Nolan’s Return to Batman Contingent on a Good Story October 27, 2008 2:35 pm
Posted by Rosario T. Calabria in Batman, Movies, News, The Dark Knight.trackback
In the first part of its three-part interview with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan, the LA Times asks Nolan whether he’ll be back for a third film:
Could you see actually yourself not making the third Batman film?
Christopher Nolan: Well … let me think how to put this. There are two things to be said. One is the emphasis on story. What’s the story? Is there a story that’s going to keep me emotionally invested for the couple of years that it will take to make another one? That’s the overriding question. On a more superficial level, I have to ask the question: How many good third movies in a franchise can people name? [Laughs.] At the same time, in taking on the second one, we had the challenge of trying to make a great second movie, and there haven’t been too many of those either. It’s all about the story really. If the story is there, everything is possible. I hope that was a suitably slippery answer.
Earlier in the interview, Nolan was asked for his thoughts on the worldwide box office success of the film, and whether or not he expected such a great reaction to it:
“The Dark Knight” is closing in on $1 billion. How do you get your arms around that kind of success?
Nolan: I can’t get my arms around it, to be quite frank. It’s mystifying. It’s terrific but at the same time it’s a little abstract, the numbers are so big. The biggest thrill for me would be, with the number of people who have gone to see the film, how “The Dark Knight” stood on the shoulders of the first film, how we were able to build the audience up and build the story up from the first film. That was really exciting to see. We were all pretty happy with the performance of the first film but so we really didn’t know, “Where does it go from there?” For it to become such a phenomenon is extraordinarily gratifying. I mean, I’ve spent now like six years or something working on Batman films. It becomes an important part of your life; you become very obsessive about it, and it’s pretty fun when there are other people sharing your obsession and going to see the film a dozen times or whatever.Wrapping your arms around the scale of the success, as you ask, I don’t find that possible really. There’s something liberating in knowing that my next film, whatever it is, isn’t going to make as much money [laughter]. I don’t have to try for years.
Read the rest of the first part of the interview here.
Source: LA Times
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Great interview. It’s really nice to see Mr. Nolan
is finally talking candidly about this remarkable
film ! I can’t begin to imagine how overwhelming
this experience has been for him, to loose Heath
Ledger and to be at the helm of such a runaway
hit at the same time.