SPOILERS: 'The Dark Knight Rises' Based On A Charles Dickens Novel

The Dark Knight Rises, the final installment of director Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy with Christian Bale (pictured) in the lead role, has some unexpected source material — and we're not talking about DC Comics. Darker in tone than the previous two films, The Dark Knight Rises borrows from none other than A Tale of Two Cities, the classic 1859 novel by Charles Dickens.

Nolan said in a press conference Monday that the film's noticeable literary allusions stem from the famous novel set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. "When Jonah [Jonathan Nolan] showed me his first draft of his screenplay, it was 400 pages long or something. It had all this crazy stuff in it. As part of a primer when he handed it to me, he said, 'You've got to think of A Tale of Two Cities, which, of course, you've read.' I said, 'Absolutely,'" Nolan told SuperheroHype.

Nolan said he covered up his lie to his screenwriting partner (and brother) by quickly brushing up on his Victorian lit. "I read the script and was a little baffled by a few things and realized that I'd never read A Tale of Two Cities. It was just one of those things that I thought I had done. Then I got it, read it and absolutely loved it and got completely what he was talking about… When I did my draft on the script, it was all about A Tale of Two Cities."

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