Christopher Nolan and his brother and collaborator Jonathan (Jonah to his friends) are officially Hollywood power players, with the latter winning Best Director at this year’s Academy Awards. It’s a far cry and 20-year plus journey on where they started, but their trajectory might not have been the same without The Dark Knight Trilogy. After the abysmal reaction to 1997’s Batman and Robin, Warner Bros. rebooted the Batman franchise and was helmed by then-up-and-comer Christopher Nolan. However, he almost didn’t take the job initially.
Nolan’s trilogy became the benchmark of DC Comics movies and put the budding director on Hollywood’s A-list. During a recent interview on the Armchair Expert podcast with Dax Shepard, Jonathan Nolan said that it took some serious coaxing to get his brother to return for The Dark Knight after the success of Batman Begins.
“Chris was on the fence about making another one,” Jonathan said, noting that Chris went straight from Batman Begins into the production of The Prestige, also starring Batman Begins’ Christian Bale and Michael Caine. “He didn’t want to become a superhero movie director.”
The filmmaker and Dark Knight co-writer said that his brother was proud of what they accomplished with the successful reboot, but didn’t know how to follow it up. “It was like we built this amazing sports car,” he added. “I’m like, ‘Let’s take it for a drive. Don’t you want to make another one?'”
Jonathan tried to convince his brother they had more stories to tell since they got the origin out of the way. He even suggested they didn’t have to make standard superhero movies, but set them with a specific genre. The Dark Knight channeled films like The Godfather and Michael Mann’s Heat to make it more into a crime-thriller with capes, rather than another superhero outing. The Nolan brothers shared screenwriting credit on the sequel and worked together on the screenplay for the final film in the trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises.
“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!'” Jonathan added. “And I knew with the script–and he developed the story with David Goyer with a little bit of input from me–it was like first act detailed, second act somewhat detailed, third act … uh, he rides away at the end–once we had the script done, I was like, ‘This is going to be great. This is exciting. We gotta make this movie.’ And eventually, he came around. He did manage to avoid being pigeonholed.”
The Dark Knight was the first DC Comics film and superhero movie to gross over $1 billion at the global box office, setting the standard for tentpole films. It was also nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning two. One was for Best Supporting Actor for Heath Ledger (awarded posthumously)–a comic book movie first–and Best Sound Editing.
