Marion Cotillard has admitted she ‘screwed up’ her character’s ‘disappointing’ death scene in Christopher Nolan’s final Batman film The Dark Knight Rises.
It’s almost been two decades since two-time Academy Award-winning director Nolan, 54, began his first foray into the DC comic book genre with Batman Begins.
After the success of the 2005 flick - which starred Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne and his superhero alter ego Batman - the lauded filmmaker returned for the 2008 sequel The Dark Knight and later 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises.
The latter, written in collaboration with his brother Jonathan Nolan, was set eight years after The Dark Knight and saw Bale being joined by an ensemble cast of Anne Hathaway, Harry Potter icon Gary Oldman and Tom Hardy as antagonist Bane.
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Another actor who is featured in the flick is 49-year-old Marion Cotillard. She portrayed Talia al Ghul, the daughter of supervillain Ra’s al Ghul (played by Liam Neesan) and leader of the League of Shadows, who sought to destroy Gotham.
However, she ends up dying after Batman caused her truck to swerve off the road.
In the throes of death, Talia reveals that she planned to destroy the city that killed her father by remotely activating an emergency flood so that stabilizing the bomb in the reactor would fail.
She utters, "My father’s work is done," in her final moments before awkwardly dying on screen.
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Recently, Talia’s death in The Dark Knight Rises has re-entered public discourse, with one social media user going as far as to call it ‘the worst death scene in the history of cinema’.
Under the clip of the death scene on YouTube, one film fan commented 'the way she closes her eyes kills me every time', while another added: "The scene would've worked ten times better if she'd simply stopped moving and blankly stared into oblivion. No need for a last breath or eyes closing."
A final user said: "Always found the three of them [Batman, Catwoman and Commissioner Gordon] staring at her while she talks comical."
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Regarding the recent criticism, Cotillard has admitted that she ‘didn’t nail’ Talia’s final moments on screen.
“I didn’t find the right position. I didn’t find the right way… I was stressed. Sometimes it happens that you screw something up. So that, I screwed up,” she said in an interview with Les rencontres du Papotin.
Interestingly, this isn’t the first time that Cotillard has expressed regret regarding her performance in the action flick.
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In a 2016 interview with Allociné, she remarked how ‘tough’ it was to be remembered for her role in The Dark Knight Rises and not her other roles.
“Sometimes there are failures, and when you see this on screen, you’re thinking: ‘Why? Why did they keep that take?’
"But either you blame everyone or nobody,” she continued in French. “But I thought people overreacted because it was tough to be identified just with this scene.
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“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.”
Despite some people declaring Cotillard’s scene as ‘disappointing’, it seemingly hasn’t dimmed the masses’ perception of The Dark Knight Rises.
Variety reports that it grossed just over $1 billion at the worldwide box office against a budget of $250 million in 2012.
It also currently has an 87 percent rating on the Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer.
Topics: Batman, Christopher Nolan, DC Comics, Film and TV, Entertainment, Celebrity
Ella Scott