Christopher Nolan was “hesitant” to make ‘The Dark Knight’

Christopher Nolan was initially “hesitant” to make The Dark Knight, the director’s brother has revealed.

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In 2003, Warner Bros. Pictures tapped Memento director Christopher Nolan to helm an untitled Batman film, which was released in 2005 titled Batman Begins. The film starred Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman and went on to be a critical success, spawning two sequels: 2008’s The Dark Knight and 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises.

The trilogy of films would go on to be helmed as some of Nolan’s most prominent work but now, Christopher’s brother Jonathan – who also goes by Jonah and is also a director and screenwriter – has revealed that Nolan was on the verge of ending the franchise with Batman Begins.

Speaking on the Armchair Expert Podcast with Dax Shepard recently, Jonathan Nolan spoke about his brother Christopher’s hesitation to direct a second Batman movie. “I worked on Batman Begins in this slightly arm’s length capacity, but it was the one comic book my brother ever given me as a kid, Batman: Year One, for my 14th birthday, and 10 years later I was on the set working with him.”

He continued: “Chris was on the fence about making another one. I think he didn’t want to become a superhero movie director.” However, he knew that Christopher was “very proud” of Batman Begins, and he pushed his brother to follow up with The Dark Knight.
“We spent an hour telling the origin story, and that’s great, but it’s like, ‘What [more] can we do with this?’ Can we take the same characters and shift ever so slightly into a different genre? Can we go from an adventure film to a crime film, to a mob movie, and bring that feeling into it?”

“So I was literally sitting with [producer] Charles Roven and Chris and being like, ‘Dude, don’t be a chicken shit. Let’s do this!’… And eventually, he came around. He did manage to avoid being pigeonholed.”

Jonathan Nolan has had a hand in writing several prominent films and TV series, including Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar with his brother. On his own, Jonah Nolan is credited with creating and writing HBO‘s Westworld, and wrote and directed the upcoming Fallout series for Amazon Prime Video, which is due to arrive on April 10.

Christopher Nolan has also credited his brother with writing one of the most popular – and important – lines in The Dark Knight: “I’m plagued by a line from The Dark Knight, and I’m plagued by it because I didn’t write it. My brother [Jonathan] wrote it. It kills me, because it’s the line that most resonates. And at the time, I didn’t even understand it. He says, ‘You either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.’”

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