David Goyer on the Choice of Scarecrow as a “Batman Begins” Villain: “One, he hadn’t been used in the movies before. He’s creepy. We were wanting to explore subtext and themes of fear, and then loss is the other one, obviously. If you look at the pantheon of Batman villains, it just so happened, in my opinion, two of the best ones, the Scarecrow and Ra's Al Ghul hadn’t been used yet, so that’s why. And we thought it was important since we were doing a kind of reboot to use the one that hadn’t been done before.”
Incorporating Different Eras of “Batman” Into One Film: Goyer said, “We had at our disposal 66 years of ‘Batman’ material so we could use the best of the best. It just so happened that a lot of it came from the 70’s, but the Scarecrow was introduced in the 40’s and I believe ‘Batman: Year One’ came out in the tail end of the 80’s. Whatever worked best we used. We cherry-picked.”
Charles Roven on the 'Comic Book as Movies' Phenomenon: “You know, here’s the funny thing. Making movies out of comic books has been going on for a lot of years. Alright, it happens to be having, I don’t want to call it a renaissance because it’s never really stopped, but it certainly has caught the attention of the public maybe more than in the past because actually, many of the movies that are coming out are good. The ‘X Men’ movies are really good and the ‘Spider-Man’ movies are really good. As long as we can continue to mine these for great stories, I think that it’ll continue this way. But if, you know, if every time you turn around, you’re seeing a not-very-inspired or rehashed version of like ‘Scary Movie,’ then there’ll be less of them.”
The Creative Team Behind “Batman Begins” and a Shared Vision for the Film: “I’ll tell you this, that one of the interesting things about this project was, and it doesn’t always happen this good, really - everybody had the same vision of the movie that they wanted to make. At the focal point of that vision was Chris [Nolan]. Because he knew the vision that he had and was so focused on it, and never deviated from it, we had our share of production problems because the shoot was so incredibly long. The longest shoot any of us had ever done; four times [the] longest shoot Chris had ever done before this one. So there were those kinds of problems and constantly weighing… You know, even though we’ve got these tremendous amounts of assets and money, a movie has to, if it’s gonna deliver, have this tremendous scale to it so you’re constantly balancing the aesthetic with the economics. You’ve got those kind of problems but we really didn’t have any what you hear about as, you know, typical studio on one side of the creative table and the filmmakers on another side. That didn’t happen on this movie. It was incredibly easy that way,” explained Roven.
”Batman Begins” Never Approaches Being Campy: David Goyer said the point of the movie was to take the best aspects of the comics and create a movie for fans, without camping it up. Roven elaborated on Goyer’s point. “Everybody wanted to make that movie. Everybody wanted to tell the story in kind of a hyper-reality way, you know? Very not-cartoony, try to make it as real [as possible] and the whole production is designed around that. What would a guy today who came from one of the richest families in the world who had this tragedy, what events could happen that would end up with him donning a batsuit? That’s where we went.
Chris shot it in a very realistic way. That’s why we decided to use, you know, as many real things as we could. We developed a real car. It does all the things that are in the movie. Most of the stunts in the movie are actually done - really done. [There’s] very little CGI in the movie and the CGI that’s in the movie, instead of it being designed to be wondrous and out of this world, it’s actually designed to make the world that we’re in more real.”
