It’s only November and yet it appears that Christmas has come early. Empire magazine’s feature on The Dark Knight Rises landed on doorsteps this morning and fans were quick to discover that it was jam-packed with interviews, pictures and enticing new bits of information concerning the long-awaited blockbuster.

Our copy of Empire is still in the mail (although we’re waiting patiently by our door for the mail person) so we thank the good folks at ComicBookMovie for their scans and transcriptions! We’ll have more pictures and page scans as they become available!

Check out the page scans in the gallery below. We’re using our old gallery for the scans so that the image will be large enough to read the text!
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And now for the photo spreads. Frankly, they look outstanding and offer our first real look at how the film is going to look.

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Lastly, in case you couldn’t read the text in the page scans above, CBM has transcribed a good portion of it! Take a look below!

Christopher Nolan on the prologue and the overall story:

“Our story picks up EIGHT years after The Dark Knight”.
In terms of finishing our story and increasing its scope, we were trying to craft an epic”
“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. With our choice of villain and with our choice of story we are testing Batman both physically as well as mentally. Also, in terms of finishing the our story and increasing its scope, we were trying to craft an epic so the physicality of the film became very important.”

Nolan On Bane:

“The Prologue is basically the first six, seven minutes of the film. It’s the introduction to Bane and a taste of the rest of the film. With Bane we are looking to give Batman a physical challenge that he hasn’t had before. He’s a great sort of movie monster, but with an incredible brain, and that was a side of him that hadn’t been taped before. Because the stories from the comics are very epic and very evocative—very much in the way that Bruce Wayne’s origin story is epic and evocative. We were looking to really parallel that with our choice of villain. So he’s a worthy adversary. I felt that if I could get somebody as talented as Tom to agree to hide himself in the character I would get something very special. What I really feel with a great actor is every movement, every hand gesture, every step, has performance in it. Tom completely got it. It’s an incredible challenge to remove motion of the face so that you can’t put things across in the usual way, and you just have the eyes and a bit of the scalp and the arms and legs. What I knew is that from Tom I would get something where you get a total character and everything has incredible thought applied to it. And a lot of what he’s doing is very counterintuitive. He has this incredible disjunct between the expressiveness of the voice and the stillness of the movement of his body. He’s found a way to play a character who is enormous and powerful with a sort of calm to it, but also is able to be incredibly fast at times. Unpredictable. He just has a raw threat to him that’s extraordinary. It’s a very powerful thing when you see it come together, beyond what I have ever imagined. That’s what you get from working with great actors.”

Nolan on continuing the series after The Dark Knight:

The world of Batman, indeed the world of all graphic novels, deals with archetypes,” he says, “And there’s a very real sense in which the Joker is an extreme and an absolute and Batman is an extreme and an absolute. So when you’re looking to continue the story – in this case finish Bruce Wayne and Batman’s story, as we see it – then you certainly don’t want a watered-down version of a character you’ve already done. You want a different archetype. What Bane represents in the comics is the ultimate physical villain.

It’s really all about finishing Batman’s and Bruce Wayne’s story. We left him in a very precarious place at the end of The Dark Knight. His reputation in tatters, on the run. And I think perhaps surprisingly for some people, our story picks up quite a bit later. He’s not in a great state. He’s frozen in time, he’s hit a brick wall. Batman Begins was very much about the explaining the logic of the suit, and how it belonged in the shadows, in a position of stealth where he’s able to intimidate people with it as his new entity. And then through The Dark Knight we would out him during the magic hour and we changed the suit accordingly so he withstood that kind of exposure. But also the character himself has the reputation now, so he’s able to expose himself more and still intimidate people. And with the third film we’re pushing that further…but plenty of it takes place in the dark too.”

Lindy Hemming Gives Details On Bane’s Mask:

THE BREATHING MECHINISM: “He was injured early in his story. Hes suffering from pain and he needs gas to survive. He cannot survive the pain without the mask. The pipes from the mask go back along his jawline and feed into the thing at the back where there are two cannisters of what ever it is..the anasthetic”

Tom Hardy on Bane:

“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. He’s a smashing machine. He’s a wrecking ball. If we’re going to shoot somebody, shoot the pregnant woman or the old lady first. Make sure everybody stands up. He’s a terrorist in his mentality as well as brutal actions. He’s horrible piece of work.”

Christian Bale on Bane:

“I wasn’t familiar with Bane. Although I vaguely remembered just a crazy “roid-looking” guy with a mask. You know what I mean? I remember him less actually on screen, and more people telling me that, and wincing just like you did. I just trust and have faith in Chris I know he wasn’t gonna mess around with making poor decision on who the bloody villain was! It does harken back to that notion that this guy is originated from great pain and he has to address that–but at what point does it become indulgence? The question is how long do you allow pain to dominate your life? He has to try and answer that and move on.”

Wow! That sure is a whole lot to learn in a few minutes! The important bits stick out however, the prologue we plan to catch before Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol will feature Bane (possibly his prison escape?) and the film will officially take place eight years after the close of The Dark Knight It’s impressive to hear about Bane’s brutality, exactly how much carnage should we expect from The Dark Knight Rises?

Stay tuned, we’ll have more news, scans and pictures as they become available!