Forget it, Bruce. It’s Gotham.
Robert Pattinson‘s new iteration of the Caped Crusader in next year’s The Batman owes some of its inspiration to Jack Nicholson‘s private eye in 1974’s Chinatown.
So said director Matt Reeves as he presented the first trailer for the film at the DC Fandome event, and online showcase of upcoming superhero titles from the comics giant. “‘70s, street-grounded stories” were the model for this story about Batman in the second year of his work as a vigilante.
“Chinatown was a key one,” Reeves said. “In Chinatown, Jake Gittes, in investigating that series of crimes that were part of that story, he discovers the depth of corruption in Los Angeles. It’s a classic noir, and the series of murders Batman is investigating are very much in that mode.”
Like Nicholson’s Gittes, Pattinson’s Wayne discovers that even in spite of his intense skepticism, the world is much darker than he thinks.
“It’s a criminological experiment. He’s trying to figure out what he can do to finally change this place. You see that he’s charting what he’s doing, and he’s seeing he isn’t having any of the effect that he wants to have yet,” Reeves said. “The murders start to happen, and the murders start to describe a history of Gotham. It only reinforces what he knows about Gotham, but opens up a whole world of corruption that went much further.”
That also raises questions about Batman’s past. Reeves said he won’t retell the well-trod origin of Martha and Thomas Wayne’s alleyway murders, which sent their son on a lifetime quest for justice, but he did suggest the film will lead the hero to question the role his wealthy, high society parents played in the problems that plague Gotham.
“As it starts to describe this epic history of corruption in Gotham, it’s ‘Where did my family sit in that?’” Reeves said. “It’s a detective story, a point of view story, a mystery, and it has action and all that stuff, but it’s also very personal for him.”
The filmmaker, who had to shut down production in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, siad the movie was also inspired by several other classic ’70s dramas. “That idea of gritty, flawed humanity was very much inspired by those kinds of movies, like The French Connection, and cop movies like that, and even a movie like Taxi Driver, in the description of a place and getting inside someone’s head.”