Christopher Nolan tension, big budget pressure, and why Warner Bros hated Christian Bale’s first scene as Batman
Somehow, it has already been 20 years since Christopher Nolan brought his version of Batman back to the big screen, and, in the process, elevated superhero movies to previously unseen heights.
Far darker in tone than previous adaptations, casting Christian Bale as brooding billionaire Bruce Wayne proved a masterstroke as all three movies (but especially the second instalment) immediately became classics of the genre.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing for Nolan, though. Many felt that the four original Warner Bros movies on Batman, made between 1989 and 1997, had done all there was to do with the franchise, and there wasn’t much appetite from the public to see more of the Caped Crusader. Nevertheless, Nolan believed in the potential of an origin story and was on a high after the success of his mind-bending whodunnit story, Memento.
He highlighted: “What drew me to Batman in the first place was Bruce Wayne’s story and that he’s a real character whose story begins in childhood. He’s not a fully formed character like James Bond, so what we’re doing is we’re following the journey of this guy from a child who goes through this horrible experience to becoming this extraordinary character.”
Nolan recruited Blade writer David S Goyer and set to work on the reboot, envisioning it as a three-part story tracking Bruce Wayne’s history from his parents’ murder to his training to become a martial arts expert and beyond.
While the director was intent on making far grittier instalments than before, he deliberately avoided gore and excessive violence in order to make the movies accessible for kids above the age of around 11, “because I would have loved to have seen a film like this at that age”.
Christian Bale, meanwhile, was a known face to some degree, having gathered acclaim for his role as a child in Steven Spielberg’s 1987 war epic Empire of the Sun. But he was not a household name yet, and auditioned for the role of Batman using the suit from the previous films donated by Val Kilmer. Beating the likes of future Nolan favourite, Cillian Murphy, to the part, the director said of Bale: “He has exactly the balance of darkness and light that we were looking for”.
Filming began in locations as far apart as Iceland and Shepperton in the UK and was a massive undertaking, with Nolan undesirous of relying on CGI, leading to a set being built for the Batcave that was 250 feet long, 120 feet wide, and had a working 12,000-gallon waterfall.
He wanted the film to carry the feel of Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner, a movie he described as “seminal”. Scott’s use of models and miniatures, together with his treatment of rain and camera techniques, informed Nolan’s look for both Gotham City and the slum-like Narrows.
Twinning with an incredible soundtrack by German composer Hans Zimmer, the movie outdid anyone’s expectations at the box office in a year when blockbusters were expected to fare badly. Batman Begins brought in almost $400million around the world and made a superstar of Bale.
However, Warner Bros executives were very concerned during screenings that the director had left far too much time from the film’s beginning to the audience getting to see Bale dressed in the iconic batsuit for the first time. “They were not happy about that,” Goyer told the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “No disrespect to the actors who played Bruce Wayne prior to this, and as movie goers, we were always twiddling our thumbs waiting for the character to get into costume and for the movie to begin. But why is that?”
In order to get round the issue, Nolan and Goyer took it upon themselves to look at previous superhero movies to compare at which point the star of the films were first seen in costume, examining the likes of Superman: The Movie from 1978 as the scriptwriter explained: “[We] clocked the minute into the film the character had put on the costume… We weren’t that much farther than them!”
Regardless, Warner Bros very quickly greenlit a second instalment of the new Batman franchise under Nolan, which led to 2008’s The Dark Knight, co-starring Heath Ledger as the Joker in a performance that now ranks as one of cinema’s finest. That sequel is thought of by many as the best superhero movie ever and regularly makes it into top films of all time lists.
