Christopher Nolan‘s brother Jonathan Nolan recently revealed that the legendary director needed a lot of convincing to continue with the Batman film series and make ‘The Dark Knight‘. Speaking on ‘Armchair Expert‘ podcast with Dax Shepard, Jonathan said the convincing job wasn’t as easy as one might think. Despite the massive success of the film’s prequel ‘Batman Begins’, Christopher was initially hesitant to dive back into the world of comic book movies, as he feared being typecast as a superhero movie director.
“I worked on ‘Batman Begins’ in this slightly arm’s length capacity, but it was the one comic book my brother ever given me as a kid, ‘Batman: Year One,’ for my 14th birthday, and 10 years later I was on the set working with him,” Jonathan said, as he recalled how he thought it was a bad idea — or in his own words, thinking “this is nuts.”
“Chris was on the fence about making another one,” Jonathan said, as he noted that Chris switched to directing the magician thriller ‘The Prestige’ right after the success of ‘Batman Begins’. “He didn’t want to become a superhero movie director,” he said. However, Jonathan was determined to persuade him otherwise.
“I was like, ‘Let’s take it for a drive. Don’t you want to make another one?’” Jonathan recounted. “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?” he recalled asking his brother Christopher at the time.
Jonathan Nolan Was Hell Bent On Making A Sequel For ‘Batman Begins’ With Christopher Nolan Onboard
Along with producer Charles Roven, Jonathan said he pushed Christopher to see the potential of the sequel. “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!’ 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 … uh, 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,’” Jonathan added.
“And eventually, he came around. He did manage to avoid being pigeonholed,” Jonathan finally said of his brother. The film went on to became one of the greatest works of the ‘Oppenheimer‘ director Christopher Nolan’s career and laid a breeding ground for the Batman and DC fandom.
The film dew inspiration from classic crime thrillers like Michael Mann’s ‘Heat‘ and broke new ground in the comic book movie genre. The film received widespread acclaim and remains one of the most celebrated superhero films to date.
Other than working on ‘The Dark Knight’ together, the the Nolan brothers also worked on a few other films. They both shared screenwriting credits on the sequel and worked together on the screenplay for ‘The Dark Knight Rises‘ in 2012 as well.
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