DC Comics provided Nolan and Goyer with a set of guidelines that the comic book publishers felt should appear in every Batman story. Goyer referred to it as “the 10 Commandments.”22 “For us, it’s not about what you have to do but about what you can’t deny,” said Levitz, who explained that DC had what it called a circle of “three rings” that made up Batman’s universe.23
The first was the “aspirational experience,” which consisted of how people reacted emotionally to Bruce Wayne, his traumatic childhood involving the death of his parents and how that led him to use his riches to fight crime. “It’s all about making you feel that if you went through something traumatic, you’d rise to the challenge in the same way,” said Levitz.24
For the second ring, Levitz said, “You go to a Batman movie expecting certain moments. You expect to see the Batmobile, the Batcave, the Bat Signal, his utility belt, Batman swinging across Gotham City. That’s your wow.” There was also the expectation of seeing something new, something that wasn’t in the previous Batman stories. “There’s always the question of how do you give the audience something they haven’t seen before,” said Levitz.25
The third ring was concerned with the creative interpretation that the director, writers and actors brought to the film. “They each want to bring things that are unique, but they can’t fight the other rings of the circle,” said Levitz. “It would be unique to have Batman tripping over himself, but that wouldn’t be good.”26
Despite their concerns, DC remained mostly hands-off during the making of the film. “When you’re making a great movie, you need a great director who has a vision,” said Levitz. “You can’t stand behind a director’s shoulders with correctional glasses. Our job is to help, whether it’s to provide stories or to serve as a sounding board to talk about the creative issues.”27
Levitz said that although DC was an adviser, they did not have script approval. “We’re all part of the same company and trying to achieve the same goal: a wonderful Batman film that will delight old fans and make new fans. So there’s no complicated contractual language ruling the creative process between us. We have the right to be consulted, the right to warn. We’re happy to be part of the part of the process. It’s just old-fashioned teamwork.”28
In telling an origin story, Goyer said, “It was interesting when we were meeting with DC and Paul Levitz, when we were proposing to fill in some of these gaps, I was very curious as to how they were going to react. But they embraced everything that we were proposing because it seemed to fit in with everything that had been set before. It was exciting to do an origin story because we weren’t beholden to any of the other films or to the TV series. In comic book terms, it was sort of a reboot in a way. The notion was that after our film finished, we could then go off and if Chris or Warner Bros. wanted to play with subsequent films, that they could sort of reintroduce the pantheon of villains and whatnot.”29
In interviews, Nolan kept saying that he and Goyer were telling a story that had not previously been revealed. “There is no definitive account in the comics of the origin story,” said Nolan. “What you get are these flashbacks and glimpses. Over the period of the history of the comics there have been some quite interesting things that have arisen. The studio sent me a Batman story early on called ‘The Man Who Falls.’ It’s a DC Comics story from the 1970s. It’s not even a whole comic. I think it appeared in an anthology. It was a very good jumping-off point. It suggested the idea of traveling around the world, meeting criminals and flirting with the criminal life and learning about them that way. Then, in the forest, he goes to a martial arts teacher. It had a great feel to it. It’s very short, only a few pages. That was very important. So there are those kinds of influences. Then, looking at the middle act of Batman Begins, it draws a lot from Batman: Year One, with Bruce Wayne becoming Batman. But then, with all of the stuff in between, what we would call ‘mileposts,’ we were free to figure out what we wanted to do.”30
Novelist James Dawson, author of Wasted Talents, disputed Nolan’s claim to be telling “a story that hadn’t been told before” in a letter to The Los Angeles Times published during the production of Batman Begins. Dawson pointed out that Batman’s past was not a complete mystery. In fact, in 1989, Sam Hamm—one of the co-writers of Tim Burton’s Batman movie—wrote a three-issue storyline called “Blind Justice” that appeared in Detective Comics issues 598-600. In the story, the government accuses Bruce Wayne of being a traitor, and asks him to account for his activities during the years he spent overseas. Wayne explains that he trained with a martial-arts master named Chu Chin Li before going to Korea, Thailand and the Philippines and training with a Yakuza named Tsunetomo. Afterwards, he went to Paris and spent six weeks as an apprentice detective to Henri Ducard, a troubleshooter affiliated with Interpol. We also learn in the story that Wayne had wanted to be a policeman at one point, and majored in criminology. Dawson questioned how no one at Time-Warner was aware of this backstory, since the company owned DC Comics.31
Aside from comic book influences, Nolan and Goyer found templates for Bruce Wayne’s character in a couple of real-life millionaires. Having just been working on a script about eccentric industrialist Howard Hughes, Nolan infused some of Hughes’s character into Bruce Wayne. “The thing about Howard Hughes as a young man that Bruce Wayne recalls is that Hughes was orphaned as a young man and given the keys to the kingdom and billions of dollars to play with,” said Nolan. “Essentially, he was given complete freedom to do whatever he wanted to do, in practical terms. For me it was fascinating to see where that would lead. It’s something we all think we want, but when you look at a story like Hughes’s or, in fictional terms, Bruce Wayne’s, you wouldn’t want to be in their shoes."32
Besides Hughes, Nolan also saw a parallel between Bruce Wayne and America’s 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt. Like Roosevelt, Bruce Wayne came from a wealthy, urban family active in philanthropy. Both had strong fathers whom they admired. Both suffered tragic losses; Roosevelt lost both his wife and mother on the same day. Both went into a period of self-exile; whereas Bruce Wayne went to foreign lands and trained in martial arts, Roosevelt lived in the North Dakota badlands for a few years. Both were inspired by grief to do good; Roosevelt fought the spoils system as a member of the United States Civil Service Commission and served as commissioner of the New York City Police which he then sought to reform.33
Most of all, Nolan wanted to present a more realistic take on Bruce Wayne’s story than had ever been presented before. His would not be a movie filmed on stylized sets lit with an abundance of neon. “I wanted to treat it with a degree of gravity and with a sense of epic scope, but set in a world that is firmly grounded in reality,” said Nolan.34 While working on the script, rather than seeking inspiration from the previous Batman films, Nolan and Goyer kept returning to epics like Lawrence of Arabia, The Man Who Would Be King, Blade Runner and, most tellingly, the 1969 James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.35
The first 007 film to be made with an actor other than Sean Connery, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service starred George Lazenby as James Bond in a film that set out to redefine the 007 character. After several films in which the gadgets had overtaken the storytelling, director Peter Hunt and scriptwriter Richard Maibaum decided to, in effect, start over. The result was a Bond film much more rooted in reality, with a more vulnerable Bond—by the end of the film, he’s fallen in love and married, but his wife is tragically murdered by the villain, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Although the film was a commercial disappointment, its reputation grew over the years, with die-hard 007 fans considering it one of the very best of the series. Now, Nolan and Goyer wanted to reestablish Batman in the same way that Hunt and Maibaum reestablished James Bond.
“One of Chris’ mantras when we were working on the script was it has to be real, it has to be real,” said Goyer.36 “We applied that philosophy to every aspect of the story, even down to the most minute details—Why are the bat ears so tall? Why does the Batmobile
look the way it does? We developed a logical explanation for everything that Bruce Wayne does and for every device he acquires in the film.”37
“For me,” said Nolan, “the most exciting aspect of telling this story is getting inside Bruce Wayne’s head and going on that journey with him, so that we experience the process of becoming Batman through his eyes.”38
“I remember Chris and I batting ideas around thinking there’s no way they’re going to let us do this,” said Goyer. “Not that we were breaking any great rules, but it just seemed like we were doing the sort of story that I certainly had always wanted to see. And DC and Warner Bros. were great. They just embraced it. It’s actually the best experience I’ve ever had working with a studio because they truly trusted us and just said, ‘You guys know what you’re doing. We’re going to let you run with it.’”39
“We met for a couple of months and talked through the story and he came up with a story outline based on us thrashing around ideas and me saying what I wanted in the film,” said Nolan. “Then, he—within seven or eight weeks—provided a first draft, gave that to me and then had to go off and do his thing. So I took it from that point and did another eight drafts.”40
Nolan and Goyer decided on a title before handing the script in to the studio. “Internally with Warner Bros., we knew that that would kind of set the tone,” said Goyer. “We were talking about how it would be promoted initially and we didn’t want to have the same title as any of the previous films. I came up with Batman Beginning. And then Chris just said, ‘Let’s just say Begins because then when it’s announced you can say I’m blah blah blah of Batman Begins.’ I was like, ‘Genius.’ So from that point on, it was always that.”41
Since Nolan was involved with the script from the very beginning, the initial script drafted by David Goyer and Nolan varies very little from the final film. In this seminal script, Rachel Dawes is named Rachel Dodson. The beginning scenes are almost exactly like the eventual film, except that after Bruce Wayne saves Ducard’s life and leaves him with an old Sherpa, we get a scene of Wayne entering a smoky climber’s bar in Bhutan filled with Sherpas and climbers. When he enters, filthy and ragged, all conversation stops, and everyone stares at him. He goes to the bar and uses the phone to dial Alfred, who answers with “Master Wayne. It’s been some time.” Bruce says he needs a ride, and that he thinks he’s in Bhutan, without money or a passport. Alfred says, “I believe there’s an airstrip at Khatmandu long enough for a G5. Make your way there, I’ll have the jet down in fifteen hours.” Bruce then asks Alfred to bring some painkillers.
After returning home, Bruce sees a bat flittering around the ceiling of the Wayne Mansion library. Alfred tells him they nest somewhere on the grounds. Later, Bruce arrives at Wayne Industries just as Earle is talking to Judge Phelan, convincing him that Bruce Wayne should be declared legally dead. This was dropped in the final film. In this early draft, Phelan was a public official in Falcone’s control who appears in a few different scenes.
Phelan is mentioned in the very next scene of the script, in which we see Rachel hurrying down a marble staircase at the D.A.’s office to catch Finch. She tries to convince him that they should take the Falcone case to Harvey Dent. Finch tells her that Falcone has Judge Phelan bought and paid for. They continue their conversation out into the parking lot, where Bruce Wayne, sitting in the back of a Rolls Royce chauffeured by Alfred, watches her. When Alfred asks if he should park, Wayne says, “No, let’s go,” and Alfred registers disappointment. The scene then cuts to Wayne meeting Lucius Fox.
One of the plot threads given more prominence in the early script draft is Earle’s machinations to drive Bruce Wayne out of his company. After Bruce, as Batman, has his first meeting with Gordon, the scene shifts to the Wayne Industries boardroom, where Earle and another board member have discovered that Bruce Wayne can’t take control of the company until his 30th birthday, which is three months away. To prevent letting the “clown prince” take control of the company, Earle and the board member decide to have an initial public offering and take the company public, so that Bruce will be just another board member. Earle then notices his assistant and the receptionist gone. He finds them on the rooftop, where Bruce helps them improve their golf swings by knocking balls into the Gotham River. He tells Earle that he’s going to have a “huge blowout” on his birthday and he expects everyone to be there.
In the next scene, Bruce is outside Falcone’s nightclub, disguised as a homeless person. He surreptitiously takes a photo of Judge Phelan leaving the club with a young woman. He will later give this to Rachel as a way of blackmailing Phelan and keeping him in line.
Unlike the film, in which Dr. Crane is introduced early on, in the first script draft, he doesn’t show up until a third of the way through. When Flass arrives at the dockside warehouse, he goes inside to find Falcone talking to Crane, who complains that they rendered his last shipment of drugs useless by cutting it with baby powder.
A recurring element in the film—the kid who witnesses Batman prowling outside a building, and is later helped by Rachel when the Narrows is under the influence of Crane’s drug, is absent from the early draft. Also, in the early script, Earle fires Fox during Bruce Wayne’s birthday party at Wayne Manor, not in Fox’s underground warehouse.
The last major difference in the original script occurs in the climax. Instead of Gordon taking control of the Batmobile and blowing the tracks out from under the train, the script has Gordon driving an unmarked police car throughout the ending. The train jumps off the track and derails after Batman causes it to speed up.
Overall, one can see that 90 percent of the finished film is present in the draft script, written jointly by Goyer and Nolan. The changes made by Nolan after Goyer left the project helped to streamline sections of the story and made Gordon more of an integral player in the climactic scenes. But for both scriptwriters, the thing they most wanted to achieve with the script was to make Bruce Wayne a fully-rounded character, and not just that dull guy who takes up screen time while the audience is waiting to get to the next scene of Batman kicking ass. “If we’re successful, the thing that will be talked about a lot and on what we worked on the hardest is that the audience will really care about Bruce Wayne and not just Batman,” said Goyer. “It doesn’t matter how much you spend on special effects—if it feels hollow, no one gives a damn.”42
Even as he was working with Goyer on the script, Nolan began to assemble his production team. His wife, Emma Thomas, who produced Nolan’s Following and was an associate producer on Memento, was on board from the beginning. Thomas and Nolan met when they both attended University College London; they were wed in 1997. Before becoming a producer, she worked as a script supervisor and as an assistant to director Stephen Frears on his film High Fidelity (2000).
Nolan also immediately hired a production designer, Nathan Crowley, with whom he had developed a good rapport while the two were working on their previous collaboration, Insomnia. While Nolan and Goyer worked on the script at Nolan’s house in Los Angeles, Crowley began designing models of the Tumbler, which would become the new Batmobile, in Nolan’s garage.43 “I wanted to focus on the design of the new Batmobile during the scriptwriting stage because I felt that everything we were trying to do that defines our approach to telling this story, our emphasis on grounding the characters and the film in reality, would be evident in the look and feel of that vehicle,” said Nolan.44 Crowley’s idea was to create a tank-like vehicle that was “a cross between a Hummer and a Lamborghini. We wanted a mid-engine sports tank, so I went to a model shop, got models of the two cars and then basically crushed them together.”45
“I’ve never been on a project where I’ve gotten to do conceptual work so early on,” said Crowley. “Chris would take a break from writing and come into the garage, where I’d be with my car concepts, covered in glue. We made about five or six versions of the Batmobile over a period of about eight weeks.”46
“We were looking to present Batman as
a very functional figure, somebody very concerned with utility, and so we wanted to create a vehicle that would actually perform in ways that are useful to the character,” said Nolan.47 The director was anxious to show Crowley’s Batmobile concept to the studio, saying “I felt that would immediately explain to everybody the differences between approaches in the past and what we were doing.”48
Instead of the curvilinear lines of past Batmobiles, Crowley seemed to take inspiration from the oversized tank used by Batman in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. “We figured the thing about Batman is he doesn’t have any superpowers,” said Crowley. “His only superpower is money. That gave us the opportunity to play realism as the logic to everything we did.”49
Emma Thomas joked, “I think that from now on, any film that we make, we’ll start in the garage. The synergy of having Chris, David and Nathan working simultaneously in the same creative space worked amazingly well and it advanced our development and production process considerably.”50
A CHRISTIAN APPROACH
As the script took shape, Nolan began thinking about who would best embody his take on Bruce Wayne and Batman. Around the same time, a young actor named Christian Bale heard about the new Batman project in development. “Initially, I heard there was going to be a much lower-budget Batman,” said Bale, “where they were going to go very dark with it, and I started calling my agents and asking, ‘Can you find out about this?’ And then I heard they were going with a big Batman, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s probably not the one I would be interested in.’ But hearing that Chris [Nolan] was helming it altered everything. I met with Chris, spoke with him and said to myself, ‘Yeah, this is definitely the right one to do!’”51
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