Jonathan Nolan is definitely one of the nerdy elite, and if you don’t get that impression from his collaborations from his director brother Christopher (like co-writing the Dark Knight movies and The Prestige), or the weekly adventures of Jesus and Ben Linus on Person of Interest which he created, then maybe the below interview will convince you. Or no. Whatever.
So these excerpts come from an interview in Empire, who asked Nolan about such tantalizing fan queries as sneaking Robin into the end of The Dark Knight Rises, the Batman villains they couldn’t use, his thoughts on the upcoming Justice League movie, and what he really thought of Dark Knight competitor for best superhero movie of the year, The Avengers.
First things first, just how did they sneak “The Boy Wonder” into the Nolan Bat-universe?
It is a little hard to imagine Robin working in that universe, so the idea had to be limited to that gag at the end. But Joe's character is very important to the story. In any movie you need a character looking at proceedings the way you see them, and Joe's character is that character for this film. One of my favourite scenes is when John tells Bruce how he knew he was Batman. It's like that scene in The Prestige where the little kid sees through Christian's trick. Little kids, they don't have any illusions, they just see the truth of the situation. I feel there's a kind of spiritual connection between the two movies there.
So let’s talk Bat-villains now. Are there any that Nolan wishes he could have penned into the series?
Yeah, like Clayface or, indeed, The Penguin. Part of what's compelling about Chris's take is the naturalism of it and I think that's one of the things I loved about the Frank Miller comic books was that they were sort of urban, gritty vigilante stories first and formost. So everything had to stick within that universe. It's hard to imagine [in these movies] any of the rogue's gallery characters who have sort of a more supernatural or science-fiction bent to them. And I think that's one of the aspects of Batman which are fascinating: in 70 years, the character has been sort of fully laundered. Because of writers and artists having every month coming up with a different story to tell with this character, there are often different genre aspects to it. You have your science-fictions, you've had fantasy elements along the way, horror, camp comedy… I mean there are so many different versions.
And while his big brother has been pretty clear about his future intentions with DC Comics-based movies, the littler Nolan says that he’s looking forward to the eventual Justice League film.
I'm incredibly excited. I was a big Batman fan when I was a kid. In fact he was the only comic-book character I really liked. I went through a brief spell where I was reading Captain Britain, because I was an English kid living in the States, and Wolverine for 30 seconds, Spider-Man too, but really Batman was the one. And I love that there are different versions of the character. I love that in the context of The Justice League, he's kind of the black sheep of that family.
Currently, Justice League is scheduled against the sequel to The Avengers in 2015, which is going to be a pretty epic box office match-up if it ends up going down, perhaps even bigger than this summer’s showdown between The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises. But seriously, what did Nolan think about the efforts of the other team?
I did. To me Joss Whedon is a god, I'm just a huge fan of his work, I love his work on TV. And I thought The Avengers was just an incredible achievement.
Nice of Jonah to be so giving to the Marvel side of life.
Source: Geek Tyrant
