10 Surprising Reasons Movie Scenes Were Ruined
7. Christopher Nolan Chose A Terrible Take Of Talia Al Ghul's Death - The Dark Knight Rises
The Dark Knight Rises is a fittingly bombastic and affecting finale to Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, even if it didn't quite match the heights of its predecessors.
Yet many fans can't look past an undeniably terrible moment at the end of the movie that has rendered an otherwise pivotal scene in the film an abject laughing stock.
The villainous Talia al Ghul (Marion Cotillard) is mortally wounded, and in her dying moments she acts out the most hilariously melodramatic death this side of a grade school production, panting heavily and nodding her head violently.
It turns a dead-serious moment of dramatic catharsis into something more likely to leave audiences giggling, especially as it quickly went viral.
Several years later, Marion Cotillard talked openly about the scene, expressing bemusement that director Nolan picked such an obviously terrible take. She said:
"Sometimes there are failures, and when you see this on screen, you're thinking, 'Why? Why did they keep that take?'... It was tough to be identified just with this scene. When I'm doing the best I can to find the authenticity in every character that I'm playing, it's tough to be known just for this scene."
Though most fans initially assumed that Nolan was caught in a tough spot in the editing room and simply didn't have another take to work with, Cotillard made it pretty clear that they filmed numerous takes of the scene and that this was far from her best.
It's easy to lay the blame at Cotillard, but an actor is always at the mercy of their director's judiciousness, and in this case it seems like Nolan might've been a little asleep at the wheel. There's just no way this was the best version of the setup that he had available.