Leonardo DiCaprio as The Riddler?: 'Empire' Reveals Newest 'Dark Knight Rises' Secrets

The U.S. edition of Empire hit stands this week, and it comes as no surprise that magazine The Dark Knight Rises issue brings with it some interesting facts about the upcoming conclusion to Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy.

Nolan and David S. Goyer, his co-writer, have had the final scene to The Dark Knight Rises set in stone since 2008, creating it before any other part of the film.

"The final scene of The Dark Knight Rises is exactly that scene we talked about then," says Goyer, speaking to Empire from his LA office almost four years later. "It remained completely unchanged. We both knew in our hearts that we were onto something special. I have to tell you, having finally seen everything strung together a little while ago and seeing that scene, I got a complete lump in my throat."

When asked what The Dark Knight Rises is about, Nolan replies, "It's a war film. It's a revolutionary epic. It's looking back to they grand-scale epics of the past, really, and for me that goes as far back as silent films."

One of the most interesting parts of the Empire story is Goyer talking about the influence there were getting for The Dark Knight Rises' villain.

Goyer recalls studio suits at The Dark Knight premiere saying of the next villain that "obviously it's gonna be The Riddler, and we it to be Leonardo DiCaprio ..." 

While this idea sounds absurd and all too predictable now, it would have been completely possible. The Riddler is a well-known Batman villain, and DiCaprio has worked with Nolan before. Looking at the cast Nolan has assembled for The Dark Knight Rises — Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cottilard — and it's easy to see the influence that Inception had on the director's casting choices. DiCaprio would've just been one step more. Great directors control the path their films take. Nolan knew that. Sam Raimi with Spider-Man 3 and its villains? Let the studio dictate the story he was going to tell.

As was mentioned in a post earlier this week, Heath Ledger's The Joker won't be mentioned at all in The Dark Knight Rises, with Nolan citing the personal relationship he had with Ledger and how the "real-life tragedy" of the actor's death affected him. Don't expect to see Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent either.

"There are tricks that are fair there are tricks that aren't fair," says the director. "You do see him dead. It was quite an expensive visual effect to stop his chest moving!" he laughs.

When it comes to Catwoman, The Dark Knight Rises other villain, Nolan admits to hesitating to include her in his trilogy, mentioning that it took him awhile to figure out how to fit her into the real-world Batman universe that he had developed.

"... Jonah was very much convinced that there would be a great way to do it and eventually me around. Once I got my around the idea of looking at that character through the prism of our films, saying 'Who could that person be in real-life?', we figured it out."

And while we're all referring to Anne Hathaway's character as Catwoman, it turns out that she's only referred to as Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises.

More than a third of The Dark Knight Rises (an hour) is shot on IMAX, meaning you're going to want to reserve those IMAX midnight premiere tickets as soon as they go on sale.

Check out this issue of Empire for the entire story. There's a ton of The Dark Knight Rises stuff in this installment. If you can't find Empire on magazine racks, pick up the iPad version. They have a great, new U.S. edition app that just launched on Friday.