Christopher Nolanthe award-winning director of films such as ‘Interstellar‘, ‘Tenet‘or the most recent and Oscar-winning’Oppenheimer‘I didn’t want to do’The dark knight‘ after his first experience in superhero movies with ‘Batman Begins‘. And the reason was very specific: the fear of pigeonholing. This is how his brother told it Jonathan Nolan on the Armchair Expert podcast, ensuring that he finally managed to convince Christopher to direct what would be considered one of the best films of the genre.
From Nolan to Nolan: “Don’t be a chicken”
So much so, that apparently, Christopher Nolan had little interest in directing a sequel to ‘Batman Begins‘; After all, he created his own origin story of one of the most popular comic characters in history with considerable success among critics and the public. And the reason was very specific: “I had doubts about doing another. He didn’t want to become a superhero movie director”, his brother Jonathan acknowledged.
“I was sitting with producer Charles Roben and Chris like, ‘Man, don’t be a chicken. Let’s do it!’ And she knew that with the script she had the first act detailed, the second more or less detailed and the third… she got out of hand at the end. When we had the script done I told him ‘This is going to be great. It is exciting. We have to make this movie‘. And, in the end, he accepted. He managed to avoid being pigeonholed”Jonathan Nolan continues.
Jonathan himself relates that he did not give up and continued to encourage his brother with a more than suggestive example: “It’s as if we had built an amazing race car and I said ‘Let’s go for a walk. Don’t you want to do another one?‘Can we take the same characters and change them slightly to another different genre?”Jonathan wondered. And so it was, achieving one of the most celebrated films among comic book adaptations, with a joker of Heath Ledger who went down in history, winning a posthumous Oscar for his performance.
