It’s been a couple of weeks since the news broke that Christopher Nolan had been tasked by Warner Bros with overseeing their latest reboot of Superman, as well as the third Batman movie. But the British director has kept silent on the matter – until now.
The** LA Times** sat down with Nolan and tried to prise as much Superman and Batman information out of him as they possibly could. Which, true to form for the tight-lipped director, wasn’t very much. But it’s a start.
On his attraction to the Superman project, Nolan confesses that his interest in the project – which he will produce – was sparked when David S. Goyer pitched a blue-sky idea while they were brainstorming the next Batman movie. “He basically told me, ‘I have this thought about how you would approach Superman,’” Nolan tells the LA Times. “I immediately got it, loved it and thought: that is a way of approaching the story I’ve never seen before that makes it incredibly exciting. I wanted to get Emma [Thomas, Nolan’s wife and fellow producer] and I involved in shepherding the project right away and getting it to the studio and getting it going in an exciting way.”
Of course, Nolan won’t divulge details of the movie, which Goyer is currently writing for an as-yet unconfirmed director. But he sounds charged by the possibilities inherent in the Man Of Steel’s story. “It’s very exciting, we have a fantastic story,” he adds. “And we feel we can do it right. We know the milieu, if you will, we know the genre and how to get it done right.”
The Superman reboot likely won’t surface until 2012 or 2013, it’s intimated, which is roughly the time when we can expect to see a follow-up to The Dark Knight. If Nolan directs, that is. But he confirmed that work has begun on the script, with Jonah Nolan currently locked in a room, beavering away on Final Draft. “He’s struggling to put it together into the epic story that you want it to be,” admits Nolan. “Without getting into specifics, the key thing that makes the third film a great possibility for us is that we want to finish our story. And in viewing it as the finishing of a story rather than infinitely blowing up the balloon and expanding the story.”
So, it seems that if he does direct the third Batman – and we’d bet someone else’s house that he will – it will be the last chapter of Nolan’s take on the character. A take which, of course, saw the Caped Crusader on the run, heading into an uncertain future. Nolan wouldn’t be drawn on the direction of the third film, or the identity of the new villain. But he did admit one thing: “It won’t be Mr. Freeze.” Well, thank Christ for that.
For more from Nolan on Superman and Batman, including the notion that the two might exist in the same movieverse, click here to go to the LA Times’ website.