Christopher Nolan not particularly worried about whether you can understand Bane or not

By Sean O'Neal | December 20, 2011 | 9:18pm

Aux Features Film

One of the main questions provoked by the recent unveiling of The Dark Knight Rises’ six-minute prologue and trailer (besides “Did they just blow up Ben Roethlisberger?”) has been “What's with Bane’s upper-crust-British-accent-run-through-a-Vocoder voice?” And once those early Internet reviews near-unanimously decreed that they could barely understand a word Tom Hardy’s masked villain was saying, Warner Bros. executives began suggesting that director Christopher Nolan pay attention and start doing some serious remixing of the audio. But according to The Hollywood Reporter, Nolan isn’t too concerned: He’s informed them that he only plans to make slight alterations, with a source close to the production saying, “Chris wants the audience to catch up and participate rather than push everything at them. He doesn't dumb things down. You've got to pedal faster to keep up.”

Of course, refusing to pander to a lazy audience’s need to have the dialogue all laid out and enunciated for them (Maybe you want he should also come chew your popcorn?) is really just one unnamed executive’s paraphrasing of Nolan’s feelings. However, it does echo what Nolan said shortly after the prologue’s première, when he told THR that “it was OK for a moviegoer not to understand what was said at times, as long as the overall idea was conveyed.” (Ah yes: The New York City Transit Authority school of filmmaking.) Anyway, Nolan usually knows what he's doing and hopefully everyone is just worried for narfinbargle.