THE DARK KNIGHT Co-Writer Jonathan Nolan Says His Brother Was Hesitant to Make the Sequel So He Told Him Not to Be "Chicken Sh--"

Director Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy is one of the most well-made and perfectly executed superhero stories told in the history of superhero cinema, but Nolan, known for his original storytelling, and not so much for sequels, almost stopped after the success of Batman Begins.

He liked the story he told, and was hesitant to pull the trigger on another film, scared that he might be pigeonholed strictly into the role of superhero filmmaker.

The trilogy’s co-writer and the director’s brother, Jonathan Nolan, recently spoke about this period of time and his brother’s trepidation in an interview on the “Armchair Expert” podcast with Dax Shepard.

“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, remembering thinking ‘this is nuts.’”

“Chris was on the fence about making another one,” Jonathan continued, noting that Chris went straight from Batman Begins into helming the magician thriller The Prestige. “He didn’t want to become a superhero movie director.”

Jonathan said that Chris was “very proud” of Batman Begins, but “to me, it was like we built this amazing sports car, and I’m like, ‘Let’s take it for a drive. Don’t you want to make another one?’”

Jonathan remembered telling Chris:

“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 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.”

It’s a good thing that Jonathan was able to give his brother the push he needed to move forward and complete this fantastic trilogy.

via: Variety