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Christopher Nolan’s brother Jonathan is certainly a remarkable creative in his own right, as he’s not only the creator of Person of Interest, Westworld, and the new Fallout series coming to Prime Video, but he also helped Christopher write Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, and Interstellar.
As it turns out, we may also have Jonathan to thank for Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy coming into existence in the first place, as the 47-year-old writer and producer recently revealed that his “chickens—” brother needed a little convincing to take on Batman Begins.
During a recent interview to promote the release of Fallout, the younger of the two Nolans revealed that his Oscar-winning older brother was “on the fence” about returning for a sequel to Batman Begins because he didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a “superhero movie director.”
“I worked on Batman Begins in this slightly arm’s length capacity, but it was the one comic book my brother ever given me as a kid, Batman: Year One, for my 14th birthday, and 10 years later I was on the set working with him,” Jonathan said in a sweet moment of reminiscence on the Armchair Expert podcast.
“Chris was on the fence about making another one. He didn’t want to become a superhero movie director. [But] to me, it was like we built this amazing sports car, and I’m like, ‘Let’s take it for a drive. Don’t you want to make another one?’ We spent an hour telling the origin story, and that’s great, but it’s like, ‘what [more] can we do with this?’”
Nolan continued to say that, after pressing Christopher about not being a “chickens—“, the acclaimed Oppenheimer director would eventually change his mind and not only opt to direct The Dark Knight but also the trilogy-capper in 2012 with The Dark Knight Rises.
“So I was literally sitting with [producer] Charles Roven and Chris and being like, ‘Dude, don’t be a chicken shit. Let’s do this!’” Nolan told hosts Dax Shepard and Monica Padman.
And I knew with the script — and he developed the story with David Goyer with a little bit of input from me — it was like first act detailed, second act somewhat detailed, third act … uh, he rides away at the end — once we had the script done, I was like, ‘This is going to be great. This is exciting. We gotta make this movie.’ And eventually, he came around. He did manage to avoid being pigeonholed.”
As we all now know, The Dark Knight is not only considered to be one of the defining superhero movies ever made but also one of the consensus greatest movies of the 21st century thus far.
The Dark Knight was so good, in fact, that it did the opposite of what Nolan feared it would: instead of pigeonholing him as a superhero movie director, it gave him the perpetual license to make whatever the hell he wanted, with Instellar — his first film after the trilogy concluded — being the most obvious example of that priceless cache.
Fallout begins streaming on Prime Video on Wednesday, April 10.