story. He’s suffering from pain and needs gas to survive. He can’t survive the pain without the mask. The pipes from the mask go back along his jawline and feed into the thing at his back, where there are two canisters.”