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CHAPTER 1

SCREENPLAY

From the beginning, even as he first began to toy with the notion of writing and directing a new Batman movie, Christopher Nolan suspected that Bruce Wayne's story was bigger than what could be told in a single film; in the back of his mind, he considered ideas about where that story could go if he were to make not just one film, but a series of films. "We never sat down and specifically plotted out a trilogy," Nolan said, "but we had a notion of what the shape of Bruce Wayne's story would be were we to make three films — even from the first one. Just to come up with the first film, we had to have some idea of what Bruce Wayne's life story would be."

Laying a foundation for a trilogy wasn't foremost in Nolan's mind as he embarked on creating Batman Begins, however. For one thing, he'd always had an aversion to what he called "sequel bait," narrative threads that anticipate and rely on a sequel. For another, there was considerable risk in what Nolan was proposing to do with Batman Begins — essentially turning the super hero genre on its head — and neither he nor Warner Bros. knew if his unusual take would succeed or fail. If it failed, there would be no sequel, and certainly no trilogy.

And that would have suited Nolan just fine. Having come from the world of independent film, with its modest budgets and guerilla filmmaking techniques, the young director — only thirty-three years old at the time — had no burning desire to make a series of "big Hollywood" block-busters. Rather, what compelled him as he began developing the story for Batman Begins was the tantalizing prospect of taking the "comic" out of the comic book movie.

"From the beginning," said Nolan, "my interest was in taking on a super hero story but grounding it in reality, never looking at it as a comic book movie, but rather as any other action/adventure film. I was interested in removing the frame of the comic, if you will, the two-dimensional reality of what a comic book looks like. It would be a darker, more human Batman — and the opportunity to approach this great iconic character in a new way was very exciting to me."

The movie's narrative framework, as Nolan saw it, would be Batman's origins, the events that led billionaire Bruce Wayne to don a Batsuit and fight crime in Gotham City. Surprisingly, it was a story that had never been told in its entirety, in the comics or on film. "There hadn't been a single definitive account of the journey of Bruce Wayne into Batman," Nolan stated, "which meant that there were fascinating gaps in the mythology to be played with. I wanted to tell that origin story with a certain degree of gravity, and in a more grounded way than what had been done before, giving the story and the characters a more realistic spin."

That was the initial pitch Nolan made to Warner Bros. executives, and they responded to it enthusiastically, giving the project an immediate green light. "It wasn't a difficult sell at all," admitted Jeff Robinov, president, Warner Bros. Pictures Group, "even though there was no screenplay — nothing but Chris's vision about the type of film he could deliver. At the risk of giving away too much, there's very little that I wouldn't say yes to Chris Nolan on because I think he is the filmmaker of his generation. His body of work, the way he's been received critically, and how he raises his own bar each time he makes a movie all make him an incredibly impressive person."

Having reached an agreement with the studio, Nolan sought out David S. Goyer — writer of the Blade series of films and something of an authority on Batman and other comic book icons — to help him work out a story and write the first draft of the screenplay.

"Even though I've always been a fan of Batman," said Nolan, "I am by no means a comic book expert, and so I didn't feel capable of doing a first draft and coming up with that story myself. I needed a writer on the project who knew the character inside and out, and knew the comic world. Everything we did in translating the character's comic story to film would have to be extremely reverential to the mythology of Batman."

At the time, Goyer was heavily into pre-production on Blade: Trinity, his first feature-film directing assignment. When he was contacted by Nolan's agent, he cited the scheduling conflict and passed on the offer to cowrite the story — reluctantly. "I'd always wanted to write a Batman movie," Goyer insisted. "I remember telling my mother when I was a kid that I was going to go to Hollywood one day and do a Batman film. So, in a way, I had been waiting my whole life for this call. But, at the time, I was so busy I didn't think I could do it. About a week later, Chris Nolan called and said that he'd really like me to do it, and again, I had to say that I didn't have the time. 'But if I was going to write it,' I said, 'this is what I would do' — and then I talked for about an hour."

What Goyer related in that phone conversation was his conviction that in order to reengage an audience's interest in Batman, the story line had to either jump forward to the future — which had been explored in the animated Batman Beyond — or go back to the beginning, to Batman's origin story. Goyer's take dovetailed perfectly with Nolan's, and the director called Goyer yet again, a few days after their initial conversation. "Chris said, 'You have to do this,'" Goyer recalled. "'You have to.' And we worked it out. I would work on Batman Begins from seven in the morning until noon, and then I would go to the production office on the other film until ten at night. It almost killed me, but it all worked out in the end."

To craft the story, Nolan and Goyer — meeting in Nolan's garage — began by envisioning the film's first teaser trailer. Rather than flashes of a dark figure in a bat costume swooping over the rooftops of Gotham City, the image that captured their imaginations was the famous photograph of a very young John F. Kennedy Jr. at his father's graveside. "That photograph, which showed this little child trying to look stoic and brave, triggered something for us," Goyer revealed. "We thought it would be great if the first trailer showed Bruce Wayne as an eight-year-old boy, after his parents had been killed. We referred to him as the loneliest boy in the world because he becomes heir to this multibillion-dollar company, Wayne Enterprises, but he can't run it for another twenty years. We viewed him as a prince regent being groomed to one day become king — and the commoners can't touch him."

Another evocative image that came to the writers was that of Bruce's childhood friend, Rachel Dawes, the daughter of one of Wayne Manor's maids, looking up and waving at his forlorn visage in an upper-story window of the Manor after his parents' funeral.

"She would look up and see this lonely little boy waving back at her," said Goyer, "as if he was a prisoner of Wayne Manor." This post-funeral scene was one of the gaps in the Batman mythology that Nolan had been eager to explore, as very little of Bruce Wayne's boyhood had ever been depicted in the comic books. "All you ever saw of him as a little boy was the brief flash of him coming out of the movies with his parents, and then the bad guy shooting them — and that was it. We didn't know anything about the parents, or what happened to Bruce after their deaths. This was our 'in' into the psychology of Bruce Wayne — that he grew up as the loneliest boy in the world, sheltered and secluded, a very tragic figure."

The writers conceived another significant event in Bruce's childhood, one that would provide a psychological rationale for his choice of disguise when he embarks on his crime-fighting career as an adult: While playing on the grounds of Wayne Manor with Rachel, young Bruce falls into an abandoned well and is swarmed by bats emerging from adjacent caverns. "In the previous films," said Goyer, "and even in the comic books, you would see Bruce's parents killed, and then they would jump forward twenty years to Bruce in his study, in an evening jacket, reading or smoking a pipe. And then a bat would crash through the window, and in the next panel, he would be in a bat costume, on a rooftop in Gotham. So a bat crashes through a window, and suddenly: 'I know! I'll turn into a bat!'

"We thought that was too facile a way of explaining that transformation. So we came up with this traumatic experience that happens to Bruce when he's eight years old, being trapped at the bottom of this well for hours, and then having millions of bats pour out, getting caught in his hair and scratching him. It would be a terrifying experience for anyone, but especially for a little boy, and it becomes a formative experience for Bruce Wayne."

The one traumatic event of Bruce Wayne's childhood that had been chronicled in the Batman comics — if only superficially — was his witnessing of his parents' murders in an alleyway. While remaining true to that well-known element of Batman mythology, Nolan and Goyer gave it a spin that added another layer of complexity to Bruce Wayne's psychological makeup. "In the comics," Nolan explained, "they are going to see a movie, The Mask of Zorro, but I felt that an opera would be a grander, richer source of Bruce Wayne's fear. So we changed it to an opera house, where he's watching Mefistofele, which has these batlike creatures very elaborately presented onstage.

"It reminds him of his trauma — this terrible experience with the bats — and he asks his parents if they can leave, and it's in leaving the opera that they encounter the mugger who kills them. We wanted to tie together Bruce Wayne's feeling of guilt over his parents' death with his fear of bats. We wanted his parents' murder to be forever associated with the idea of the bat, which is why that symbol becomes so significant in his life."

In Batman Begins, all of these events form a backstory that explains the highly complex, dark, and troubled nature of Bruce Wayne. As the writers structured their screenplay, Bruce Wayne — not Batman — would be the story's central character, with Batman not making an appearance until a full forty minutes into the movie. "Bruce Wayne had to be just as interesting to the audience as Batman," Nolan commented. "To me, what was even more interesting than the duality between Batman and Bruce Wayne was the duality within Bruce Wayne. There was his public face as a dilettante and playboy, the last person anyone in Gotham would suspect of being Batman. And then there was the private Bruce Wayne — and that's the figure that our film had to bring to life."

Jumping from the present to the past, the first act of Batman Begins follows Bruce as a lost and angry young man, with flashbacks to the traumas of his childhood. Unable to sate his hunger for revenge, he leaves Gotham to travel the world. Bruce Wayne's journey and his ultimate return to Gotham had been first chronicled in "The Man Who Falls," a 1989 comic book story written by Dennis O'Neil and Dick Giordano.

"That story suggests various points in the development of Bruce Wayne into Batman," said Nolan, "including the idea that he disappears for seven years and travels the world, learning all of the skills that eventually become important to being Batman. That was the jumping-off point for our story."

By taking Bruce Wayne outside Gotham city limits, Nolan and Goyer were making a significant departure from previous Batman films, all of which had been set entirely within the city. Both to open up the film and to reinforce Bruce Wayne as the central character, the writers dramatized Bruce's seven-year absence from his point of view, not from the perspectives of those left back in Gotham, thus revealing Bruce's experiences in the outside world.

The movie opens, in fact, with Bruce in a prison in Bhutan. "The first time you see the adult Bruce Wayne, he's in this prison, beating the crap out of somebody," related Goyer. "This prison is a hellhole, something right out of Midnight Express, and as soon as the audience sees that, they realize, 'Oh, my God — this is not your father's Batman film.'"

"When we pick him up in the story," elaborated Nolan, "Bruce is in terrible shape. He has endured the horrific experience of his parents' deaths, and he carries within him this very powerful sense of rage against the world. We wanted to start our story showing the true depths of despair that Bruce Wayne would be reduced to in his search for how to use that rage."

A mysterious figure, Henri Ducard, arrives at the prison to offer Bruce an outlet for his rage, inviting him to join the League of Shadows, an ancient order of assassins committed to "fighting injustice" — but, as Ducard later reveals to Bruce, their method of doing so is to destroy what they deem to be corrupt and decayed civilizations. "As the most human of the super heroes," noted Nolan, "Bruce Wayne is always poised on this knife-edge between taking the right path and taking the wrong path. Ducard and the League of Shadows offer him one way to deal with criminality, which involves many positive things. He learns combat skills, theatricality, and deception, all things that will play into the Batman persona. But, ultimately, the path they offer is questionable, and Bruce must decide whether to follow it or go his own way."

Bruce chooses the latter, rejecting the League of Shadows and returning to Gotham. Nolan and Goyer found key story elements for Bruce Wayne's return in the narrative arc of 1987's Batman: Year One, by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli.

The tone of Miller and Mazzucchelli's comic book story was particularly appealing to the writers, as it struck the hard-nosed, gritty, realistic chords they sought. "Batman: Year One was very tough and no-nonsense," said Goyer. "Also, Frank Miller had developed a great relationship between Batman and Gordon — who is not yet Commissioner Gordon — and I think Miller was the first to suggest that the police force in Gotham City was corrupt. That was important, because it left an opening for Batman. If the police were doing their job, there wouldn't be a need for Batman." Yet another narrative influence was The Long Halloween, a series of Batman stories by Jeph Loeb that introduced mob boss Carmine Falcone.

Upon his return to Gotham, Bruce Wayne conceives the idea of fighting crime, not as a man, but as a symbol that will strike fear into the city's criminals and inspire hope in its citizens. Crucial to Nolan's take on the story was depicting Bruce Wayne's transformation into Batman in a way that wouldn't require major suspensions of disbelief in the audience. Why Bruce Wayne decides to fight crime, why he chooses a bat as his symbol, and how he creates the accouterments of that persona were all questions that demanded rational, plausible answers.

The most elemental question to be answered was "why?" Instead of living the comfortable, pleasurable life his riches could afford him, why does Bruce Wayne go out into the mean streets of Gotham every night to confront the criminal element, risking his life and often returning home with all manner of injuries?

"The core of Bruce Wayne's drive to become Batman," explained Nolan, "is his frustration with the corruption of Gotham City, and his inability to reconcile his desire for revenge through conventional police work or within a legal framework. Driven by this tremendous engine of unresolved anger, he devotes himself to fighting crime, to righting the type of wrongs that have been done to him." It was important that, as the film's hero, Batman be seen as controlling that rage, however. Batman couldn't be reduced to a common vigilante. "It is the point of the story, in a sense, this tension between the desire for revenge and the desire to do good. He's driven by very dark, negative impulses, but by using those impulses, he makes Gotham a better place. It was important to get that part of his character across in the story."

The second crucial question was: Why a bat? Why not just go out and fight crime as Bruce Wayne, or, if his identity had to be hidden, why not wear a simple mask or hood? In other words, why the getup? "We started to examine why Bruce Wayne would dress up as this very theatrical figure," said Nolan. "The best explanation offered by the comics, and the one that was the most interesting to me, was the notion of him using fear against those who would use fear themselves. It was the idea of becoming a symbol, and not just a man. A flesh-and-blood man can be destroyed. A symbol is much more frightening and intimidating. And so he looks for the most intimidating symbol that he can think of, and he naturally gravitates toward the thing that has frightened him most since he was a child — bats."

The final question to be answered was "how?" — the specifics of how Bruce Wayne, a mere mortal, transforms himself into a powerful figure with seemingly superhuman capabilities. "We wanted the audience to experience the process of becoming Batman through Bruce Wayne's eyes," said Nolan, "to really get inside this guy's head and go on that journey with him." To do that, the writers imagined real-world sources for Batman's tools of the trade. "We got into the detail of his gadgetry and how that hardware came to be. How would you put together the tools to be Batman? We thought of things like Bruce spray-painting his equipment a matte black, or using a grinder to form his own metal Batarangs. It was a homemade approach, because that's how Batman would have to start. He couldn't jump in as a branded figure with these beautifully designed gadgets. It was important that we start with more crude tools, and show where they came from and how they were put together."

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Art And Making Of The Dark Knight Trilogy"
by .
Copyright © 2012 DC Comics.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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