We are a little under two weeks away from the release of The Dark Knight Rises and needless to say, we are all very anxious of what we will see. But if you want to know how the story of the film came to be, all you have to do is grab a Charles Dickens‘ book.

This past weekend, the press junket for The Dark Knight Rises was held, and during an interview with Comingsoon, Christopher and Jonathan Nolan spoke about how Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities not the Occupy Movement was the basis for The Dark Knight Rises.

When Jonah showed me his first draft of his screenplay, it was 400 pages long or something. It had all this crazy stuff in it. As part of a primer when he handed it to me, he said, ‘You’ve got to think of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ which, of course, you’ve read.’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’ I read the script and was a little baffled by a few things and realized that I’d never read ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. It was just one of those things that I thought I had done. Then I got it, read it and absolutely loved it and got completely what he was talking about”¦ When I did my draft on the script, it was all about ‘A Tale of Two Cities’.

Though the two films share the same class warfare theme, the script for The Dark Knight Rises was written long before the Occupy movement began:

“Chris and David [Goyer] started developing the story in 2008 right after the second film came out,” he says. “Before the recession. Before Occupy Wall Street or any of that. Rather than being influenced by that, I was looking to old good books and good movies. Good literature for inspiration”¦ What I always felt like we needed to do in a third film was, for lack of a better term, go there. All of these films have threatened to turn Gotham inside out and to collapse it on itself. None of them have actually achieved that until this film. ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ was, to me, one of the most harrowing portrait of a relatable, recognizable civilization that completely folded to pieces with the terrors in Paris in France in that period. It’s hard to imagine that things can go that badly wrong.”

The Dark Knight Rises opens on July 20th.

[Source: Comingsoon]