ABOUT A BAT
Christopher Nolan takes a fresh look at the Dark Knight's origins
By Andy Klein
The character of Batman remains one of Warner Bros.' most potentially valuable franchises - in both aesthetic and commercial terms. The decision, back in the '80s, to entrust it to Tim Burton was a daring and admirable one: Rather than play it safe with some commercial hack, the studio chose a filmmaker with a strong and idiosyncratic style, but not much of a track record.
Of course, when Burton's Batman Returns (1992) didn't match the first entry's phenomenal box office, Warners reverted to big-studio form by turning the next two episodes over to Joel Schumacher, the classic "safe choice." Schumacher's Batman Forever (1995) did better financially, but his followup, Batman and Robin (1997), was another disappointment.
After an eight-year hiatus, the company has taken an even more admirable risk by hiring Christopher Nolan to direct Batman Begins. Due out June 15, the film has Christian Bale in the title role, Michael Caine as Alfred, and Gary Oldman as Lt. (not yet Commissioner) Gordon, amid an international cast that includes Liam Neeson, Morgan Freeman, Ken Watanabe, Katie Holmes, Cillian Murphy, Tom Wilkinson, and Rutger Hauer.
It's not merely that Nolan had only made three features. More to the point, his first film, Following (1998), was a complex thriller, shot on a shoestring budget over the course of a year; and his second, Memento (2000) - a big hit only by indie standards - was one of the most challenging, talked about, and analyzed films of the last decade. Even its detractors would be unlikely to label it "the same old thing."
After helming the first-rate, but more conventional, Insomnia (2002), he was working on a script about Howard Hughes. When Martin Scorsese started shooting The Aviator, Nolan put it aside. "I looked around and found a different story about an orphaned billionaire who goes nuts," he says in a recent interview.
He heard that Warners wanted to reinvent the Batman franchise but didn't have any specific ideas. "So I got in touch with them and pitched my take on it. A very loose take. Then I refined it a bit and got more specific with it, based on their comments ... . And we settled on the notion of it being an origin story."
Looking at the entirety of the Batman canon with co-scripter David S. Goyer, Nolan discovered that there isn't a single definitive account of the hero's origin: Different writers had experimented with different ideas through the years. "Some elements stuck, others didn't," Nolan says. "We looked for the things that stuck and therefore are essential to the character." While he cites Frank Miller's Batman: Year One and Jeph Loeb's The Long Halloween as influences, he was determined that this film should be a fresh take on the character - his interpretation of its essence from six decades of stories by scores of writers.
Greg Silverman at Warners sent him "The Man Who Falls," in which Bruce Wayne leaves Gotham for seven years and travels the world, learning the different skills that he will put to use as Batman. "I found that a fascinating jumping-off point," Nolan says. "You know, Bruce Wayne as a little boy being traumatized by an encounter with bats and how that influences his life."
The unproduced Hughes script, which Nolan hopes to revive some day, couldn't help but influence Batman Begins. "The fascinating thing for me about Hughes was that he could do anything," the director says. "He had essentially limitless finances. His parents both died when he was young, and he was left with the keys to the kingdom ... not unlike Bruce Wayne. That's a fascinating situation for somebody to be in - to have all kinds of potential, all kinds of power, but also have these inner demons. Where those things lead is pretty fascinating in both stories."
One earmark of the Batman films, under both Burton and Schumacher, has been the surreal, elaborately designed environments in which they unfold. Nolan wanted to use a different approach, closer to his earlier films. He says that "[production designer] Nathan [Crowley] and I didn't sit there and go, 'Okay, let's create an art deco world or an art nouveau world or a modernist world.' We didn't want to stylize Gotham in that way. First, that's already been done very, very effectively by Anton Furst and Tim Burton and the rest.
"But also, the whole point to me is to have Batman be an extraordinary figure against a relatively ordinary background. That way, you get to experience what the people of Gotham would experience, which is seeing Batman as this incredible figure. And so our Gotham arose from looking at modern cities, from looking at New York, Chicago, London, Tokyo - all these places - and really just putting together the elements of those that fit our story."
Memento is famous for its amazingly clever (and justified) scrambling of chronology, a directorial tendency that could be spotted in nascent form in Following. But Batman Begins, like Insomnia, is more normal and linear. Still, Nolan admits that the first third of the story comprises a very fractured narrative, in part to present a long series of events in a short span of screen time, but also to emphasize the connection between Bruce Wayne's past, present, and future.
The movie basically starts with Bruce Wayne as a young man in jail somewhere in China. "He's truly lost, and he's flashing back to his childhood," says Nolan. "And everything he's dealing with in the present points very strongly toward what we all know he's going to become. That's the advantage of making a film about a character everyone is familiar with. It was the same with Hughes. If you can assume that the audience knows where the character is heading, you can play around a lot with the chronology ... . There are interesting resonances in the way we jump between the elements of the younger Bruce Wayne and the older Bruce Wayne."
While Nolan - as in his previous films - clings rigorously to the hero's subjective POV, the nature of the story required that he occasionally step outside the character. "For example, it was always important to me that, when Batman first appears, we see him from the criminals' point of view, in order to show the effect that his use of theatricality - his use of symbolism - is going to have on them."
Nolan is reluctant to go into greater detail about the plot, but I am able to nail him down on one point. His earlier films end with no chance of sequels, so I ask if it's safe to assume that Batman doesn't die in the last 10 minutes.
He laughs. "Well, I think it would have been pretty hard to sell that one to the studio ... . Besides, I wanted to leave it very, very open-ended - much more open-ended, I think, than the other films in a lot of ways ... . I was trying to paint a film on the broadest possible canvas, to create the epic that I think the character has always deserved. And part of that is to finish the story but leave things so that the audience can imagine the characters continue, broaden, and experience further stories."
There is yet another reason, and Nolan struggles to explain it without spoiling things. "I'll put it this way: There's a nice idea at present in one of the comics that Batman, in using this extreme symbolism, this extreme behavior, essentially winds up attracting lunacy to Gotham. He elicits a response from those he's fighting with. I like the bittersweet notion that the end is a kind of Pyrrhic victory. Because, when you've got a character who adopts such extreme tactics, it's bound to have long-term repercussions."
Published: 05/26/2005
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