Christopher Nolan was “on the fence” about making landmark movie
Horrifyingly, the world nearly lost out on Christopher Nolan’s biggest movies, but thankfully, the director changed his mind.
When the offer to direct The Dark Knight landed on the table, Nolan had already hit a home run with the 2005 movie Batman Begins. In the eyes of most fans, his first foray was the best feature yet in the Batman franchise and reignited the superhero genre into a more interesting, artistic notion thanks to the director’s meticulous eye.
However, in a recent interview on the Armchair Expert podcast with Dax Shepard, the director’s brother, Jonathan Nolan, revealed Christopher almost turned down the chance to make The Dark Knight.
Jonathan also helped out on the movie, reflecting, “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.”
Make no mistake, Jonathan said his director brother was “very proud” of Batman Begins. Nevertheless, he was initially unsure when the offer to make another landed on the table. “Chris was on the fence about making another one,” he said, adding, “To me, it was like we built this amazing sports car, and I’m like, ‘Let’s take it for a drive. Don’t you want to make another one?’”
Still, the Oppenheimer filmmaker wasn’t sure if he wanted to make another movie when it came to possibly signing onto The Dark Knight. According to Jonathan, Christopher was scared of potentially limiting his career prospects by accepting the opportunity, “He didn’t want to become a superhero movie director.”
Luckily, Jonathan was able to change his mind. “We spent an hour telling the origin story, and that’s great, but it’s like, ‘what [more] can we do with this?’,” he recalled telling his brother. “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?”
In the end, it all came down to a simple comment that only a brother could say to a director as respected and revered as Christopher. Jonathan remembered telling his sibling, “Dude, don’t be a chicken shit. Let’s do this!”
Jonathan worked closely on the screenplay for The Dark Knight, still in an attempt to convince his brother to work on it. He said, “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.”
The film was a roaring success, potentially even usurping Batman Begins as the best superhero adaptation ever made. Furthermore, Heath Ledger posthumously won the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ for his work on the film, with the movie overall taking home 107 awards across various bodies and categories.
Listen to Jonathan Nolan on the Armchair Expert below.
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