As one of the most acclaimed and successful filmmakers of the modern era, Christopher Nolan has complete creative freedom to craft mega budget blockbusters however the hell he wants, without studio interference. Unfortunately, that’s led to much criticism across his last few movies that the sound mix could have greatly benefited from being made much clearer, and The Dark Knight Rises‘ Bane is a case in point.
When the first footage from the trilogy-closer dropped, a lot of fans and critics were quick to complain that they could barely understand a word the hulking villain was saying, matters that weren’t helped by having Tom Hardy sport the latest in his signature range of bizarre accents, this time with a mask muffling things even more.
In a recent appearance on Wired‘s YouTube channel where he responded to the most Googled questions about himself, the actor explained how he came up with Bane’s instantly-recognizable vocal stylings.
“That was actually a really cool choice that Chris Nolan made. Bane quintessentially is Latinx in origin, and I’m not. So I looked at the concept of Latin and found a man called Bartley Gorman, who’s a Romany gypsy. The king of the gypsies, in inverted commas, is a bare-knuckle fighter and a boxer. And he said, ‘When I get into a ring with a man, and we want to wipe you off the face of the Earth, and he wants to kill me’. And I was like this is great. And I showed Chris.
I said Chris, we can either go down a sort of arch Darth Vader route, straight just neutral tone villain voice, or we could try this. And this I’ve been thinking of just in case we’ve got to consider the roots and origins of Bane. But we could get laughed out of the part of it, it might be something that we regret, but it’s your choice ultimately. He says, no I think we’ll go with it. And that was that. And we played with it, and made it a bit more fluid, and now people love it.”
Hardy previously teased that he partly based his Bane voice on Nolan, something the director responded to with incredulity. Anyone to have seen The Dark Knight Rises has done an impression of the Bat-breaking villain at one stage or another, and it’s gone on to enjoy a combination of infamy and longevity in certain circles.