14 DAY TRIAL // When the 6-minute preview of “The Dark Knight Rises” premiered in theaters in December last year, there was a lot of talk about how Bane's voice was so muffled you could hardly understand what he was saying. There's no reason to worry about that, Chris Nolan said at a recent press call attended by HitFix.
Fans will remember that Nolan spoke on the issue before, basically to state the same thing: there was no reason to worry about Bane's voice because it's muffled in a bid to make the character as realistic as possible.
At the time, the director also said that he had no plans to alter the voice, because it was as it should be.
He seems to have had a slight change of heart: asked by a reporter whether he re-recorded Bane's voice in post-production, Nolan said that he didn't but, at the same time, admitted that SOME modifications had been made.
“Not really. Some things are clarified and cleaned up. But we try to be true. I'm not really a big fan of ADR, so we try to be as true as possible to the recordings we do at the time,” Nolan said.
“So for the IMAX scenes, because the IMAX cameras are incredibly noisy, you're then really in a position where what we would do on the set is immediately do a take without running the camera. And that way you'd get [the actors' voices] in the costume, in the physical positions that they're actually in when they're performing the scene. And those you can sync up very well to picture,” he added.
He also spoke about Tom Hardy's incredible transformation into Bane, arguably the most dangerous villains Batman ever had to face, and noted that his role was all the more challenging because it literally prevented him from using his face.
Bane, as fans must know, has a mask covering the better part of his face, through which he inhales a special gas that gives him superpowers.
It is to be expected that he won't be seen much without it in the film.
“And what Tom did, which I completely love but it takes audiences time to get used to is there's an incredible disjunct between what he's doing with his voice and what he's doing with his eyes,” Nolan said.
“His eyes have this extremely threating stillness to them. His voice is this extremely expressive and different voice. And I've never really seen anything like it. The first time I ever saw him perform a scene with Christian [Bale], I was shocked by it. I mean I really was like, 'ok, I've just never seen this',” said the director.
“The Dark Knight Rises” arrives in theaters on July 20. Here is the full interview with Chris Nolan.