With Warner announcing the first villain involved in Christopher Nolan's Batman: The Dark Knight Rises last week. NBC decided to chat to Bane creator Chuck Dixon and his thoughts on the final film in the current franchise.
"The crowning achievement of all my work is definitely Bane," states Dixon, "Graham [Nolan/ Artist] called me yesterday morning. I had no clue. He said he'd just read it on the Internet. We were both as giddy as schoolgirls that Bane is going to get another shot at cinema stardom." I guess Joel Schumacher didn't quite capture it. Bane was introduced in Batman: Knightfall in which, to facilitate a new, darker hero taking on the cowl, Batman would have his back broken by a major new enemy created just for the occasion. Dixon continues: "If we failed in creating this new villain it was going to seem like a lame stunt," he recalls. "I argued that it's nearly impossible to create a character to be popular. Comic book characters who become popular tend to be almost created by mistake: One-off characters like Wolverine, who's now iconic, or the Silver Surfer, who was created just to be a friend for Galactus." "The parameters for him had to be that he must be the intellectual and physical equal of Batman, that it would be believable that he could beat Batman and injure him badly enough to put him out of action for a year, He is in every way a self-made man, just as Bruce Wayne made himself into Batman. Bane made himself into Bane, but with much darker purposes. We created a backstory for him where you had a little bit of sympathy for him because his circumstances were so lousy: Bane basically grew up in prison serving his father's life sentence in some Central American hellhole," Dixon states, Bane initially had no name, known for his cunning and brute strength to escape from prison, he heightens his physique with Venom, a steroid once used then rejected by Batman after it made him a hyper-aggressive, nearly insane addict. "It's always good to have a little sympathy for the bad guy if you want him to stick in the public's mind."
"I'm real confident that we're going to get something close to the Bane that appeared in the comic book," says Dixon, "It'd be nice to hear from them, but it’s not like I'm going to wait by the phone. They're going to do what they're going to do. I'm not going to worry about that."
Tom Hardy will play Bane in Batman:The Dark Knight Rises which will hit theaters July 20th 2012.
