By: Russ Burlingame on December 15, 2012
During an interview with Empire Magazine this week, The Dark Knight Trilogy co-writer Jonathan Nolan not only praised the work of Avengers director Joss Whedon, but looked forward to the next big superhero team film poised to change the game–this one from Warner Brothers, the studio that has been underwriting most of Nolan’s work with his brother, director/producer Christopher Nolan.
What did Nolan have to say about Justice League? He wants it.
“I’m incredibly excited. I was a big Batman fan when I was a kid. In fact he was the only comic-book character I really liked,” Nolan said. “I went through a brief spell where I was reading Captain Britain, because I was an English kid living in the States, and Wolverine for 30 seconds, Spider-Man too, but really Batman was the one. And I love that there are different versions of the character. I love that in the context of The Justice League, he’s kind of the black sheep of that family.”
The question came in the context of Batman’s larger place in the DC Universe, particularly on film, as not only did some viewers feel like the last-minute John Blake twist violated the Nolan Brothers’ own position that there was no place for Robin in their universe, but also Nolan discussed that certain of Batman’s rogues gallery wouldn’t work out in the Nolanverse.
“It is a little hard to imagine Robin working in that universe, so the idea had to be limited to that gag at the end. But Joe’s character is very important to the story. In any movie you need a character looking at proceedings the way yousee them, and Joe’s character is that character for this film. One of my favourite scenes is when John tells Bruce how he knew he was Batman. It’s like that scene in The Prestige where the little kid sees through Christian’s trick. Little kids, they don’t have any illusions, they just see the truth of the situation. I feel there’s a kind of spiritual connection between the two movies there,” Nolan said. He added, “Part of what’s compelling about Chris’s take is the naturalism of it and I think that’s one of the things I loved about the Frank Miller comic books was that they were sort of urban, gritty vigilante stories first and formost. So everything had to stick within that universe. It’s hard to imagine [in these movies] any of the rogue’s gallery characters who have sort of a more supernatural or science-fiction bent to them. And I think that’s one of the aspects of Batman which are fascinating: in 70 years, the character has been sort of fully laundered. Because of writers and artists having every month coming up with a different story to tell with this character, there are often different genre aspects to it. You have your science-fictions, you’ve had fantasy elements along the way, horror, camp comedy… I mean there are so many different versions.”
