By Daniel Fierman, Entertainment Weekly, #817/818, April 29 & May 6, 2005
Left for dead since 1997, an exhausted franchise is finally getting an infusion of new blood. Can director Christoper Nolan make Batman Begins fly?
The day is vintage London. Just pure, unadulterated atmospheric misery,. The
sky sputters rain, and the air shoulders a leaden chill. But inside an unassuming
building on picturesque Soho Square something very, very cool is about to unfold.
The kind of thing that would warm sodden hearts on both sides of the Atlantic.
The interview is over. The director is done chatting about the hows and whys
of his $150 million project. And now, surrounded by memorabilia - oversize posters,
elaborately sculpted statues, a cornucopia of toys - the man behind Memento
and Insomnia is going to show the first 10 minutes of his new Batman movie (in
theatres June 17). Christopher Nolan stands and leads the way to the editing
suite. His shoulds slump. He nervously smoothes his clotehs - the usual Nolan
uniform of suit pants, a white dress shirt, and a pin-strped vest. He does not
look particularly happy. Emma Thomas, who doubles as his producer and wife,
sits in an office chair in the corner of the room, hands resting on her five-months-pregnant
belly. She flashes a smile at her husband.
"Well, hello!" she says brightly. "How did the interview go?"
"Well, right off the bat he asked that question"
"What question?"
"Oh, you know," Nolan replies sourly. "The whole greatest American
icon of the past 100 years, am I going to f... it all up question."
We'll get to that in a bit. For the moment, it's enough to say that Nolan is fortunate there's even a Batman movie that he has a chance to foul up. Because most fans are still nursing disappointment over the last glimpse of their hero in 1997's Batman & Robin, when the Dark Knight could be seen clad in a nipple suit, sporting a pretty-boy sidekick, and battling a future governor-slash-oversize icebox who mangled bons mots like "Yuah not sending me to the cooh-lah!"
Not good - and a far cry from the $415 million global phenomenon that Tim Burton launched in 1989. The critics were savage. The fanboys disgusted. And worst of all, the box office barely beat $100 million in North America. Despite the best efforts of director Joel Schumacher, the franchise lay in smoking ruins. Which left Warner Bros, (which, like EW, is owned by Time Warner) with a serious problem. For years the company has recognized the incredible profits that can be wrung out of properties like Batman. And since becoming president and COO of Warner Bros, in 1999, Alan Horn had made nurturing franchises his specialty, spinning films like Harry Potter, The Matrix, and their sequels into billions of dollars. So it was maddening to discover that the most valuable bauble in his vault - the one that was worth almost $1.3 billion at the box office during its recent 10-year run - had been rendered radioactive.
"It was dormant for a couple of years," says Warner Bros, president
of production Jeff Robinov. "There were no scripts in development. There
was nothing happening. We had to proceed carefully."
When they were ready, the studio cast a wide net, developing a series of scripts
from 1999 to 2002 based on everything from the animated TV series Batman Beyond
to Frank Miller's legendary graphic novel Batman: Year One. (The latter was
to be an especially down-and-dirty, hip collaboration between Miller and Requiem
for a Dream's Darren Aronofsky.) But after much chin stroking and soothsaying,
Horn and then president of worldwide production Lorenzo di Bonaventura settled
on a radical, even dangerous, strategy. They greenlit Batman vs. Superman.
It was an interesting idea. The story - cooked up by Seven's Andrew Kevin Walker
and polished by Oscar winner Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind) - reportedly
had the two superheroes battling after Batman blames the Man of Steel for the
death of his fiancee, only to see the rivals reunite and take on evil by the
end. Done right, the movie had the chance to be a glorious twofer, rebooting
both franchises at once and making scads of money. Done wrong, and the fallout
would make all that fuss over Bat nipples seem quaint.
So in the summer of 2002, when Alias creator J. J. Abrams handed in the first 88 pages of a separate Superman script the studio had assigned him to work on, people took notice. Horn called in a 10-member blue-ribbon panel - including creative, marketing, and merchandising execs - to determine which screenplay was the better bet. Given the quality of the script and the less risky nature of the project, it wasn't exactly a surprise when Abrams won. But the aftermath got a little ugly. Di Bonaventura resigned. Commissioned to fill the hole left by Batman vs. Superman in Warner's 2004 summer slate, Catwoman turned out to be a hair ball. And the studio still didn't have a clue about how to make another Batman.
That's when Horn and Robinov took a meeting with a young guy named Christopher Nolan. Insomnia had come out that summer, and Nolan had been sweating blood over a Howard Hughes biopic that was to star Jim Carrey - a project he'd been toiling away at for a year. "It was a tough script to write, but I cracked it in the last two weeks," says the 34-year-old director, with a trace of melancholy. "It's one of the best things I've ever written." There was just one problem: It was becoming increasingly clear that Martin Scorsese's Hughes movie was going to shoot first. So Nolan tabled his script and made his pitch. He told Warner Bros, that if he was going to make Batman, it wouldn't be sweepingly gothic like Burton's or cartoonishly campy like Schumacher's. His Batman would be grounded in the real world and play to the twisted psychology of Bruce Wayne. It would be an original story that would answer the question: What kind of man puts on a bat costume and goes around fighting crime?
"I mean, he's just a regular guy who does a lot of press-ups," says Nolan. "He makes himself extraordinary through force of will. I talked to the studio about what they wanted to do with Batman and what I wanted to do, and the two things coincided."
"Nolan pitched the idea, and we fell in love with it," remembers Robinov. "We had no trepidation [about his inexperience] - maybe naively. He just really made you feel confident that he knew what he was doing."
But Nolan had never been a big Bat geek; his first contact with the series had been the goofy Adam West TV show, and he'd never read the comics as a kid. So he called David Goyer. An un-repentant fanboy, Goyer - who only recently sold his comic-book collection, which numbered in the thousands - had an established track record of writing cuitish movies like Dark City and Blade. The two chatted for an hour as Goyer laid out his vision for the movie. The plot, he said, had to be something that played to the only blank space in the Bat mythology - how Bruce Wayne trained and became Batman before returning to Gotham City. And, by the way, he told Nolan he couldn't do the movie. "I was going to be shooting Blade: Trinity in about two months and I was already starting preproduetion," says Goyer. "And it was a bummer for me, because I had always dreamed about doing a Batman film."
A week later, he caved. The kid in the 39-year-old screenwriter just couldn't resist. Soon the duo were in the Manhattan offices of DC Comics (another Time Warner subsidiary), poring over stacks of books and having long, impossibly nerdy discussions with staffers about the direction of what they would eventually call Batman Begins.
"Our job was to be the canary in the coal mine," laughs DC president and publisher Paul Levitz. "We sit there representing the fans of the property and say, 'Nope!' [Makes canary-dying noise] But what they came in wanting to do was dead-on. It was all things like 'Well, we don't think we want to put the yellow circle around the bat [on the suit]. Is that okay?' [Pause] That? Fine. Just fine. Don't worry about it."
All that was left for the promising young director was figuring out how to actually make the movie.
That's when Chris Nolan went back home. Literally. In the fall of 2003, he relocated his family to London, eventually moving into his childhood house. The experience was nostalgic, romantic, and a little strange. In the mornings, Emma would walk their two kids right past the school where their dad once cracked textbooks. At night, the couple went to sleep in Nolan's old bedroom, under the very roof where he first fell in love with movies.
But it was appropriate, in a way. Nolan had put a lot of thought into Batman and he kept returning to the movies of his childhood. Epic films. Fun films. The kind of stuff that new parents can't wait to show their children. "My touchstones were The Spy Who Loved Me, Raiders oftlie Lost Ark, and the first Star Wars," he says. "They have an immersion in their world that is spectacular. And they take themselves quite seriously."
Goyer's screenplay, he felt, was up to that task. The script for Batman Begins ended up as ambitious as it was polished - a story that follows a young Bruce Wayne from his early training at the hands of a shadowy organization to his return to Gotham and battles with classic Batvillains the Scarecrow and Ra's al Ghul. Along the way, all kinds of juicy secrets are revealed, from the origin of the Batmobile to how Batman first met Commissioner Gordon to who exactly killed Bruce Wayne's parents. "The script actually leaked on the Internet," sighs Goyer. "The studio. Was. Nervous! But it was met with almost unanimous praise by the fanboys. Their response was *Wow! This is great! Warner's will never let Nolan make it!'"
The casting of Christian Bale as the Caped Crusader met with equal approval. Though not an obvious choice, Bale had a huge Internet following from movies like Empire of the Sun and American Psycho, and he won over Nolan despite showing up to the screen test obscenely underweight, having lost more than 60 pounds to star in the psychological thriller The Machinist. "I walked in looking like a ghost and told Chris that I genuinely did not want to be involved in doing another Batman that was the same as the others," he says. "It may not have been the most brilliant tactical move on my part, but hey, it was honest."
And Nolan liked it. To his eyes, the notoriously intense actor was an inspired choice to play Bruce Wayne - someone who could deliver the sardonic humor and darkness the character required. Sure, there were screen tests with other actors, most notably Cilkan Murphy (28 Days Later), who would later be cast as Scarecrow, but Nolan went to bat for the skinny guy and Bale (who put the weight back on in just seven weeks) soon signed a three-picture contract to succeed Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, and George Clooney as the Dark Knight.
A torrent of prestige names quickly filled out the cast: The Last Samurai's Ken Watanabe as Ra's al Ghul; Michael Came as butler Alfred; Gary Oldman as a young Lieutenant Gordon; Liam Neeson as Wayne's mysterious mentor Henri Dueard; Morgan Freeman as his friend, inventor Lucius Fox; Katie Holmes as Wayne's childhood friend and love interest Rachel Dodson; and Tom Wilkinson as crime boss Carmine Falcone. "The experience was exciting and petrifying, because the cast was so good," says Murphy. "[But Chris] created a calm and mellow atmosphere. There was no pressure and no sense of the immensity of the project."
Well, sometimes. The massive sets built for the $150 million production were intricate and often overwhelming. All kinds of aesthetic decisions had to be made, from the look of Gotham (roughly based on the now-demolished slums in Kowloon, Hong Kong) to the Batmobile (a strange Humvee/tank hybrid, which reportedly cost over $1 million per car) to the Batsuit (which starts out as see-through body armor). "It was strange to go into work every day," says Bale. "I frankly felt like a fool just standing there in a Batsuit, chatting and having coffee with somebody. You look like a drunken partygoer on Halloween or something. And the cowl was so damn tight. It gives you headaches and puts you in a foul mood. You're in a rage after an hour."
"When we started, it was mainly me and Bruce Wayne," says Holmes. "But when Christian would have the whole suit on, I lost it. I was like, Christian, don't talk to me today, I think I have a crush on you! I mean, I don't but, like, you're Batman today."
Thus, over a 129-day shoot, Batman was resurrected. Nolan brought the movie in on time and on budget, handling his quick transition from smallish thrillers to massive projects with what the cast universally describes as an almost eerie calm. The editing was smooth. And today, on this rainy day in London, people are feeling confident. "I think we did good," says Nolan, cueing the footage, adding, "He says, bravely."
''Batman's a really big deal," adds Goyer, nodding to the pressure that
they're under. "It's funny. I remember when I was writing, we were invading
Iraq. And I was sitting on Chris' porch [with] The New York Times. And on the
front page there's a photograph just above the fold of this Marine in Fallujah
and a bunch of Iraqi children around him. And one of the kids, who couldn't
have been more than 2, had no pants and a filthy, bloody T-shirt. A Batman T-shirt.
I pointed to the photo and I said to Chris, 'This is how big Batman is. This
is what we've taken on here.'" With that, Goyer pauses to consider the
obvious implication: Batman may be the greatest American icon of the last 100
years. And they better not #@!* it all up.