Christopher Nolan Hesitated To Direct ‘The Dark Knight’

Jonathan Nolan said during a recent interview on the “Armchair Expert” podcast with Dax Shepard that it took some convincing to get his brother, Christopher Nolan, to agree to direct “The Dark Knight.” The filmmaker had already hit a superhero movie slam dunk with “Batman Begins” and was hesitant to make another comic book movie because he didn’t want his career getting pigeonholed.

“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,” Jonathan said, 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.” “I think 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?’”

“We spent an hour telling the origin story, and that’s great, but it’s like, ‘what [more] can we do with this?’” Jonathan remembered telling Chris. “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!’” Jonathan continued. “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” pulled inspiration from classic crime thrillers such as Michael Mann’s “Heat” and remains one of the most acclaimed comic book films ever made. The Nolan brothers shared screenwriting credit on the sequel and worked together on the screenplay for 2012’s “The Dark Knight Rises.”

Listen to Jonathan’s full interview on the “Armchair Expert” podcast here.