From a distance, Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City sure doesn’t look like much. The “skyline” begins to emerge over the horizon in the rolling green farmlands about 50 miles north of London, but there are just the slanted, pocked roofs of two boxy metal buildings. But nearing the complex, the immensity of the filmmaker’s make-believe metropolis comes into focus: the structures that looked squat from afar are actually 15 storeys tall — and as long as 81-storey skyscrapers lying on their sides. The 525-ton door opened for Nolan in 2004. Cardington has since become a special home base, which is fitting given the fact that illusion, extreme architecture, old-school craft and colossal scale are screen trademarks for the London-born filmmaker best known for his three Batman films and Inception.

For 2005’s Batman Begins they put in the faux masonry of the Narrows and Arkham Asylum. Nolan’s team added to the indoor cityscape for 2008’s billion-dollar hit sequel The Dark Knight and then, for the topsy-turvy fights of Inception, special-effect guru Chris Corbould built a spinning corridor that made actors like hamsters in a wheel.

Made in India

The Dark Knight Rises team has shot a key sequence in Mehrangarh, Jodhpur. Early on in the production, the team touched down in a remote expanse near Mehrangarh. The forbidding landscape added to the desolation needed for a prison scene. Incidentally, the first leg of shooting of The Dark Knight Rises started from India.

“The locals thought we were nuts,” says Christian Bale, who plays Batman. “We were out in 120-degree (Fahrenheit) heat. I thought it was a great induction by fire into the whole thing. It was nice to mix it up and go to different places. It makes it an adventure.”

Emma Thomas, the film’s producer, says: “We wanted a sequence that needed to be in the middle of nowhere, and the place where we shot is beautiful and clearly very remote. We actually went there with a very small crew, and it was an exciting way to start the movie.”

Old soul with an outsider aura

More recently, Nolan and production designer Nathan Crowley added a cruel and exotic underground prison for The Dark Knight Rises, which opens July 20 and will be Nolan’s final take on the Caped Crusader for Warner Bros. “I think my dad put it best when he visited and referred to it as the world’s largest toy box,” Nolan said with a rare relaxed chuckle. “There’s an awful lot of my history with the Batman films and also Inception. It’s all there.”

If there was a documentary about the 41-year-old Nolan’s own life, that stroll around Cardington could set up a flashback to a key childhood moment: at age seven, he picked up his father’s Super 8 camera and made a film with his Action Man toys. While other kids were climbing the levels in Super Mario Bros, the intense Nolan was piecing together the tale that would someday become Inception.

Nolan broke through in 2000 with his reverse riddle Memento, which earned him an Oscar nomination for screenwriting (two more nods followed for Inception). Yet even as he’s become a top filmmaker whose films vie against CG-laden, 3D spectacles for summer box office bragging rights, Nolan is a decidedly old soul with an outsider aura.

An English literature major who rarely leaves the house without a suit coat, he has no email account, no cellphone, and here in this digital summer of 2012, his Batman movie is the only major popcorn release shot on film stock. He shuns 3D, typically goes light on digital effects and his stories and characters are not just serious, they’re grim.

As Dark Knight Rises opens, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) is a sullen shadow of himself, and instead of his Batman mask he hides behind a scraggly hermit’s beard. Eight years have passed since the murder of his true love, Rachel Dawes, and the fatal tumble of the deranged Harvey Dent. With the weight of those memories, the recluse must lean on a cane as he wanders a sealed-off wing of Wayne Manor. The world outside claws away at that isolation, almost literally in the case of Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), the femme fatale traditionally called Catwoman.

Things get worse for Wayne and Gotham as a mysterious terrorist named Bane (Tom Hardy) unleashes a campaign to sever the city from the outside world; like a brawny butcher swinging a cleaver, there’s no hesitation or empathy that slows his hand as he goes about his wet work amid the body count. Anarchy spreads but the chaos is only a cover for Bane’s true plans — those, like the villain himself, are difficult to unmask.

No silly stuff

Some scenes of Wayne’s reclusive bitterness and the urban bedlam evoke the landmark Frank Miller 1986 limited series The Dark Knight Returns, which (along with Watchmen) propelled much of the comics world into deep, dark grit for the next decade. The reminder of that raises a question for the (apparently inexhaustible) sub-genre of superhero films: which will echo in the mind of filmmakers more in the years to come, The Avengers or The Dark Knight Rises?

The Nolan film logged a lot of airport time. Dark Knight Rises was shot in India, London, Glasgow, Pittsburgh, New York, Newark and Los Angeles. Last year, shooting a scene from the $250-million-plus production at the Senate House on the University of London campus, Nolan was watching the action unfold as Bale finished an intense sequence with Morgan Freeman, Marion Cotillard and Hathaway. After the group had run through the scene multiple times, Nolan walked over to Hathaway.

His advice? Take down the supervillain intonations creeping into the dialogue, Hathaway recalled later on set, still clad in her character’s skin-tight, black battle togs. “There’s no moustache-twirling in Gotham City,” she said. “That’s why what Chris does is really special and celebrated and successful. This is not making fun of the material. It’s serious.”

On the topic of tone, Bale agreed with Hathaway, adding that while Nolan’s Batman movies “have the roller-coaster element and the visual spectacle” required of any superhero film, they veer away from “the silly stuff”.

The silly stuff was the enemy that Batman couldn’t beat at one point. Last month was the 15th anniversary of Batman & Robin, which presented George Clooney in a Bat-suit with Bat-nipples, and a very different version of Bane — he was essentially a mute, lab-created pro wrestler.

The camp is gone and now the movies are assembled like intricate timepieces. While Nolan’s actors are clear about the tone he wants to set, they say they are often in the dark about what the director is actually putting together until they watch the completed movie.

“The things he’s doing in these films, a lot of it I don’t get to see — I’m not aware of it — until I sit and watch the finished film,” Bale said. “There’s so much there in script but it comes together when Chris is editing it. He knows what it is going to be. That’s why he’s very decisive on the set. The pieces already fit together in his mind.”

A real ending

Nolan said a primary goal of the third and final instalment in his Batman series is to create “a unified statement, a real ending, a true conclusion.” The third act of the third film delivers a series of jolting twists and jarring turns and an exclamation point climax. Nolan’s finale takes Batman and his on-screen mythology to a place it has never been before.

While the details can’t be discussed, of course, the director enjoys broader conversation about the infrastructure. Fascinated with architecture, the filmmaker describes the rises and falls of his characters as if they are elevation points of a blueprint plan. He also presents the trilogy almost as a tale of different levels — the heights of the city, the street level and the underground of caves and sewers.

The Dark Knight Rises presents a story where greed, hypocrisy and false justice bring down the city’s bridges, stadium and the houses of government.

“We really wanted a cast of thousands, literally, and all of that for me is trying to represent the world in primarily visual and architectural terms,” Nolan said. “So the thematic idea is that the superficial positivity is being eaten away from underneath; we tried to make that quite literal.”

Due to commercial interest in the film and pundit culture of today, Rises will be parsed for political messages and controversy fodder. So much will be made of images of financial market abuse, politicians behaving badly, a terrorist attack at a professional football game and looting riots. To Nolan, the goal doesn’t seem to be commentary, he’s just looking for the believable swirl of circumstances needed to get Bruce Wayne back in the cowl.

The Dark Knight Rises releases in Calcutta on July 20