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Dark Knight trilogy writer initially didn't think Warner Bros. would "take a big swing" on the Christopher Nolan take on a grounded Batman movie
Batman Begins is such a huge departure from the Batman movies that came before it that we can understand why David S. Goyer was skeptical at first.
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It can seem obvious now, but Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy represented a huge departure for superhero movies at the time. In fact, when Nolan approached David S. Goyer to write a more grounded take on Batman, Goyer said no. Not because he didn’t want to write the movie but because he didn’t think Warner Bros. would take that big a risk with Batman at the time.
“We had an initial conversation,” Goyer recalled during an episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “And he asked me some thoughts. I think we talked about it for an hour. And I have a bunch of ideas and then I said I don’t want to do it. Which is amazing, in hindsight.”
It wasn’t the ideas that they were throwing out – such as really focusing on the origin story and Bruce Wayne’s training to become Batman – that put Goyer off. The fact of the matter is that he didn’t think what they were pitching would ever be picked up by the studio. “The main reason I felt I didn’t want to do was because I didn’t believe it would get made. I had three or four friends that had written Batman scripts that hadn’t been made… I knew at least four or five people who had written Batman movies that weren’t getting made and I just thought they’re never going to do it. They’re never going to take a big swing and do something different.”
Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. Christopher Nolan went away from that meeting and sat down with the executives at Warner Bros. to discuss his plans for a Batman movie that would eventually become Batman Begins. “He came back, I don’t know, maybe three weeks later and he said that he had met with a bunch of people and that my take… was the only thing that really resonated with them and would I reconsider and meet with him and that’s what started that path.”
We can’t blame Goyer for being uncertain about Warner Bros. at the time. With so many proposed Batman movies in the air and his grounded approach to the character being so different from the campy take we’d seen in Batman & Robin, it probably seemed impossible that Warner Bros. would agree to make The Dark Knight trilogy. Yet, here we are.
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