By Antony Jacobs, Film Review Special #58, June 2005
Director Christopher Nolan tells Antony Jacobs how he convinced Warner that he knew exactly how Batman Begins ...
If there's one thing that audiences need to know about Warner's big-budget
June entry, Batman Begins, it's that this is not and will never be Batman 5.
There are no camp Lycra-clad villains laughing maniacally, no Gothic scenery
and absolutely no neon lighting. As the title suggests, this is a redux of the
Dark Knight's cinematic journey, taking nothing - save for the inspiration for
the stylized suit - from its predecessors and providing a more realistic, visceral
and rewarding experience in return.
This switch in thinking, while being brought about as an inevitable consequence of the poor reception of the last two entries in the Batman canon, is largely due to British filmmaker Christopher Nolan. Indeed the look and approach to the previous films were similarly watermarked by their directors; Burton through the use of his dark fairy-tale gothica and Schumacher through his penchant for vibrant comic-book nostalgia. For Nolan, however, the themes recurrent in his previous films Memento and Insomnia - of vivid realism mixed with film noir overtones - are what slip into his vision of Batman's tale, although as Nolan admits, this is only possible due to Burton's contribution.
"The thing with Burton is that he had the challenge of convincing a cinema audience that you could have a 'cool' Batman film," Nolan explains. "Convincing an audience who remembers the TV show is ridiculous. And he did it, he succeeded. The way he did it was to make the entire world that he lives in - Gotham - as peculiar and extraordinary as Batman is. So he fits in with that hyper-real, hyper-stylized universe on its own terms. That then convinced everybody that you could have a 'cool' Batman film. So that isn't a hurdle that we have to get over with this film and because of that, we are freer to treat the world around him as more ordinary and allow his extraordinary nature stand out. For me, it was very important that for the audience watching the film, they would feel that for people in Gotham, Batman is as extraordinary a figure as he is for us in the audience."
Like so many men of his generation, the 34-year-old director was introduced to Batman from an early age in the form of the classic 'Sock' 'Pow' kids' TV series.
"First and foremost I know Batman from the TV show, from when I was four or five years old," says Nolan. "At that age, you don't realize how tongue in cheek and camp it all is. You take it seriously - and I loved the character. It says quite a lot about the elemental nature of the character that it can reach you through different interpretations, like the TV show, even though it was so kitsch and silly in a way. There's still something about that character, something about who he is and what he does. It's part of everybody's upbringing - I was watching it 10 years after it had gone off air."
Although by his own admission Nolan isn't a big comic-book fan, his attention had been drawn to what could well be considered as chapters of the Batman bible, The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, both of which were created by Sin City author Frank Miller.
"In terms of tone, and in terms of the notion that you could re-create for yourself a serious interpretation of the character... [they were] like the way you felt about the character when you were five years old. Frank Miller was doing it for grown-ups, really. That was quite exciting. It put you back into that child-like appreciation of the magic of character. Certainly his work was a big influence on the tone of the film."
While Bat fans will no doubt be able to see echoes of Batman stories from throughout its rich 66-year history, Batman Begins doesn't retread any one tale. Instead it borrows from many of the character's strongest story arcs, some of which go back as far as the 70s.
"The studio sent me a Batman story early on called The Man Who Falls," Nolan reveals. "It's a DC Comics story from the 1970s. It's not even a whole comic. I think it appeared in an anthology. It was a very good jumping-off point. It suggested the idea of travelling around the world, meeting criminals and flirting with the criminal life and learning about them that way. Then, in the forest, he goes to a martial arts teacher. It had a great feel to it. It's very short, only a few pages. That was very important. So there are those kind of influences. Then looking at the middle act of Batman Begins, it draws a lot from Batman: Year One, with Bruce Wayne becoming Batman. But then all of the stuff in between, what we would call 'mileposts', we were free to figure out what we wanted to do."
Story aside, one of Nolan's hardest tasks for Begins would be re-creating some of the most important elements of Batman's world. From Gotham to the Batmobile, Nolan decided early on that these elements had to mirror the film's raison d'etre and be unlike anything seen before.
"We just tried to shoot [Gotham] in the same way you'd shoot any contemporary thriller," Nolan says of the film's new outlook. "We don't stylize it to the point where the audience is noticing it - but you want a certain amount of mood in it. That was the guiding principle that Wally [Pfister, cinematographer] was following."
That was very important. So there are those kind of influences. Then looking
at the middle act of Batman Begins, it draws a lot from Batman: Year One, with
Bruce Wayne becoming Batman. But then all of the stuff in between, what we would
call 'mileposts', we were free to figure out what we wanted to do."
Story aside, one of Nolan's hardest tasks for Begins would be re-creating some
of the most important elements of Batman's world. From Gotham to the Batmobile,
Nolan decided early on that these elements had to mirror the film's raison d'etre
and be unlike anything seen before.
"We just tried to shoot [Gotham] in the same way you'd shoot any contemporary thriller," Nolan says of the film's new outlook. "We don't stylize it to the point where the audience is noticing it - but you want a certain amount of mood in it. That was the guiding principle that Wally [Pfister, cinematographer] was following."
While Batman's costume is perhaps the most recognizable aspect - "The only big change we've made is the use of the cape, as it features in the graphic novels. We came up with special fabric to do that and blow it around" - it's his mode of transportation which has endured the biggest alterations. A heavy-duty vehicle that falls somewhere between a Lamborghini and a US army Humvee, the new-look Batmobile ultimately became the poster child for the entire project.
"Before we first wrote the script, we designed the Batmobile because I wanted to show that to the studio. I felt that would explain to everybody immediately the differences between approaches in the past and what we were doing," Nolan explains. "The Batmobile - even in the comics but especially in the movies... well, it got frozen in time in the 1960s, I think. The car they adapted into the Batmobile for the TV show was a cutting-edge state-of-the-art car then - all cars had fins then and it became this retro-look. So every Batmobile you've ever seen since then has had this styling of an older car. But if you look at the older comics, it was a contemporary vehicle but more extraordinary and more heightened. And that's what the Batmobile should be. It should be a contemporary vehicle. It doesn't make any sense in the real world for Batman to stick goofy fins on his car. I firmly believe that our vehicle is the equivalent of what the Batmobile was in the late 1950s. It needed to be moved on."
With an idea of how to turn Warner's Batman franchise around, while at the same time providing a story which is more loyal to the character than anything previously seen on screen, Nolan - not confident enough about his comic credentials - needed to find the right person to write the script.
"I was looking for a writer to do a first draft, one who was very knowledgeable about comics, more than I was," confesses Nolan. "I felt that the first draft needed to set us on the right track, in terms of the myth of Batman, the mythic quality and the iconography and all of the things we needed in there. David Goyer had some great initial thoughts on who the villain would be, how the villain could relate to the origin story - so I got very excited about working with him. He was about to direct Blade: Trinity, so he had a very small window of time. We met for a couple of months and talked through the story and he came up with a story outline based on us thrashing around ideas and me saying what I wanted in the film. Then, he - within seven or eight weeks - provided a first draft, gave that to me and then had to go off and do his thing. So I took it from that point and did another eight drafts."
It would be Goyer who would provide the inspiration for the project's main antagonist; one of Batman's much lesser-known adversaries, Ra's Al Ghul. While Nolan admits that, like most of the world Ra's is, "not a villain I was familiar with" he wasted no time in going back to original source material to find out more about the character.
"I read a lot of the 1970s comics he appears in, in the Neal Adams/Dennis
O'Neill period," Nolan says. "That's a period of comic book law that
draws very much from the James Bond films of the time. So Ra's Al Ghul has a
lot of similarities with the Bond villains of the 1970s - such as Hugo Drax
from Moonraker '
While the little-known Ra's plays a large part of Batman's overall plot in Begins,
the villain on Bruce Wayne's home turf is a little more recognizable to occasional
fans, although finding a way to link Ghul to The Scarecrow - who fights his
enemies by using a gas that invokes nightmarish visions - would prove to be
no easy task.
"We figured out a way to relate [Scarecrow's] fear toxin to Ra's Al Ghul," Nolan explains. "The training and the blue poppy. I liked the idea of a nemesis for Batman who is all about the use of fear to control others, which is Batman's symbolism. So Scarecrow being somebody who uses fear to manipulate others... it's a nice balance."
Having the right visionary director on board, picking the right script and carefully crafting the right look is one thing, but even a critically acclaimed director would have trouble pulling off such a project without the right lead. Luckily for Nolan, American Psycho actor Christian Bale proved to be both a studio and a fan favourite for the role, imbuing all the qualities that have become associated with the Dark Knight.
"I felt that you would be able in the film to look into Christian's eyes and believe he had the determination and self-discipline to re-create himself as a superhero which is what Bruce Wayne does," Nolan says of the British actor. "I mean, Bruce Wayne is just a guy who does a lot of push-ups really! But that's a hell of a leap into being Batman, so whoever was going to play him, you'd have to be able to look into his eyes and see that fire. And Christian has that in real life and he can apply that intensity to his roles."
Rarely are there so many positive elements which are infused into a production such as Batman Begins and Nolan, despite the unaccustomed size of such a bona fide blockbuster - "it meant a lot more careful planning and a certain restriction in terms of spontaneity" - has managed to fuse everything together perfectly. Nolan's role in this highly anticipated franchise resurrection is unquestionably more significant than any of the previous outings and will no doubt ensure that this is the beginning of a very successful film series.