Batman Begins at 20: How Christopher Nolan – and a scrawny Christian Bale – made superheroes grow up

Telegraph

a day ago

As the world waits eagerly for Christopher Nolan's next epic, 2026's Homer adaptation The Odyssey, and with only slightly less eagerness for the great Robert Pattinson's return to the role of Batman (current eta: October 2027, though who knows), it is salutary to remember that, two decades ago, Pattinson was about to play a supporting role in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and that Nolan was on the verge of a career-defining gamble.
The 35-year old Anglo-American director had been hired to resurrect Warner Bros' most interesting (and, after Superman, most popular) comic-strip character in the form of Batman, the dark knight himself. If he succeeded, he was made for life. But if he failed, then the character, and director, were bound for cinematic oblivion.
That Batman Begins, which was released to both critical acclaim and commercial success, was triumphant now seems almost inevitable. Although few would class it amongst Nolan's greatest films, it is nonetheless a superbly accomplished and relentlessly gripping crime thriller that makes full use of an intelligent script, excellent cast and varied locations to give Batman his dignity once again.
It paved the way for virtually every gritty, grown-up take on superhero characters that followed subsequently. Without Batman Begins, Zack Snyder, Matt Reeves and James Mangold would never have been able to make the films that they made, and even Marvel's pictures – which have been deliberately pitched, tonally and visually, as the opposite of the Nolan-influenced dark superhero genre – would have struggled to achieve the success that they have. And yet it was far more of a punt – for director and studio alike – than it seemed at the time.
When Tim Burton made Batman in 1989, he had to cope with everything from fan suspicion that his lead actor Michael Keaton would be a dreadful choice as the caped crusader to a miserable and stressful production schedule. Burton later called it 'torture [and] the worst period of my life.' All was forgotten when it became an enormous hit, grossing more than $400 million at the box office.
Its sequel Batman Returns was darker, weirder and (far) kinkier, and made considerably less money, and so its studio Warner Brothers, fearing that Burton was not family-friendly enough, hired Joel Schumacher instead for the next film, 1995's Batman Forever. Once again, the picture was beset by production troubles, mainly revolving around the antagonism that developed between its stars Val Kilmer, Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones, but it was a big enough hit for these to be ignored. Schumacher was rehired for the next in the series, Batman and Robin, and then things went very, very badly wrong.
Stories about the sheer ineptitude of the franchise-killing picture have proliferated since its release in 1997. It isn't one of those pictures that's so bad it's good; it's simply so bad it's bad. During one test screening, a member of the audience shouted 'Death to Joel Schumacher!' and was met with wild cheers and applause. Its star George Clooney is said to refund anyone's ticket money to this day if they ask for it (although his recent cameo in The Flash as Batman may have been an attempt to lay this particular ghost by less expensive means) and it remains a byword for diabolical scripting, atrocious acting and general Hollywood waste. Marvel's Kevin Feige may have put it best when he said that it was 'so bad that it demanded a new way of doing things.'
A planned fifth film in the series, Batman Triumphant, was duly scrapped, and the entire franchise put on ice while Warners debated what to do. Bryan Singer's first X-Men film was released in 2000, and while it was a moderate rather than blockbuster hit, its tone – blending real-world seriousness with effective, rather than campy, comic relief – showed what audiences were looking for. What could be done?
The canonical latter-day Batman comic book was Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, first published in 1986 and a clear tonal inspiration on Burton's Batman picture. Warners considered a straight adaptation of this, to be directed by Darren Aronofsky (then a hot property following the success of the darker-than-dark Requiem for a Dream) and co-written by Aronofsky and Miller. Schumacher had wished to direct it, too, but his calls were not returned.
It would have been gritty, R-rated and potentially uncommercial, due to the sheer level of violence. 'Toss out everything you can imagine about Batman! Everything! We're starting completely anew,' Aronofsky declared. Warners began to worry that the relatively untested film-maker was not the right man for the job, not least because he and Miller had considerably different ideas as to what the picture should be. (The idea of casting then-popular teen idol Freddie Prinze Jr as Batman, in an attempt to bring in the younger crowd, was not great.)
They scrapped the project and, after briefly toying with the idea of a family-friendly Batman picture based on the animated series Batman Beyond, decided to retain the idea of hiring an auteur director and using a Miller-influenced storyline, but without the overwhelming darkness (and R-rating) that Aronofsky seemed desperate to bring to the project.
Enter Christopher Nolan. At the beginning of 2003, the director had just made Warners the successful crime picture Insomnia, and his American debut with the chronology-warping thriller Memento in 2000 was beloved by cinephiles and critics alike.
Nolan was hired by the studio in what the film industry magazine Variety called 'an unexpected plot twist', referencing the many failed attempts to resurrect the character, and commented 'All I can say is that I grew up with Batman, I've been fascinated by him and I'm excited to contribute to the lore surrounding the character. He is the most credible and realistic of the superheroes, and has the most complex human psychology. His superhero qualities come from within. He's not a magical character.'
David S Goyer, who had written the first and second Blade films, was hired to write the screenplay, which he would eventually end up co-writing with Nolan. It was a harmonious collaboration, as both men agreed that what the film needed to be was an epic, rather than a live-action cartoon.
Nolan remarked that 'I'm not a real big fan of comic book movies generally because I felt like I really wanted to see a film that conveys the experience of reading a comic book…The only time I have seen a film do the right thing was the 1978 Superman film that Richard Donner directed. They treated that film like an epic scaled film and this amazing cast like Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman and Ned Beatty and Glenn Ford. I thought that was a spectacular film and I felt that Batman deserved that type of storytelling.'
In terms of other progenitors, Nolan cited Lawrence of Arabia as a major influence on the film's scope, as well as the comic book story The Man Who Falls, which followed Bruce Wayne's international travels before he became Batman. Yet an even greater influence came in the form of one of his favourite films, Blade Runner, which would define his version of Gotham City.
The director commented that Ridley Scott's classic was 'an interesting lesson on the technique of exploring and describing a credible universe that doesn't appear to have any boundaries.' Nolan would also pay homage to that picture by casting its antagonist Rutger Hauer in a small but important role as William Earle, Bruce Wayne's apparent mentor and CEO of his company Wayne Enterprises, who turns out to be a cold-hearted villain.
The director soon assembled an impressive cast, which mixed well-respected character actors like Michael Caine (who would go on to become a regular collaborator) and Morgan Freeman with lesser-known but brilliant stars like Tom Wilkinson and Ken Watanabe. There were some surprise reversals, too; Gary Oldman, who had cornered the market in villains the previous decade, played the noble and decent Lieutenant Gordon, whereas Liam Neeson, who was then best known for playing inspiring mentors, was cast as the film's surprise villain Ra's al Ghul, head of the League of Shadows and bent on Gotham's destruction.
The only relatively weak link was Katie Holmes as Wayne's childhood friend Rachel Dawes; her romantic involvement with Tom Cruise would attract a great deal of interest around the time of the film's release. Yet the most vital piece of casting – which had defeated Schumacher, and led to Burton being abused – was that of Wayne and Batman. Get it right, and the film would be a triumph. Get it wrong, and everyone might as well pack up and go home.
The shortlist for actors considered for the role included Jake Gyllenhaal, Henry Cavill, Josh Hartnett and Hugh Dancy. None were quite right. Nolan was keen on Cillian Murphy but decided that he was better suited to the role of the film's secondary antagonist, Dr Jonathan Crane aka 'Scarecrow'; the two would go on to make another five films together.
The other serious contenders for the role were Eion Bailey, a little-known American actor who had had small roles in Fight Club and Almost Famous, and Christian Bale, who had begun his acting career as a child in Spielberg's Empire of the Sun and had since worked steadily, mainly in supporting roles in mid-budget studio films.
Neither were obvious choices, but Bailey had the advantage that he was the same nationality as the character he was playing. Yet Bale had two factors in his favour. Firstly, his most iconic role to date was his yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman in Mary Harron's adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' zeitgeist-baiting novel American Psycho. As Bateman, he could convincingly manifest suavity, charm, narcissism and psychosis, and did so while appearing to disappear completely into the role.
And shortly before he did his screen test for Batman, he lost (and then regained) a frightening amount of weight to shoot Brad Anderson's thriller The Machinist, in which he was unrecognisable from Bateman. He certainly didn't appear to be an obvious choice for Batman. But as Nolan told the BBC: 'You need an actor like Christian who has sufficient intensity and focus in his eyes to make you believe in the idea that somebody without superpowers – and Bruce Wayne has no superpowers – could, through sheer force of will, change himself into a superhero.'
When Bale was cast, Nolan announced that 'What I see in Christian is the ultimate embodiment of Bruce Wayne. He has exactly the balance of darkness and light that we were looking for.' All the same, when Batman Begins began filming in London, Chicago and Iceland in March 2004 under the codename The Intimidation Game, it was by no means a guaranteed success.
Nolan had a budget of $150 million – more than treble what Insomnia had cost – and while the cast consisted of strong actors, there was no A-list figure in the cast. Burton's Batman had hired Jack Nicholson as the Joker to assuage worries about the lesser-known Keaton, and Nicholson had promptly walked away with the picture. There would be no room for such a flamboyant star performance in Nolan's grittier, more grounded vision.
Yet a potentially greater worry was that there was no well-known antagonist to boast in the marketing; no Joker, no Riddler, no Penguin. The Scarecrow and Ra's al Ghul were well-known and loved by comic book fans, but they were deep cuts rather than audience-pleasers. And while Raimi's first and second Spider-Man films boasted copious heart and humour, Nolan and Goyer's intense, bleak script was full of psychological torment for its protagonist. Finally, Bruce Wayne doesn't even become Batman until the film is halfway through. Would audiences be sufficiently interested in Nolan's new world, and Bale's conflicted character, to come in the quantities that they needed to?
After a hassle-free production (a Nolan speciality), the film had some successful test screenings at the beginning of 2005, which convinced a trepidatious studio that they had the best Batman film ever made on their hands. Marketing it therefore became a pleasure, rather than a regrettable necessity. Yet the taint of Batman and Robin hung heavy over the character. When Batman Begins opened in the United States on June 15 2005, it was to a $48.7 million opening weekend, which the box office predictor Box Office Mojo called 'strong but unimpressive by today's instantaneous blockbuster standards' and the Wall Street Journal belittled as 'tepid'. It would later go on to gross $373 million worldwide; undeniably decent, but considerably less than the first Batman picture and roughly on a par with Batman Forever, allowing for inflation.
What saved the franchise – and, by extension, Nolan's blockbuster career – were the reviews. America's best-known critic Roger Ebert gave it his maximum score of four out of four, and wrote that it was 'the Batman movie I've been waiting for; more correctly, this is the movie I did not realise I was waiting for.'
Most writers assessed the film as a Christopher Nolan picture first and foremost, and saluted it as a clever Trojan horse of an achievement, managing to smuggle in the director's signature concerns – the fractured nature of identity; unorthodox, time-jumping storytelling; ambiguity as to the nature of good and evil – into a summer blockbuster.
To be sure, there are touches that feel studio-mandated, such as the casting of Holmes and a slightly cringeworthy moment when Oldman's otherwise dignified Gordon has to pump his arms and shout 'Yes!' in the middle of a climatic action scene. But these are minor cavils. Nolan did not just reinvent the Batman series with Batman Begins, but he set out a new blueprint for what could be done with serious mainstream entertainment. Without it, there would be no Casino Royale or Skyfall, no Star Trek, no Joker.
It may not be a wholly satisfying action picture (Nolan would develop his craft over his next few films) but it's that rare thing instead, an intellectually rigorous summer blockbuster. One minor but fiendishly complex idea, expressed by Neeson's villain towards the film's conclusion, is that the murder of Wayne's parents – a scene seen in so many pictures now that it should perhaps be retired from cinema – led to the citizens of Gotham rallying round and thereby postponed its lawful destruction by the League of Shadows for decades.
In other words, the trauma that their son suffered for years should be viewed as subservient to the good that it did. This emphasis on an apparently insoluble moral dilemma prefigured much else in Nolan's work, from the high-stakes dream heists of Inception to Oppenheimer's development of the atomic bomb, and it can be found in embryonic form here, too.
Nolan was often asked while promoting the film whether he would make a sequel. His stock answer was that he was about to make The Prestige and that 'I enjoyed making this film very much and we try to leave the film very open with a real sense of possibilities in the audiences' mind as they leave the theatre. As far as I doing another film, that will mostly be defined by how people react to this one.' He viewed himself as an independent filmmaker, rather than a go-to blockbuster director (he had turned down the chance to direct Troy, for instance) and did not want to be typecast as 'the Batman dude'.
Yet Batman Begins ends with a particularly delicious tease, as Gordon shows Batman a playing card with a joker on it and says 'Now, take this guy. Armed robbery, double homicide, has a taste for the theatrical, like you. Leaves a calling card.' The hint at what would come three years later, in all its delicious, dark glory, was tantalising in the extreme. Most would agree that the results surpassed all expectations.