Robert Pattinson in The Batman. Photo / Warner Bros
Robert Pattinson in The Batman. Photo / Warner Bros
A few weeks after filming an armed insurrectionist mob storming a secure public building in the immediate aftermath of an election, Matt Reeves put on the news and watched an armed insurrectionist mob storm a secure public building in the immediate aftermath of an election.
The New York-born director was shooting The Batman at Leavesden Studios, in Hertfordshire, and had recently completed one of its more blood-freezing sequences: an attack on a Gotham City mayoral victory rally by… well, sidestepping spoilers, let's say certain parties with a dim view of the democratic process.
Then on January 6, 2021, a throng of Trump supporters marched on the US Capitol – and reality leapfrogged the blockbuster with a pair of novelty bison horns on its head.
"My first thought was, 'Does this mean the world has become worse than Gotham?'" Reeves, 55, recalls, talking from the US via Zoom. He had written his siege scene in 2017, shortly after another fractious polling day in the United States: "So tension around elections was out there in the zeitgeist. But I never intended it to be so direct."
In other ways, though, the parallels with real life were absolutely deliberate. When discussing the Bruce Wayne character with his leading man, Robert Pattinson, Reeves tells me he advised Pattinson to look to the British Royal Family for inspiration. He was interested, he says, in the idea that Bruce finds his role, as a son of one of Gotham's oldest families, a "burden".
"I was describing it to Rob as like something tragic had happened in the family's past [Bruce Wayne's parents are, famously, murdered when he is a young boy] and now he had to carry that with him, and have everyone always looking to him, so he would want to withdraw from that."
And indeed, when we meet Bruce in the film, he has beaten a very Prince Harry-like retreat from his civic duties. Reeves told Pattinson, "rather than a playboy he should just look like a wealthy screw-up".
Meanwhile, in creating Paul Dano's Riddler – the main villain of the piece – Reeves drew on the story of the Zodiac serial killer, who stalked the California Bay Area in the 1960s and 70s, and sent Riddler-esque coded messages to newspapers. "That was a real-life example of someone creating their own horrific supervillain persona," Reeves says. "But I realised that today, he wouldn't be writing to the San Francisco Chronicle, he'd be posting things on the internet to like minds."
That prompted Reeves to read up on the dark "incel" subculture of disaffected young males, radicalised in secretive online communities. "Paul and I spoke about the character having built up in his head this vast reserve of bitterness," Reeves says. "It's not outside the realm of what people do, which is what makes it terrifying."
This Riddler's wardrobe is notably short on chartreuse leotards. Instead, he appears in his online videos in an olive-green army surplus jacket and balaclava: an image horrifying in its banal plausibility. Did Reeves worry that in adopting this DIY aesthetic the character might appeal to the very group that had inspired it?
"To think it would be somehow provoking would be my worst nightmare," he says. "But the danger comes when you glorify or deify it, and I really don't feel that's what we're doing here. It was important that the characters felt like real human beings – I didn't want you to look at him and think 'Oh, it's the Riddler.' I wanted you to look at him and be scared."
On this front, as well as many others, Reeves has been enormously successful. "A breath of fresh air" isn't quite the right way to describe a film this murky and malevolent, but it does prove there are exciting, original angles left to explore.
Reeves's goal was not to direct a blockbuster when he left film school and moved to Hollywood in the early 1990s; he saw himself making "Hal Ashby-like melancholic comedies". Once he'd got his foot in the door, however, he found the business had a limited appetite for those. Instead, after a stint in television with his former classmate (and future Star Wars director) JJ Abrams, plus one Gwyneth Paltrow-David Schwimmer rom-com called The Pallbearer, he made the 2008 creature-feature Cloverfield, then two Planet of the Apes films.
Yet in the age of franchise-friendly CGI free-for-alls, Reeves was an outlier: he had a knack for imbuing spectacle with style and substance. Cloverfield, for example, was a fearsomely resonant 9/11 allegory, while the Apes films brought surprising psychological complexity to their tales.
That was presumably why Warner Bros trusted his ambition to make a stand-alone Batman film in the style of a 1970s paranoid mystery thriller, pulling back the Batman character to his Detective Comics roots.
"I always loved those films in which a series of crimes reveals the secret history of a place," he says, before acknowledging Three Days of the Condor, The French Connection, Chinatown and All the President's Men as key influences.
All highly appetising names to drop. But surely Reeves must be aware that many filmmakers from that earlier generation – The French Connection's William Friedkin among them – are among the loudest voices speaking out against the current superhero craze?
"There is no question that the oxygen in the room is being taken up by comic-book films," Reeves concedes. "So I understand their feelings – that the range of films studios fostered in their time is just no longer there."
The Batman director Matt Reeves on set with Robert Pattinson. Photo / AP
Does he feel he's become part of the problem? "At the moment, blockbusters and smaller genre films are overwhelmingly the only things the studios want to make," he says. "So yes, I know that on one level I'm making the latest Batman film in a long line. But as I did with the Apes films, the best I felt I could do was to fight to make a version of this kind of film that mattered to me, in the hope it would also matter to the audience."
He insisted on removing the now-well-worn reenactment of Bruce Wayne's parents' death – "that scene's been done so many times."
The Batman is certainly a far cry from the 1960s Batman television series – "which was the version I fell in love with as a kid," Reeves laughs. "And, by the way, as a kid, I saw no camp in it at all." He feels the two Joel Schumacher films from the 1990s , with their pun-laden scripts, have been unfairly maligned: "They had a direct connection to the Adam West show, and in their own way were just as distinctive and cool as the others."
Does he believe this most durable comic-book hero will ever again be allowed to be, well, comic?
"Let's see how people react to this one," he grins. "I'm sure some will be complaining on the internet: 'When can we have the funny Batman back?'"
