craveonline

There are seemingly infinite possible directions for any Batman story to go, so it takes careful screenwriters to hone the perfect movie script from the wealth of material available. Writers David Goyer and Jonathan Nolan (Jonah for short) told a version of the Joker/Harvey Dent stories that follow where Batman Begins left off. Though Goyer has many comic book projects in the works, he was all Batman today.

---

Crave Online:   How did you decide on the jumping off point for this story?

David Goyer:   Well, the jumping off point was the last scene in Batman Begins. We knew we were going to tell a story about escalation, and we knew we were going to tell a story about The Joker. We didn't know going into it that we were going to bring in Harvey Dent. That was sort of debated for a while. Then we started from that point and then we went back again and re-read every single comic involving The Joker. Then my experience with Chris has always been, you start off, it's just kind of like a big, sprawling debate where it's a free for all. In the beginning though it was just Chris was saying, "Convince me we should even do another one." So just internally it was just this debate about because he didn't want to do another one unless he felt we could really top it, and there was a story that was worth telling. I think there was an initial week where it was just, is this a story worthy of telling again.

Crave Online: You have fun foreshadowing things either in this film or from the Batman universe as a whole. How far can you push that and how much fun can you have with that?

David Goyer:     To the extent that many of those things are in there, I think they're just kind of grace notes or you know winks at the audience. Trust me, I've not had a single conversation really with Chris about doing another one. It's not like we're planting Easter eggs for another one. Chris doesn't approach things that way. He's just one movie at a time. I like to say I think it was three or four months before Batman Begins had already been in theaters that Chris called me up and said, "Let's have lunch and talk about another one." It was a while so we're definitely not at that point for another one.

Crave Online:   What inspiration do you take from the different writers and artists who have done Batman comics? Obviously there's a lot of Frank Miller in here.

Jonah Nolan:    It picks up a little bit along that. One of the cool things about working in this property, in this franchise – comic books, movies, all of it – the Batman world is that you have all these amazing writers who sort of pick up the baton from the previous writer and carry it a little bit further. Loeb and Sale picked up the baton from Frank Miller, dealing with Batman in this realistic setting, sort of naturalist setting, in which the criminal sort of underworld figured as a large component or a background against which the story plays out, which is enormously appealing, I think, to us.

David Goyer:    The Gotham City that exists in these movies isn't realistic either. I mean, every time you see a big wide establishing shot of Gotham City it's been augmented. But I think the approach on these movies is to try to depict Batman's story more realistically. That was something that Miller and Alan Moore and Jeff Loeb principally over the last couple of decades had been doing.

Crave Online:   Given that approach, when you go back and do your immersion in the comic book sources, are you thinking of things you could do realistically or that would be too much of a stretch?

Jonah Nolan:    There are characters who would fit into this universe and characters who probably wouldn't, although it's always a fun exercise to see if you can.

David Goyer:     To see if you can make them fit in. I think that when we start talking about The Joker, obviously prior to this film The Joker that most people were familiar with was the Jack Nicholson Joker, although Cesar Romero when I was growing up was The Joker. But it became immediately apparent that the Jack Nicholson version couldn't inhabit this world. That he was from a total parallel universe so we had to do something different.

Jonah Nolan:    I always feel like we're approaching it from the sense of you have this Batman world and you have a different lens to look into. Chris's lens is through this idea of realism but to me the idea is to look consistent in the universe.

Crave Online:   Purely hypothetically, just for the fanboys, could you foresee a way to incorporate a character like Robin into this world?

David Goyer:    We're not going to answer that question.

Crave Online:   Why not?

David Goyer:    Because A) we haven't talked about it. B) I don't want to speculate. It's up to Chris to decide if he wants to go down that path again. If he invites us along, great, and we'll kind of deal with it then.

Crave Online:    Are you looking forward or are you prepared to make that argument: should we do another one?

David Goyer:     I think we'd both to do another one. I don't think I could see beyond that.

Jonah Nolan:     But the challenge again is that the mandate from Chris is it always has to be better.

David Goyer:    How do you make it better? And we set the bar with Batman Begins and I think this one sets it even higher so it's scary.