One reason why Batman continues to endure on screen is his adaptability. Over the years the World’s Greatest Detective has been brought to the screen in various incarnations, from the campy ‘60s TV series to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, each version bearing clear signs of the filmmakers and eras from which they originated all while being unmistakably Batman. Perhaps no Bat-flick has exhibited this quite so distinctly as Batman Returns – Tim Burton’s go-for-broke sequel that followed up his 1989 blockbuster with lashings of latex, exploding penguins, and an oddball outlook that could only have come from the mind behind Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands.
In a major new Empire interview, Tim Burton revisited the film for its 30th anniversary, looking back on a movie that – at the time – was deemed as dark as Batman could get. This year, Matt Reeves’ hard-boiled noir The Batman proved there were darker depths to explore. “It is funny to see this now, because all these memories come back of, ‘It’s too dark’,” he says. “So, it makes me laugh a little bit.” While Returns has a skewed, playfully gothic, and often kinky sensibility, it’s far from the grounded grit of The Dark Knight movies or Reeves’ film, the latter of which Burton is yet to watch (“I’d like to see it,” he says).
Given Returns’ reception and controversies over its dark tone at the time, the studio turned to director Joel Schumacher for Batman Forever and Batman & Robin – two films whose dialled-up Day-Glo aesthetic and kids’ cartoon sensibilities felt a million miles away from Burton. One of the more lambasted decisions from Schumacher’s films particularly rankled the Returns director. “[Back then] they went the other way. That’s the funny thing about it. But then I was like, ‘Wait a minute. Okay. Hold on a second here. You complain about me, I’m too weird, I’m too dark, and then you put nipples on the costume? Go fuck yourself.’ Seriously. So yeah, I think that’s why I didn’t end up [doing a third film]…”
Now that Batman’s big-screen outings tend to find him battling psychopathic terrorists and serial killers, the days of penguin-warfare seem somewhat quaint. As Burton looks back on Batman Returns now, he sees more than just the darkness it became known for. “I’m not just overly dark. That represents me in the sense that… that’s how I see things. It’s not meant as pure darkness. There’s a mixture,” he says. “I feel really fondly about it because of the weird experiment that it felt like.”
Read Empire’s full Tim Burton interview on Batman Returns – with a brand new photo shoot by Steve Schofield with digital imaging by Jacey, plus rare Tim Burton artwork from his own archives, and behind-the-scenes images – in the Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power issue, on sale Thursday 9 June and available to pre-order online here.