Before Batman Begins, Darren Aronofsky was set to direct a Batman film for Warner Bros. The studio ultimately went in another direction after one draft was written (more on that below).
Aronofsky, however, has revealed (via First Showing) that the upcoming solo Joker movie planned by the studio is in the same vein as his Batman film:
“I hear the way they’re talking about the Joker movie and that’s exactly — that was my pitch. I was like: We’re going to shoot in East Detroit and East New York. We’re not building Gotham. The Batmobile — I wanted to be a Lincoln Continental with two bus engines in it.”
He added:
“It was the duct tape MacGyver Batman. And some of my ideas got out there through other films. Like the ring with ‘BW,’ Bruce Wayne’s ring making the scar was our idea and I think that was in Zack’s or something. Which is fine, you write these ideas and they get out. We were all about reinventing it and trying to make it more Taxi Driver visceral. That was the whole pitch. But the toy people were like, “Oh it can’t be a Lincoln Continental, you have to make a Batmobile.”
He revealed he was happy with how Christopher Nolan’s franchise turned out:
“I think with Chris [Nolan’s] work, which was great, it was just — he hit it [out of the park]. He was able to get the darkness in, and the psychology of the character, yet he was still able to give the gizmo thing, which I wasn’t ever really interested in.”
Frank Miller revealed last year that Warner Bros. passed on the film for being too dark:
“It was the first time I worked on a Batman project with somebody whose vision of Batman was darker than mine. My Batman was too nice for him. We would argue about it, and I’d say, “Batman wouldn’t do that, he wouldn’t torture anybody,” and so on. We hashed out a screenplay, and we were wonderfully compensated, but then Warner Bros. read it and said, “We don’t want to make this movie.” The executive wanted to do a Batman he could take his kids to. And this wasn’t that. It didn’t have the toys in it. The Batmobile was just a tricked-out car. And Batman turned his back on his fortune to live a street life so he could know what people were going through. He built his own Batcave in an abandoned part of the subway. And he created Batman out of whole cloth to fight crime and a corrupt police force.”
You can see Aronofsky’s latest film starring Jennifer Lawrence, Mother!, in theaters now.