Recently, Christopher Nolan made an interesting admission: The most famous line from his fan-favorite Batman film, 2008’s The Dark Knight, wasn’t his creation and was a line that he initially didn’t quite get. Nolan said his brother, frequent collaborator and co-writer Jonathan came up with the prophetic line, “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
“I’m plagued by a line from The Dark Knight, and I’m plagued by it because I didn’t write it,” Nolan told Deadline last month. “My brother wrote it. It kills me, because it’s the line that most resonates. And at the time, I didn’t even understand it … I read it in his draft, and I was like, ‘All right, I’ll keep it in there, but I don’t really know what it means. Is that really a thing?’ And then, over the years since that film’s come out, it just seems truer and truer. In [Oppenheimer], it’s absolutely that. Build them up, tear them down. It’s the way we treat people.”
At the South by Southwest Film & TV Festival earlier this month, The Hollywood Reporter asked Jonathan Nolan about his thought process for coming up with the line. As the audience will recall, the dialogue was spoken by Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) to Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) early in the film while they’re having a chat in a restaurant (video below).
“It came later in the script,” recalled Nolan (Westworld, Interstellar), who was at the festival to promote his upcoming Amazon sci-fi action-drama Fallout. “We’ve done a version or two of the script where we were looking for something that would distill the tragedy of Harvey Dent, but that would also apply to Batman. The richness of Batman is in the way this principled, almost Boy Scout-like figure is wrapped up in this kind of ghoulish appearance and his willingness to embrace the darkness. So I was looking at Greek tragic figures.”
Continued Nolan: “The…
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