Varför flyttades Gotham City till New York City i The Dark Knight Rises?

Från intervjuer med regissören Christopher Nolan verkar det som om målet var att skapa en ospecifik inställning (filmen var faktiskt sköt i Pittsburgh och LA samt New York och New Jersey), som kände både "operatiska" och riktigt.

Från en intervju med James Rocchi på MSN Entertainment:

MSN Movies: You knew you were doing a third film. Is the pressure to do things bigger, better -- is that from the studio? Is it from the audience? Or is it that all from you? Are you the person saying, "Let's do more with this"?

Christopher Nolan: Well, I was trying to push filmmaking from the point of view of the audience. I'm trying to make a film that I would want to go see on a Friday night and lay down ten dollars or what have you and be thrilled and moved by or whatever. And that's what was the impulse, and so when you know you're dealing with characters the audience have a relationship with, you're asking the audience to come back to Gotham City. So you feel a huge creative responsibility to give them a reason to come back to Gotham City.

Från en intervju med Emanuel Levy :

For the first time, three separate cities provided locations and backdrops for Gotham City, with scenes filmed in Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and the city sometimes nicknamed Gotham, New York.

Nolan offers, “When you look back on the films, you can see the world we’re living in reflected, but we don’t want to be specific about it. We just come at the stories from the point of view of what concerns us. What gives us fear? What gives us hope? What would require a hero of Batman’s stature to rise up in our world?”

Och från en intervju med Alex Tucker på TV-Film-News:

**‘The Dark Knight Rises’ magnifies and resolves the main themes of the trilogy, one of which is mythmaking, and the discussion of the Batman Gotham needs.

Christopher Nolan:** One of the things I’ve enjoyed about working with these characters is that they have the potential to be topical. And the reason for that is they’re not real. It’s not real life. You’re dealing with a heightened reality. You’re not dealing with Chicago or New York; you’re dealing with Gotham City. And that gives you a very interesting world to be able to play with in a very heightened way, in a very operatic way.

Och några praktiska resonemang från Chicago Tribune :

Chicago-less Gotham

Chicago, don't take this personally, but: "The Dark Knight Rises," the first of Nolan's Batman movies not to be shot here, was wise not to shoot here this time. For variety's sake, sure. But also, a better reason: A quick shot of the Chicago skyline screams money and prosperity. A quick shot of Pittsburgh, where a lot of the film was shot, reveals working-class areas within yearning range of gleaming skyscrapers. You'd have to find a pretty wide lens before you could hold the poor of Chicago and the rich of Chicago within the same frame. True, in "Rises" the Manhattan skyline is liberally mixed in; all the better to play up the 1-percenters. (Still, two nods to Chicago do sneak in, sorta: Batman swings by a historic neighborhood named "Old Town," and those Gotham license plates are hilariously reminiscent of Illinois license plates.)

I Batman Begins byggdes det mest från början, men mörk riddare och mörk riddare stiger, filmade i verkliga, existerande städer som Chicago, New York och London, England.