'The Dark Knight Rises': Christopher Nolan Reveals Shocking Batman Secrets

With the dramatic fashion in which "The Dark Knight" ended, one would expect that the last installment in Christopher Nolan's Batman series, "The Dark Knight Rises," would pick up right where that one left off.

Not so, says Nolan. In an interview with Empire, which featured some close-up looks at Batman and Bane on the cover, Nolan revealed an interesting detail about the movie. "Perhaps surprisingly for some people, our story picks up quite a bit later, eight years after The Dark Knight," said Nolan.

That's a pretty major gap, during which time a lot of stuff could have happened. It seemed that the ending to the second film was setting up for Batman being chased down by the law, but with an eight-year jump, all of that chasing might have died down.

However, Nolan still notes that things are great for this decade-older Bruce Wayne: "We left him in a very precarious place," noted Nolan. "He's not in a great state."

For a little extra insight, Nolan dished on Bane, his tactics, and his fighting style. "He's a big dude who's incredibly clinical, in the fact that he has a result-based and oriented fighting style," he said in the interview.

"It's not about fighting. It's about carnage. The style is heavy-handed, heavy-footed, it's nasty. Anything from small-joint manipulation to crushing skulls, crushing rib cages, stamping on shins and knees and necks and collarbones and snapping heads off and tearing his fists through chests, ripping out spinal columns. He is a terrorist in mentality as well as brutal action," said Nolan.

That's likely to be all the information we're going to get out of Nolan until a full trailer hits, as the production has been shrouded in secrecy from the beginning. But it seems pretty clear that Bats is going to have his work cut out for him in this third part of the trilogy.