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Read filmmaker Christopher Nolan's fond farewell letter to his Batman legacy

He's crafted a trio of respected and wildly popular, record-breaking films that are going to stand up against the likes of Francis Ford Coppola's 'The Godfather', Peter Jackson's 'Lord of the Rings' and Sergio Leone's 'Dollars' trilogies in the eyes of cinemagoers for decades to come, and now Christopher Nolan is saying goodbye to Batman. A job well done.

Fresh from his breakout 'Memento' and its follow-up thriller 'Insomnia', writer/director Nolan replaced camp gloss with solid backstory and a wealth of interesting characters for series reboot 'Batman Begins'. 'The Dark Knight' was even better and trilogy-closer 'The Dark Knight Rises' has wrapped it all up perfectly.

But how does Nolan himself view the experience? The director has provided the foreword to forthcoming book 'The Art And Making Of The Dark Knight Rises' which relates his feelings for the project. Read his fond farewell below:

“Alfred. Gordon. Lucius. Bruce... Wayne. Names that have come to mean so much to me. Today, I’m three weeks from saying a final good-bye to these characters and their world. It’s my son’s ninth birthday. He was born as the Tumbler was being glued together in my garage from random parts of model kits. Much time, many changes. A shift from sets where some gunplay or a helicopter were extraordinary events to working days where crowds of extras, building demolitions, or mayhem thousands of feet in the air have become familiar.”

“People ask if we’d always planned a trilogy. This is like being asked whether you had planned on growing up, getting married, having kids. The answer is complicated. When David [Goyer] and I first started cracking open Bruce’s story, we flirted with what might come after, then backed away, not wanting to look too deep into the future. I didn’t want to know everything that Bruce couldn’t; I wanted to live it with him.”

“I told David and Jonah [Nolan] to put everything they knew into each film as we made it. The entire cast and crew put all they had into the first film. Nothing held back. Nothing saved for next time. They built an entire city. Then Christian and Michael and Gary and Morgan and Liam and Cillian started living in it. Christian bit off a big chunk of Bruce Wayne’s life and made it utterly compelling. He took us into a pop icon’s mind and never let us notice for an instant the fanciful nature of Bruce’s methods.”

“I never thought we’d do a second - how many good sequels are there? Why roll those dice? But once I knew where it would take Bruce, and when I started to see glimpses of the antagonist, it became essential. We re-assembled the team and went back to Gotham. It had changed in three years. Bigger. More real. More modern. And a new force of chaos was coming to the fore. The ultimate scary clown, as brought to terrifying life by Heath.”

“We’d held nothing back, but there were things we hadn’t been able to do the first time out - a Batsuit with a flexible neck, shooting on Imax. And things we’d chickened out on - destroying the Batmobile, burning up the villain’s blood money to show a complete disregard for conventional motivation. We took the supposed security of a sequel as license to throw caution to the wind and headed for the darkest corners of Gotham.”

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