Before Matt Reeves, director and co-writer of The Batman, March’s hugely anticipated new movie, sat down to draft out his vision for the character, he turned to the source material. As he recently told Esquire, that involved going back more than 80 years, to May 1939, and the first Batman comics.
“I went on this huge comic book deep dive, reading,” Reeves told us. “This character is so important to so many people. And you have to find the personal connections. Having loved the early iterations, the way that [Batman co-creators] Bob Kane and the Bill Finger comics looked. I loved the stories – the stories really began as, and are, noir.”
Though the superhero genre was nascent, those early Batman stories already marked the character out as distinct and different from what had come before.
“There’s a certain amount of American Dream and optimism that Superman was born out of,” Reeves said. “Bob Kane and Bill Finger created something that could be a reaction that, to grab people’s attention, [so] they went the other way. It’s a darker tale and it’s about a character existing in that darker, grounded noir world – where the world is corrupt. And [it asks] ‘How do you navigate through that?’ So it’s the idea of him being a detective in that world. I felt like that was something that hasn’t been done. And as I was reading comic after comic, when I got to [fan-favourite 1987 miniseries by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli] Year One there was something that really connected with me. Because I found it to be so relatable."
For Reeves, it was about finding a Gotham that would translate well to screen, and a characterisation that made sense in a non-comic book setting.
"You know it’s funny, cos I read that [2005 deluxe re-edition with notes, unseen artwork etc] commemorative print edition where Mazzucchelli and Miller are talking about the difficulty of what they’re doing because what they’re trying to do is: ‘How much can you [make this realistic]?’ ‘When does it become ridiculous?’ And all those things. The tone of it is so wonderful, because it felt like you could believe [the story] was real. It gave me complete access to a tone that I thought was cinematic.
“[Year One] does actually refer to the one thing which I thought couldn’t be done again. It does refer to the actual moments of origin where you see what happened in Crime Alley [when Bruce Wayne’s parents are murdered]. And I knew we couldn’t do that because it’s been done too much. Maybe somebody will do it again someday [in a movie] in some definitive way. But people have seen it.
“What appealed to me about Year One was this idea of finding him in the process of ‘becoming’. You can refer to the past. But you don’t have to see those moments,” Reeves explained. “You can catch this guy early. So as I started diving in on this comics thing, the idea was not to do what I would say Year One is, which literally has the origins, you see him literally becoming [Batman]. You see him when he’s literally creating this suit, you see all of that that stuff. I thought ‘Well, what if it’s more like, ‘It’s the end of Year One? So he’s beginning Year Two’.
“And he’s doing a kind of criminological experiment where he’s trying to see what effect he can have on crime in the city, the way that Dr Jekyll charted his experiment and what was happening to himself. It was this psychological kind of thing. Almost like a kind of Travis Bickle sort of journal."
Reeves was keen that his Batman would have the rough edges still visible, that he would be recognisably a human being.
“So, okay, in a noir way, how can we have an introduction into a world where Batman exists but he’s only just ‘becoming’ and so he’s imperfect?” he said. “What I wanted was for Batman to have an arc. I wanted to see that that character is not someone who had perfected himself or mastered himself, the way a lot of those [traditional superhero] stories are. ‘Okay, he went through this really painful trauma and now he’s kind of perfected himself into this.’ And that would be part of what engages you in the characters. You see that he’s struggling to figure out how to be Batman. What does Batman mean? So he wouldn’t have all of the stuff that you see in some of these stories where he’s already accumulated the help of so many people. That he was a loner. That he was pushing himself. In, actually, a dangerous and destructive way because it was being born out of a personal drive that was all-consuming. And potentially deadly to him.”
The Batman is out 4 March
