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The Unofficial Christopher Nolan Website / Interviews / Batman Begins DVD and Sequel News |
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Exclusive Christopher Nolan Interview - Batman Begins DVD and Sequel News (October 11th, 2005) Last week I was woken by a 7:30 AM phone call. Mumbling incoherently, I heard that Christopher Nolan was available this week to do some interviews for the Batman Begins DVD. I mustered a “yes” before stealing another hour of sleep. (Yeah, in LA you sleep late.) Today, a man from Nolan’s office connected me to the man who relaunched the Batman franchise. I think he was at home, because I heard a teapot screech in the middle of the interview. Or maybe he’s just got a swank office with a full kitchen. In any event, the DVD covers the complete making of Batman Begins and includes a spoof called Tankman Begins. With only 10 minutes, I could not afford to be quite so thorough, but we hit a few major talking points, and I did my best to get sequel news out of him. He was tough, but we got some news, as well as news on his next film, The Prestige. Did Christian Bale show up for his audition looking like The Machinist? Funny enough, yes he did. Well, yes and no, as I say. My first meeting with him was right before he was going off to shoot it and he weighed very little. He then lost some more during the shooting but he was pretty damn skinny, which didn’t distract me from the sense of purpose he got in his eyes, that great focus that I think Bruce Wayne needed. So I was impressed but I was very worried that when he turned up for his screen test right after finishing The Machinist, the studio was going to think I lost my mind screen testing a 90 pound Batman. But he turned up for that screen test having put on all of the weight he ever lost. He came in at 180 pounds or something. The fans love it and it got great reviews, but it’s safe to say the Academy won’t be nominating Batman Begins. How can we get to the point where a comic book movie is considered as special as a historical drama? I have to say, it would be churlish of me to complain in any way about the way in which Batman Begins has been received. My assumption was that if we made a sincere effort to make a great film and not in any way sell the material short as being just a comic book movie or just a superhero movie, then we’d get a lot of credit for that. I think we have. As far as talking about awards and things like that, that’s a whole other world. It is whatever it is. But I think in terms of the way the audiences have received Batman Begins, I think we’ve actually had a lot of credit from audiences for respecting the material and really trying to put something great on screen and the film has played all the way through the summer. We’re still on a couple of hundred screens now. Like I said, I couldn’t really complain about the film being ghettoized because I think actually we have been able to play well beyond the core audience who turned out the first couple of weeks. The comic book menu system on the DVD is very reminiscent of the Memento special edition. Why do you like to make DVD menus a challenge? Well, I think for me, it’s really about the opportunity that the DVD format gives you to engage with the viewer in a manner that has some relation to the feel of the film. In the case of Memento which my brother designed the menus for, we really were looking for something that would be challenging and puzzling in the way that the narrative of the film had been. In the case of Batman Begins which wasn’t my idea to do the comic interface but I thought it was a great idea and I was very happy that they did it, because I think it’s just a marvelous tribute to the source material, the source medium if you like, that we were drawing from in making the film. I’m especially pleased with the two disc set. There are three of our comic book sources, some really historic comics that have been reprinted by the D.C. guys, which I think is a great tribute, a great looking back to the essence of the original source material and where does Batman come from. What do you think of Tankman Begins? I thought it was hilarious. I actually had not had a chance to see it when it first aired. It was really only in preparing the DVD that I was able to take a look at it. I just thought it was hilarious. They did such a great job of matching in with our existing footage. The amazing skill of the guys who put that together, so I’m pretty pleased to have that on the DVD. How much time do you take out of the schedule to do the DVD interviews? I don’t take any time out of the schedule to do it. What I do, because I’m in the thick of things, I do some interviews in pre-production, and then while we’re shooting, I try and just allow them to shoot me on set and capture the odd word or whatever. But then when we’re in post production, I’ve got a bit more time on my hands and a bit more perspective. Then I’ll go and do another set of interviews and that’s where the material is drawn from. To me, it’s the best way of doing it, talking about our ambition for the film before we shoot it and then having got it in the can and knowing a bit more how it was going to work, talk about what we actually went through. Is it important to you to have that historical record of the filmmaking process? It’s very important. For selfish reasons purely, I just think it’s marvelous that you can have a format which will record all of this information about everyone who worked on the film and where we shot the film, how we did things. I like to think that for a certain segment of the audience, hopefully a large one, there’s a lot of fascination with that kind of material too. Certainly as a movie buff, a movie fan myself, I’ve always been pretty interested to see that material, how things have actually been achieved. In terms of Batman Begins for example, I was very pleased with the amount of footage of the Batmobile in development they were able to put on there because that’s something I think no one’s ever really seen before. Interview originally published on about.com |
              
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