At Sunday’s press conference for The Dark Knight Rises (July 20)  in Beverly Hills,  director  Christopher Nolan discussed coming full circle back to Batman Begins. He pointed to an encounter between Bruce Wayne and Alfred (Michael Caine) that sets up the payoff: “Before he comes up specifically with the symbolism of the bat, he talks about what he’s gonna do, and Alfred, as somebody who looks after him and cares for him, only goes along with it because there’s a logic to it. And the logic as we worked on the character had to be that symbolism — it had to be about myth making and the symbol of hope and people in  a very corrupt society are looking for some kind of tipping point to come back to good. That’s always been the heart of Bruce Wayne’s story.”

Meanwhile, there’s a terrific 13-minute featurette that delves into the cast of characters (Tom Hardy’s Bane as the first physical threat; grounding Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman as a classic femme fatale; Alfred, Morgan Freeman’s Lucius Fox, and Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon as the caretakers and conscience) and VFX (a combination of old school and new school techniques and reaching back to the silent era for inspiration in dealing with such scope).