Christopher Nolan on his 'last' Batman movie, an 'Inception' videogame, and that spinning top

Image Credit: Melissa MoseleyChristian Bale recently disclosed that he’s approaching his third Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises, as if it will be his last time playing the caped crusader on the big screen — and the film’s director, Christopher Nolan, is taking the same view. In an interview with EW, Nolan called The Dark Knight Rises “the last chapter of our Batman saga.” When the helmer was asked if any part of him wished he was tackling another original script instead of another Batman sequel in the wake of Inception’s blockbuster grosses (over $820 million worldwide) and Oscar buzz, Nolan replied: “No, it’s exactly the opposite. I feel very glad that I’m doing another Batman film. I think it would have been daunting to sit down and write an original script after Inception. I love working within the realm and rules of our Batman world. It’s kind of nice to have someplace to go that I’m super-excited about.” He added that Inception’s success allows him to tackle another Batman without any sense of needing to prove himself: “I must say that I’m glad — I’m very, very glad — to be embarking on the last chapter of our Batman saga without any sense of obligation or duty to the studio. They did very well with Inception. So I’m able to go into finishing our story in a very enthusiastic way.”

For anyone hoping that Nolan might plunge deeper into the world he created with Inception in the form of a sequel, the filmmaker says… Maybe? But there will be a videogame: “I always imagined Inception to be a world where a lot of other stories could take place,” says Nolan. “At the moment, the only direction we’re channeling that is by developing a videogame set in the world.” He declined to elaborate on details or time table, only to say that he was developing the game with a team of collaborators and that it was “a longer-term proposition.” He calls the medium of videogames “something I’ve wanted to explore” — and certainly a veritable massive multiplayer online role playing game (as imagined by Carl Jung) would seem to be a perfect for the interactive, non-linear dream world of Inception. “As for [movie] sequels,” he says, “it’s not something I want to say no to, but it’s not something I’ve given a lot of thought about.”

But let’s get to the question we’ve been asking since Inception premiered last July and promptly cooked our noodle [and SPOILER ALERT for anyone who missed the movie in theaters and has been waiting until the DVD release next week to see it for the first time]: Did the top stop spinning or what? “I’ve been asked the question more times than I’ve ever been asked any other question about any other film I’ve made,” Nolan laughs. “That’s definitely the question. It keeps coming back to that. What’s funny to me is that people really do expect me to answer it.”

This surprises him, he says, because he thought he had firmly established with his equally trippy breakthrough flick Memento that he likes to remain mum on matters of “proper” interpretation. “With this film, though, people really think I’m going to tell, ” he says. “I get a lot of questions like, ‘Okay, did this thing earlier in the film mean that it’s all true, or does this other thing at another point in the film mean that it’s all a dream?’” Nolan says there’s no definitive answer to that question, because then his choice at the end of the movie to cut away from the spinning top — used by lead character Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) to know whether he’s in the real world (the top falls) or the dream world (the top doesn’t) — would have been an error on his part. “There can’t be anything in the film that tells you one way or another because then the ambiguity at the end of the film would just be a mistake,” he says. “It would represent a failure of the film to communicate something. But it’s not a mistake. I put that cut there at the end, imposing an ambiguity from outside the film. That always felt the right ending to me — it always felt like the appropriate ‘kick’ to me….The real point of the scene — and this is what I tell people — is that Cobb isn’t looking at the top. He’s looking at his kids. He’s left it behind. That’s the emotional significance of the thing.”