2008’s The Dark Knight co-screenwriter Jonathan Nolan reveals how his Oscar-winning director brother Christopher Nolan almost declined to direct the Batman Begins follow-up.
“Chris was on the fence about making another one,” Jonathan said in an interview on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast. “He didn’t want to become a superhero movie director. We spent an hour telling the origin story, and that’s great, but it’s like, ‘what [more] can we do with this?’ Can we take the same characters and shift ever so slightly into a different genre? Can we go from an adventure film to a crime film, to a mob movie, and bring that feeling into it?“
Despite Christopher’s reluctance to continue Bruce Wayne/Batman’s story on the big screen, it was Jonathan who convinced him otherwise. “So I was literally sitting with [producer] Charles Roven and Chris and being like, ‘Dude, don’t be a chicken shit. Let’s do this,’” Jonathan continued. “And I knew with the script — and he developed the story with David Goyer with a little bit of input from me — it was like first act detailed, second act somewhat detailed, third act, he rides away at the end — once we had the script done, I was like, ‘This is going to be great. This is exciting. We gotta make this movie.’ And eventually, he came around. He did manage to avoid being pigeonholed.“
Released in the summer of 2008, The Dark Knight became the number-one movie of the year, grossing over $1 billion worldwide and cemented Christopher Nolan as one of Hollywood’s most prolific filmmakers. Additionally, the performance of the late Heath Ledger as the Joker earned him several posthumous awards, including “Best Supporting Actor” at the 2009 Academy Awards.
Who was the original Batman villain considered for The Dark Knight Rises?
Christopher Nolan concluded the trilogy with 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, which satisfied critics and audiences. Though it was almost a different movie, as Jonathan revealed on the Happy Sad Confused podcast that he and his brother considered a different villain than Tom Hardy‘s Bane. “I sort of started to play with ideas about The Riddler and what could be done with that character,” Jonathan recalled. “But it did feel like it was close enough to the space of what we’d done with Heath [Ledger] that you really needed to…shift there.”
