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When Warner Bros. asked Christopher Nolan had any ideas to resurrect the Batman franchise after “Batman & Robin” took the character to the extreme end of the cinematic spectrum, Nolan immediately knew what to do. “I saw it immediately,” the director said in a featured interview Tom Shone’s 2020 book “The Nolan Variations: The Movies, Mysteries, and Marvels of Christopher Nolan.”
“I was like, No, no, you’ve never done with Batman what you guys did with Superman in the seventies. The whole digging method, where you introduce it to the great production ethic, with all these name actors and faces, and throw it into reality – not in a gritty sense, but in an action film sense What if this was as real as any other action film?
WB executive Greg Silverman gave Nolan and his producing partner (and wife) Emma Thomas some requirements before they started: “Batman Begins” had to be rated PG-13 instead of R so kids could see it in theaters , and after some thought, Silverman also added that “it would be great if (Batman) had a really cool car.” The final note initially gave Nolan pause:
“I remember thinking, I don’t know … really? Can we make that work? I said, ‘That’s a huge challenge.’ It ended up being the thing that we focused on, even as we were writing the script We were all about ‘How do you sell the idea of a guy in a costume What’s the mythology?'”
Not only did Nolan have to justify a man beating up criminals while wearing a bat costume, he also had to justify introducing a “really cool car” in the film so the studio could make money on marketing. For some directors, that could have been a “line in the sand” moment, a time to fight the studio over the vision and integrity of the picture. But Nolan took the note in stride and let it inform his entire approach to making the trilogy (although not originally conceived as a trilogy).
Christopher Nolan found a silver lining in a studio note for his Batman films
In other interviews, Nolan has said that he did not initially plan to include a version of The Batmobile in his film (“I had been assuming that we wouldn’t deal with that at all, or that would be something if someone made a sequel later because it seemed so fanciful”), but eventually he and production designer Nathan Crowley worked out a design for something that could possibly exist within the world they were creating, and the vehicle took center stage in a climactic chase across Gotham City.
Of course, the Tumbler eventually appeared “The Dark Knight” (a movie that’s even better than you remember) and it got an even better display in that unforgettable moment of Batman bursting out of the damaged vehicle on the Batpod motorcycle. That moment is sort of a gradation between movies – a middle ground between the Tumbler and the Bats, the flying vehicle that would appear in “The Dark Knight Rises” in 2012. All three vehicles were designed with realism in mind, but by the time the franchise moved on to “The Dark Knight Rises,” the film’s bombastic demands were pushing the limits of that established approach. (Once our hero starts zooming above the streets in what is effectively a flying car, the film starts to dive into zanier territory and makes it a little harder for audiences to suspend their disbelief.)
Still, it’s impressive that Nolan and his colleagues were able to achieve such an overtly commercial studio note in a way that not only felt organic to the story, but also an ethos that permeated every other aspect of the Dark Knight trilogy.
