Christopher Nolan on Batman Begins

How the British director of Memento took a fresh look at the comic book icon and launched a revamped franchise

Reinventing the $1 billion-grossing Batman franchise is the sort of Herculean task only a director blessed with super-heroic powers might take on. Enter Christopher Nolan. After making his £5,000 black and white debut Following in 1998, in 2002 Nolan shared an Oscar nomination with brother Jonathan for penning mind-bending memory thriller Memento. A cult hit that took $25 million in the US, it led him to direct a remake of Norwegian thriller Insomnia, starring Al Pacino, in 2002. Subsequently, the London-raised Nolan found himself pitching a fresh take on the Dark Knight to Warner Brothers. After the disaster that was 1997's Batman & Robin, the studio heads were "very, very firmly convinced that they needed a fresh approach", claims the 34-year-old writer-director.

Working with writer David S Goyer (Blade), Nolan set about constructing Batman Begins, an origin story far closer in tone to Frank Miller's iconic graphic novel 'Batman: Year One' than either the camp 1960s TV series or the hyper-stylised four films by Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher. "Frank Miller was doing it for grown-ups, really," says Nolan. "That was quite exciting. It put you back into that childlike appreciation of the magic of character."

How did he feel about Burton's 1989 Batman? "What Tim Burton did could certainly be considered visionary - but it didn't speak to me personally. It's not a great favourite of mine, although I appreciated all the skill and artistry of it. It wasn't the Batman film I'd wanted to see, in terms of a film that showed his origin story. I felt like there was a version of Batman that never got made in 1979. When Dick Donner did Superman in 1978, it seems odd that they didn't do Batman in that same way, with that same epic sensibility."

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