Dark Knight rising latest

Director teases details about the next Batman outing...

10:19 22 November 2011

The Dark Knight Rises will pick up eight years after the events of its predecessor The Dark Knight.

Director Christopher Nolan teased details about his final Batman outing to Empire, telling the magazine that the movie is "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."

The plot of the film, which also stars Anne Hathaway as Catwoman, has been closely guarded, but Nolan did reveal information about the filmÂ’s villain, Bane:

"With Bane, we're looking to give Batman a challenge he hasn't had before. With our choice of villain and with our choice of story we're testing Batman both physically as well as mentally."

Tom Hardy, who will play the villain, said:

"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."

The Dark Knight Rises, co-starring Gary Oldham, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Marion Cotillard, is released in the UK on July 20 2012.