It has emerged that Christopher Nolan chose to cut a scene from The Dark Knight Rises that explained why Bane was attached to his mask.
Nolan brought the DC villain to life like never before in his 2012 smash-hit, although little was revealed about Bane’s backstory in the movie.
However, that wasn’t originally the case, as The Dark Knight Rises’ costume designer Lindy Hemming revealed shortly after the blockbuster’s release a decade ago.
Speaking to GQ, Hemming - who had not seen the film’s final cut at the time of her interview - explained they’d filmed scenes depicting Bane ‘early on’, in which he’s ‘being taunted and attacked by people’.
Hemming also said that in the flashback scenes, captured during Bane’s youth, Batman’s nemesis is ‘injured’.
Hemming said in full: “The thing that you should have seen during that sequence is [Bane] being injured in his youth. So one of the fundamental things about his costume is that he has this scar from the back injury.
“Even if he hasn’t got the bulletproof vest on, he still has to wear the waist belt and the braces. In that scene in the prison, where he’s learning to fight the same way Batman learned to fight, he’s wearing an early version of his waist belt. It’s showing support, but it’s not the finished one he eventually wears.”
Hemming continued: “He’s also wearing an early version of his gas mask, all glued together. If you look at the film, unless they’ve cut it—and I’m sure they haven’t—there’s a whole early section for Tom Hardy where he’s fighting and being taunted by people.
“He’s got chains on him, and he’s standing on a wooden thing while people are attacking him. And in that scene, he’s wearing a much more ragged, primitive version of the mask.”
Speaking to Empire that same year, Hemming added: “He was injured early in his story. He's suffering from pain and he needs gas to survive. He cannot survive the pain without the mask.
“The pipes from the mask go back along his jawline and feed into the thing at the back where there are two canisters of whatever it is…the anaesthetic.”
Nolan was also interviewed alongside Hemming for the outlet and the director confirmed that Bane could not function without his pain relieving mask.
“Bane is someone ravaged by pain from a trauma suffered long ago, and the mask dispenses a type of anaesthetic that keeps his pain just below the threshold so he can function,” Nolan shared at the time.
