Christopher Nolan on ‘The Dark Knight’ line that “plagues” him to this day
nme.comChristopher Nolan has revealed that there is a line of dialogue in his 2008 film The Dark Knight that continues to “plague” him to this day.The director made the admission in a new interview with Deadline, where he found himself discussing how the real Robert Oppenheimer was treated poorly by the US government after his role in the Second World War.In Nolan’s Oppenheimer, the real-life American physicist who played a pivotal role in the creation of the atomic bomb in World War II is played by Cillian Murphy.Often dubbed ‘the father of the atomic bomb’, Oppenheimer was instrumental in the development of the nuclear weapons that were used in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the only use of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict in human history.And yet, as Nolan explains, it is a line from The Dark Knight that he feels resonates with the real Oppenheimer’s plight.“I’m plagued by a line from The Dark Knight, and I’m plagued by it because I didn’t write it,” Nolan said. “My brother [Jonathan] wrote it.
It kills me, because it’s the line that most resonates. And at the time, I didn’t even understand it. He says, ‘You either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.’”“I read it in his draft, and I was like, ‘All right, I’ll keep it in there, but I don’t really know what it means.
Is that really a thing?’ And then, over the years since that film’s come out, it just seems truer and truer. In this story, it’s absolutely that.
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