Matt Reeves: ​‘I didn’t know if Rob would want to come back to a blockbuster’

Though com­ic books are by their nature about iter­a­tion, rein­ven­tion and sta­tus quo, there are few char­ac­ters adapt­ed for the screen that feel quite so ubiq­ui­tous as The Bat­man. From the camp antics of Adam West in ​’66 to the character’s goth­ic, brood­ing rein­ven­tion in Burton’s films, to his return to camp again with Bat­man For­ev­er and Bat­man & Robin – one might think we’ve seen it all at this point.

But with Robert Pat­tin­son now tak­ing the cowl, direc­tor Matt Reeves, known for his thought­ful genre flicks both large scale (Dawn of Plan­et of the Apes) and not (Clover­field), there’s still more to the Caped Cru­sad­er than we’ve seen on screen. We caught up with the film­mak­er ahead of the film’s release to talk the Bat, the Cat, and the Pattinson.

LWLies: Your vision of an ear­ly days, Bat­man-in-progress reminds me of Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli’s ​‘Bat­man: Year One’.

Reeves: Total­ly, and that was one of the comics that when I did a deep dive at the begin­ning of this. I start­ed by look­ing at all of the Kane and Fin­ger stuff because that is total­ly noir – it made me think of Chi­na­town. But there was some­thing about reread­ing ​‘Year One’, tonal­ly, that real­ly res­onat­ed because one of the things I find excit­ing about Bat­man as a char­ac­ter is that he’s got a kind of com­pul­sion and essen­tial­ly just try­ing to cope. Also, while I was reread­ing that one, I was try­ing to fig­ure out, well, how do you real­ly go around being Batman?

You can’t go around through Gotham Square, which is like Times Square or any big city, dressed as a giant bat because peo­ple will look and go, ​‘Oh, there’s that guy again? What’s he doing?’ I under­stand that the pur­pose of his cos­tume is to intim­i­date and I want­ed it to be very prac­ti­cal. You had to see that it was almost like it was very tac­ti­cal. It would pro­tect him. I want­ed the design of that was all dri­ven by its pur­pose. But that meant that I was like, well, wait a minute, you can’t just walk around in that, so how does he find crime? In ​‘Year One’, before he becomes Bat­man, Bruce goes to the East End. It’s actu­al­ly where he meets Seli­na Kyle for the first time.

But he goes as a drifter, because he can’t go as Bruce Wayne either. He’s high pro­file whether he’s Bat­man or not, so he had to become a third alter ego. That’s one of the things that we play with in the movie too, like ​‘How does he get from place to place?’ As ground­ed as Nolan’s movies were – and they’re fan­tas­tic – but for all of the real­ism, he still leaned into the fan­ta­sy. I think he made a great joke of it too, with that whole idea that he could just dis­ap­pear and reappear.

In one print­ing, Maz­zuchel­li has this note about how he sees Bat­man as Bruce con­stant­ly repair­ing his childhood.

Can I tell you some­thing? That is some­thing that I was talk­ing to Rob and to the crew, every­body all about. Here’s the thing, he’s still 10 years old. That’s the thing, and I don’t mean that in a way to say that he’s total­ly imma­ture. What it means is he’s emo­tion­al­ly wound­ed in that place where he hasn’t been able to move on. While the sto­ry is not an ori­gin tale, his ori­gins are con­stant­ly present psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly. He just hasn’t got­ten over it, and this is his attempt to make mean­ing. He’s dri­ven in a com­pul­sive way. I think that’s exact­ly right, that that boy is still in there some­where, and that’s why he’s fight­ing so ferociously.

You’ve already men­tioned Robert Pat­tin­son – what made him a fit for the character?

I’m a huge fan of his. One of my clos­est friends is a direc­tor named James Gray, and we went to film school togeth­er and I just think he’s enor­mous­ly tal­ent­ed. When he first had me come in and look at a cut of The Lost City of Z, I’d for­got­ten that he’d cast Rob, when he came on screen with that crazy beard and every­thing, I just thought he was so magnetic.

When I was writ­ing, I start­ed look­ing at actors in the age range of a year two era Bat­man, and I start­ed look­ing at a lot of oth­er movies that Rob had been doing, and he is a chameleon. He did such ter­rif­ic work where he would just seek out film­mak­ers like James, the Safdies, Claire Denis and David Cro­nen­berg. When I saw Good Time, there was some­thing in that sto­ry where you could feel he had an explo­sive­ness, but also a vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, and I think that’s what I was look­ing for.

At a cer­tain point, I became obsessed with it being Rob, and I start­ed writ­ing with Rob in mind. I had no idea, I mean, espe­cial­ly giv­en that after Twi­light he’d gone and done all this incred­i­bly inter­est­ing inde­pen­dent film work, I had no idea if he had any inter­est in being Bat­man. I didn’t know if he’d want to come back to some­thing that was a block­buster. It turned out to my sur­prise that, he found out that we were doing anoth­er, he became very inter­est­ed and he actu­al­ly start­ed pur­su­ing it from his side. It was weird, it was almost fat­ed, I didn’t tell him at that point that I had writ­ten it with him in mind.

This is com­ing out in an envi­ron­ment where com­ic book movies are very fre­quent, what do you think draws peo­ple to these sto­ries for adaptation?

For me, I was just par­tic­u­lar­ly drawn to this com­ic book char­ac­ter because his super­pow­er is real­ly just his dri­ve, and he’s got this tremen­dous sort of myth­ic, psy­cho­log­i­cal sort of sto­ry. I sort of have dis­cov­ered this over the course of my career, because I nev­er imag­ined myself being a genre film­mak­er, but it’s some­thing that I’ve kind of come to. When I first start­ed, I thought I was going to be mak­ing movies that were like Hal Ash­by movies or some­thing, which of course now you couldn’t make in this envi­ron­ment for the big screen.

But I think what makes com­ic book movies and genre movies the most excit­ing is when there is that inter­sec­tion between the sto­ry and the real world. Under the metaphors and the myths of the genre of the com­ic book sto­ry, they have to find some­thing human for peo­ple to con­nect to. If you can do that, I think then they can be real­ly special.