Saving of a superhero

Christian Bale as Batman

10 April 2012

There are not many young, British film-makers working in Los Angeles. Let alone one prepared to criticise Hollywood. But Christopher Nolan, the 34-year-old director of Batman Begins, is braver than most. Many mainstream movies, he ventures, insult their audiences with sloppy storytelling and tongue-in-cheek tone.

"There has been confusion in Hollywood blockbusters in recent years," he says, "nobody dares tell the story. They throw it all away in the first five minutes."

That is one of the reasons why Batman doesn't appear in the first hour of his $180 million epic. When he took on the job, Nolan insisted that its story and characters came first, before action or special effects.

"I wanted to get back to something a bit more oldfashioned than the computer graphics and effects-driven films that have arisen over the past 10 years, which were very exciting when they first began, but are now getting a bit stale," he explains.

"I wanted to get back to the epic blockbusters I'd seen as a kid in the late Seventies, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark - the kind of things Lucas and Spielberg were doing."

Nolan's strategy has paid off. If the rapturous response at early industry screenings is anything to go by, audiences should be thrilled when Batman Begins opens next week. He treats the story with absolute seriousness and invests it with psychological depths that were all but absent from Tim Burton's 1989 version and its highcamp sequels.

Nolan told Warner Bros that he wanted his superhero story to be rooted in as much reality as the tale of a man dressed as a bat would allow.

"My idea was a more realistic tone, a logic that harks back to the best of the James Bond films," he says. "You have a certain amount of grounding in a physical reality, in a recognisable world, and yet you are still able to push the boundaries of the fantastical, action elements of the story."

So when Bruce Wayne - a damaged soul, haunted since childhood by his parents' murder, carried out in front of him - decides to fight crime as Batman, Nolan ensures that we understand his pain and believe every step of his transformation.

He shows us the transformation, too: at the scientific facility of Bruce's father's corporate empire, where weapons contracts were carried out, Bruce finds his chestpiece, as well as material for his fancy flying cape and his Batmobile, which is no more than a souped-up armoured car: "The vehicle has emphasis not on gratuitous design but on utilitarianism and functionality."

The director applied the same principle of plausibility to his contemporary Gotham City setting, and to his cast. Largely shunning bigname stars, he chose instead a group of talented character actors.

The brilliant Christian Bale makes a suitably tortured Bruce Wayne, while a host of veterans such as Michael Caine (as Alfred, the butler), Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson, Gary Oldman, Tom Wilkinson and Rutger Hauer lend gravity.

Even Katie Holmes, whose love affair with Tom Cruise has opened up a new avenue of publicity for the film, makes Bruce's childhood friend Rachel Dawes a prickly and compelling character.

Batman Begins is the latest leap in Nolan's career that has landed him on top of the Hollywood pile in just four films. He first came to notice with his ultra-low budget British debut, Following, in 1998; then came his first studio film, the cult thriller Memento, in 2000; followed by his first foray into the bigtime, Insomnia, starring Al Pacino and Hilary Swank, in 2002.

Even for such a fast-rising star, being given control of the destiny of the Batman franchise by Warner Bros was a coup. "Whatever executive decided to pick Chris to do this film had guts," Michael Caine commented this week.

The way Nolan understands it is: "They knew they needed something fresh, so they needed someone who hadn't done a $180 million movie before."

What is clear is that the director impressed his cast as much as the studio. Christian Bale describes him as a "phenomenally sharp and intelligent man". For Caine, he is quiet and "... absolutely determined. It's like working with a steel blade covered in velvet. You don't get cut unless he says so. He's very tough. He's not unpleasant, but he won't stop until he gets what he wants."

Nolan began making films on his father's Super8 camera at the age of seven. They lived in London but upped-sticks for three years to Chicago when his father was relocated. On his return to England, Nolan nurtured his film fascination at University College London, where he studied English Literature and made short films on college equipment.

While still a student, he got one of his short films aired on US television. It was at university, too, that he met Emma Thomas, now his wife and eight months' pregnant with their third child. She has worked with Nolan on all his films, from those college shorts to producer on Batman Begins.

"On every production, people come to value Emma as the producer who's best at talking to me and telling me when I'm being an idiot," Nolan smiles. "You have to have somebody around that you trust both creatively and in political terms. You get to a point where people don't want to say no to you because you're doing a bigger film, or because you have a track record, so you need someone who will."

The film ends with the mention of a new criminal in Gotham City: a fellow called The Joker. Does that suggest a sequel? Is it a done deal; will Nolan make a second Batman?

"I want the audience to leave the theatre with the sense of possibility, with a wider reality spinning in their minds."

He's dodging the question. Will there be a sequel?

"I've only talked about it in vague terms with the studio because we all feel that everything depends on the audience's response to this version of Batman."

He certainly plans to make his next film a smaller one, although has yet to decide what it will be. He is committed to directing two scripts written by his younger brother, Jonathan, who wrote the short story upon which Memento was based, another comic-book adaptation called The Exec, and a period drama about rival magicians called The Prestige.

Chances are Nolan will have the pick of Hollywood projects once Batman Begins is released, but first, he and Thomas intend to take some time to welcome their third child back in the LA home they have had little opportunity to inhabit since the juggernaut of Batman Begins began two years ago.

"The main reason I haven't figured out what I want to do next," he confesses, "is because Batman is such a massive thing, I can't escape from it yet."

Batman Begins opens next Thursday.

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