With great power comes great responsibility. Yes, we know that’s a different superhero, but how is the director of The Batman feeling?

“Terrified,” says Matt Reeves.

The journey to the screen of the new Batman movie has been a long and gruelling one. Almost a decade ago, Ben Affleck was cast as the Caped Crusader in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. It is Affleck’s most successful film at the box-office. By every other metric it was a disaster: critics hated it, fans hated it more and it launched DC down a route of superhero ensemble movies (Suicide Squad; Justice League) that got worse and worse. For every new star in an ever-more-twinkling Marvel Cinematic Universe, rival DC couldn’t catch a break. The memory of Christopher Nolan’s benchmark The Dark Knight trilogy appeared to be going gently into that good night. The best bet for Bat fans looked like another outing for Lego Batman, which at least was funny. But DC wanted another Batman movie.

They put in a call to Matt Reeves, director of the acclaimed monster movie Cloverfield (2008), as well as Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017). “Ben [Affleck] had been working on a version of the script,” Reeves says, “and I said, ‘Here’s the thing: I respect that the DC Universe has become an extended universe and all the movies were kind of connected. But another Batman film, it shouldn’t have to carry the weight of connecting the characters from all those other movies. I didn’t want them in there.”

A Batman movie without Aquaman (he can control sea life), Cyborg (he’s a cyborg) or any of the rest of the corny Justice League characters already sounded like a 100 per cent improvement. As Robert Pattinson — we’ll get to him — says in a two-minute promotional showreel for the new film, “Batman has stood out as one of the major characters of the 20th century, and so many people connect with it on such a deep level for so many reasons.” He deserved better.

the batman
Courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures

Reeves’s next issue was this. Sure, you could reboot Batman — it’s been done dozens of times since he first appeared in Detective Comics in 1939, almost certainly more. But would anyone have the stomach for yet another retelling of his origin story, from a slightly different angle? “We’ve seen it so many times,” Reeves says. “It’s been done too much. I knew we couldn’t do that.”

He set about a ton of reading and was blown away by the comic Batman: Year One, the 1987 four-issue run by writer Frank Miller and artist David Mazzucchelli, that showed a young and in-turmoil Bruce Wayne figuring out how to be a be a vigilante. The tone is detective noir, the violence is street-level and nasty, and you will search in vain for a feat of superhero derring-do or a groaning Mr Freeze “Allow-me-to-break-the-ice”-style pun. Calling Batman: Year One realistic would be a stretch. But it is somewhere near as realistic as a comic book about a mentally dubious loner who puts on a disguise and begins hunting criminals come night. This proto-Batman underestimates his opponents, gets shot by the police, and his costume doesn’t fit. (It’s great, and it happens to be my favourite comic book.) Other influences on Reeves included New Hollywood classics from the 1970s: The French Connection, Chinatown and Taxi Driver. Also, Kurt Cobain.

“Early on, when I was writing, I started listening to Nirvana, and there was something about [Nevermind song] ‘Something in the Way’, which is in the first trailer, which is part of the voice of that character. When I considered, ‘How do you do Bruce Wayne in a way that hasn’t been seen before?’ I started thinking, ‘What if some tragedy happened [ie: Wayne sees his parents murdered] and this guy becomes so reclusive, we don’t know what he’s doing? Is this guy some kind of wayward, reckless, drug addict?’ And the truth is that he is a kind of drug addict. His drug is his addiction to this drive for revenge. He’s like a Batman Kurt Cobain.”

Batman’s main opponent in The Batman is The Riddler. Not the Jim Carrey version in the lime-green catsuit covered in question marks from Val Kilmer’s Batman Forever (1995). But a costume-less, schlubby Paul Dano interpretation, who communicates with the police via cyphers, based on the Zodiac Killer. Batman is one superhero without superpowers — but he is “the world’s greatest detective”. Reeves’s Batman, to the shock and awe of The Internet when it was announced in 2019, is Robert Pattinson.

DC Comics Batman Year One Deluxe SC

Batman Year One Deluxe SC

DC Comics Batman Year One Deluxe SC

£12 at Amazon

“Of course, the idea [to fit with the Year One story] was to make him a younger actor,” he says. “And in the process of writing the movie, I watched [the fantastic 2017 Safdie brothers film] Good Time, and I thought, ‘Okay, he’s got an inner kind of rage that connects with this character and a dangerousness, and I can feel this desperation.’ And I became dead-set on it being Rob. And I had no idea if Rob had any interest! Because, of course, he had done all of these indie movies after he established himself in Twilight.”

Unbeknownst to Reeves — or presumably anyone at DC — he had one thing on his side: Pattinson was a huge Batman fan. “He’d heard that we were doing this and got excited about the idea that there was going to be another version of this character,” Reeves says. “And so when I met him, and he read the script, we talked for a long, long time and I realised, ‘This guy is a massive fan’.”

Pattinson fit the part — but he still had to audition. Ridiculously, he did so in Val Kilmer’s old Batsuit. “Warner Brothers are like, ‘Look, we’re not going to make anything for somebody for a screentest’. But you go there [into WB] and they’ve got all the suits, going back to Michael Keaton. They said, ‘Look, we’ve done this on every single one. [Christian] Bale came in and he put on one of the original suits.’

“I’m not going to say it fitted well,” Reeves continues. “But it fitted the best. It was sort of old, and as he started acting, he started heating up the cowl and the cowl started to sag on his face. You could see him thinking, ‘How am I going to act in this suit?’ But putting on a Batman suit is also transformative. You start to feel the power of having that armour on.”

Completing the Grunge Gotham vibe, as the 31m people who saw The Batman trailer in its first 24 hours noticed, Pattinson’s Batman is wearing emo-eyeliner. What’s up with that?

“You can’t wear a cowl and not wear that. All of the Batmen wear that,” says Reeves, not entirely convincingly. “I just loved the idea of taking off [the mask] and under that there’s the sweating and the dripping and the whole theatricality of becoming this character.”

preview for The Batman - Main Trailer

One of the things that makes the Batman character so interesting is that he’s so malleable. He can be campy Adam West from the 1960s or angry Christian Bale from the 2000s — and both are equally valid. By an overwhelming majority, the YouTube comments section is going crazy for the “I’m vengeance!” this-guy’s-nuts punchiness of Pattinson’s 2020s version, based on two or three trailers. But it’s fair to say that not everyone thought the skinny guy from Twilight was a stroke of genius casting.

“There has been no actor, when his announcement that he was going to be playing Batman in one of the feature films was announced, that has not received a backlash,” Reeves says.

“The people who were excited, I knew it was because they knew Rob’s work post-Twilight. The people who weren’t excited, I knew it was because they didn’t know Rob’s work post-Twilight.”

What about the other iconography that comes with the character, however you choose tell his story? In The Batman, Wayne Manor is depicted as falling to bits — “He doesn’t care about any of the trappings of being a [millionaire] Wayne at this point,” Reeves says, citing Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, the 2005 fictionalised version of Kurt Cobain’s sad, slow demise (just like that film, we’ll apparently see amps stacked up in a storage room).

The new Batcave is based on a secret underground railway that still exists in New York. “The idea being that some of these wealthy industrialist families had private train cars at the turn of the century. So the Batcave is actually in the foundation of this tower. It was [another] way of saying, ‘How can we root all these things in things that feel real, but also extraordinary?’”

And finally, a new Batmobile. “The Nolan films established the Batmobile as a tank, which was a brilliant idea,” Reeves says. “But I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if this guy is a loner and a gearhead and fashioning these things by himself, taking parts of other cars and kit cars?’ So it’s recognisable as a car this time. But it’s like a muscle car. One that he’s made himself.”

Reeves says it’s daunting but also hugely exciting to see his Batman come to life — he is days away from finishing the film when this interview takes place in late 2021.

“I’m very proud of it. I felt it was the best version of the story that we could possibly do to justify having another Batman,” he says. “You always have to have a reason, and from the beginning that was the mission for me.” Sequels and Gotham City-based spin-offs are being planned. It’s safe to assume they will remain Aquaman-free. At least for now. “It will obviously have a lot to do with how people receive this film,” Reeves says. “But a lot of things are in the works.”

When Bruce Wayne/Batman first goes looking for criminals in Batman: Year One, there is one frame in which Reeves noted that “he’s dressed in what I thought looked like an image out of Taxi Driver”. Some of Frank Miller’s notes to David Mazzucchelli are included at the back of a commemorative edition of Year One, published a few years ago. Of that same frame, Miller writes he wanted Batman “to basically look like he’s won a Taxi Driver-lookalike competition”. Reeves laughed out loud when he read that. They were literally on the same page.

At the start of this article, there was one DC film we overlooked. One that bucked its run of rum luck — and did so in spectacular style. That film was 2019’s double-Oscar-winning Joker. A key influence on that? Also Taxi Driver. Don’t bet that Batman isn’t about to rise again.

The Batman is released in cinemas on 4 March