How Christopher Nolan changed Hollywood from his own garage with ‘Batman Begins’
These days, working from home has become commonplace for countless employees all over the globe. However, back in the early 2000s, it would have prompted funny looks to claim such a crazy thing, usually followed up with a quip about getting a “real job.” Amazingly, though, Christopher Nolan proved in 2005 that not only can you work from home effectively, you can even form the foundations of a $150 million blockbuster epic that changes Hollywood forever from the comfort of your own garage.
When Nolan signed up to direct a reboot of the moribund Batman franchise in January 2003, he was far from the household name he would soon become. At that time, he had made a splash with his backwards-forwards neo-noir Memento in 2000, and followed that up with the big studio thriller Insomnia, which made $113.8million at the box office. These successes put him in line for his first stab at a major blockbuster, and he wowed Warner Bros executives with his pitch of approaching Batman as realistically as possible, all while telling the origin story that had never been seen on-screen before.
In the early days of developing the film, Nolan enlisted the help of screenwriter David S Goyer, best known for writing the Blade movies. Nolan counted himself a Batman fan, but he wasn’t a comic book die-hard like Goyer, and felt he needed some of that expertise when putting together the screenplay. Over time, Nolan and Goyer wrote a script that threw comic book influences like Batman: Year One, The Long Halloween, and ‘The Man Who Falls’ into a blender with old school epic movies such as Lawrence of Arabia, and emerged with Batman Begins.
Despite Nolan being a young upstart in his 30s who had no real name brand recognition in Hollywood yet, he managed to convince the team at Warner that it would be a bad idea for him to send them the script. Even in those days, internet rumourmongering was rife, and the last thing Nolan wanted was for the Begins script to leak online. So, when executives wanted to read new drafts, they had to drive to Nolan’s Los Angeles home and peruse the script in his garage, with the director and Goyer watching over their shoulders.
This wasn’t the last use Nolan would get out of his garage, either. Once the script was locked in, the director’s attention turned to designing the movie. He had an unusually lengthy lead time on Batman Begins of around three months, so he and production designer Nathan Crowley decided to set up shop in his garage, instead of at the Warner Bros studio lot.
“It was the result of trying to find a way to keep the spontaneous, intimate creative process of smaller projects while going into, by far, the biggest project we’d taken on,” Nolan told Reuters in 2009. “When we first started, it was literally a garage with a washing machine in there and all that. I’d just pull the car out and put a desk in.” Then, with a smile, he added, “I’ve had it done up a bit nicer since then.”
Crowley remembered that the impetus to begin work on designing the world of Gotham City in Nolan’s garage sprang from early discussions about what their incarnation of the Batmobile should look like. After a chat over lunch got his creative juices flowing, he immediately drove to a nearby Toys R Us and bought a host of vehicles.
“I went over to my workshop and cut everything up and smashed them up,” he revealed to Collider in 2020. “We talked about mashing up a Lamborghini with a Humvee, and so I thought, ‘Well, let’s just start somewhere.’ So I smashed this thing together and I left it on his doorstep on a Monday morning.” No sooner had Crowley left his crude plastic Frankenstein’s Monster Batmobile outside Nolan’s house than he received a phone call from the director, who excitedly said, “Get in here. Let’s convert my two-car garage into a workshop art department and figure out how we’re going to do this film.”
Astonishingly, as the design process evolved, Crowley wound up building a model replica of Gotham City that took up most of the garage’s square footage. Nolan knew he didn’t want his Gotham to look like an art deco Gothic hellscape, because that’s what Tim Burton did in his movies, nor did he want it to look like a Day-Glo, wildly over-the-top wonderland like in Joel Schumacher’s films. Instead, Nolan wanted something that took influences from many real modern cities and mashed them together to make an exaggerated version of a modern American metropolis.
“We wanted something that reflects the reality of a large modern city, which is a tremendous variety of architecture,” Nolan told IGN. “A tremendous variety of periods in which things were built. We wanted a history to the place as well as a contemporary feel.” To achieve this, Crowley combined elements of New York City and Chicago’s architecture and geography with Tokyo’s elevated monorails and Hong Kong’s walled city of Kalhoon, which inspired Gotham’s slum, the Narrows.
Obviously, Nolan’s Batman Begins experience soon left his garage and took him to England’s iconic Shepperton Studios, as well as Iceland’s Vatnajökull glacier. From these humble beginnings, he created a movie that spawned two billion-dollar sequels, helped prove to the world that superhero movies could be taken seriously, popularised the concept of reboots, and encouraged a wave of darker, more realistic genre movies.
Most importantly, though, Batman Begins influenced countless filmmakers and actors in their own works over the next two decades, with people like Jon Favreau, Robert Downey Jr, Edward Norton, James Mangold, Patty Jenkins, Gareth Edwards, and Sam Mendes all citing it directly.
