In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Christopher Nolan, director of The Dark Knight Trilogy, spoke about what superhero film had the greatest influence on the first film in the series. Sure, you make think it was Tim Burton’s Batman which, according to Nolan, was a “very idiosyncratic, gothic kind of masterpiece.” Actually, it was Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie.
Nolan reasons:
“They never did the sort of 1978 Batman, where you see the origin story, where the world is pretty much the world we live in but there’s this extraordinary figure there, which is what worked so well in Dick Donner’s Superman film. And so I was able to get in the studio and say, ‘Well, that’s what I would do with it.’ I don’t even know who was first banging around the term “reboot” or whatever, but it was after Batman Begins, so we didn’t have any kind of reference for that idea of kind of resetting a franchise. It was more a thing of, ‘Nobody’s ever made this origin story in this way and treated it as a piece of action filmmaking, a sort of contemporary action blockbuster.’”
Granted Nolan took the Donner formula and ran with it, not fully intending to reboot; he more so wanted to make his own movie. However, it probably helped his case since the studio had tried to get a film adaptation of Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One off the ground and that obviously fell through. Restarting the franchise was seemingly already on their minds
He must have originally conceived of his story as a trilogy, right? Wrong. Nolan has always been a one film at a time type of guy.
“Privately, ourselves, we started to put together a vague idea of where a second and third film were going, and then I immediately shot them down. I was like, “You know what? You’ve got to put everything into the one movie and just try and make a great movie because you may not get this chance again.” And then, when it succeeded, we were able to think about, “Okay, what would we do in a sequel?’”
Though he ultimately did concoct a trilogy, Nolan had the same approach with The Dark Knight, insofar that he and the rest of the creative team put everything they had into it and didn’t hold anything back. It really showed.
Do you agree with Nolan’s approach?
Source: The Hollywood Reporter