David Goyer Defends Man Of Steel & Talks Christopher Nolan Batman

David Goyer recently appeared on a Nerdist podcast where he talked about creating the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, mentioned how studios want to emulate Disney and Star Wars, and he also defended Man of Steel.

Below you can check out the podcast and text (via indiewire):

Nolan Batman:

“We got lucky in that ‘Batman and Robin’ had not done well. And there had been a lot of who people who had attempted to do Batman films in the interim. Mark Protosevichhad written another one, and there was going to be an R-rated [Darren] Aronofsky one, and Boaz Yakin was going to do ‘Batman Beyond,’ and[Andrew] Kevin Walker did a ‘Batman [and] Superman, there were all these stillborn things that had not happened in the intervening period. So by time Chris and I came along they knew they had to do something radical. And they were kind of desperate. I just remember when I got the job, everyone was saying, both online and amongst my friends, ‘Oh, that’ll never get made.’ “

“We knew that we were coming in from a deficit. There was negative connotation with the character, so we had to get past that, much less it even being a good movie. We were aware that it had to be radically different, but that said, it wasn’t the guiding principle. I don’t think you can create something just as a reaction to something. The guiding principle was, ‘What if we play it straight?’ And then reverse engineer it down to everything, the utility belt, the Batmobile…the previous Batmobiles that had been in the [Tim] Burton films, that was not a practical car. You could barely turn a corner. So we just said, ‘What if it’s real?’ ”

Shared movie universes:

“I think [audiences] are savvy to do the idea that, ‘Oh, this isn’t a film, this is a piece of commerce now, in this ongoing franchise.’ If you go to the studios now, everyone wants story universes because they’ve seen what Marvel or what Lucasfilm has done. Not to say that what Marvel and Lucasfilm have done isn’t amazing, but all the other studios want to do the exact same thing. And so you’ve got, whether they’re successful or not, all these different studios saying, ‘How do we keep up with our own elite universe?’ Now it’s not just enough to say, ‘Oh, I hope this is a three movie franchise,’ it’s ‘Oh, I hope this is a nine movie…’ — it’s a ten year plan.”

“You’ve got all these projects — and I won’t name them — that are going out there that’s like, ‘This is going to be the first in a projected eight movie thing.’ And you’re like, ‘How about starting with just making a good movie?.’ There have been a lot of good sequels, and it’s really hard to do a third film. It’s incredibly hard to do it the third time out, especially if you’re not designing them to be one long story. In the Batman films, we weren’t. When we finished ‘The Dark Knight,’ we didn’t say, ‘We’ve set these seeds to do x, y and z.’ We had no idea what we were going to do. Chris always felt like, each movie has to have its own integrity, and if you have a great idea, use it, and don’t think about a sequel. And if you do that really well, it becomes harder to do a sequel. But at the same time, if you’re trying to do a presumptive trilogy, I think audiences are starting to catch on to this, and be a little weary of it.”

Man of Steel:

“The way I work, the way Chris works, is you do what’s right for the story. That exists entirely separately from what fans should or shouldn’t think of that character. You have to do what’s right for the story. In that instance, this was a Superman who had only been Superman for like, a week. He wasn’t Superman as we think of him in the DC Comics…or even in a world that conceived of Superman existing. He’d only flown for the first time a few days before that. He’d never fought anyone that had super powers before. And so he’s going up against a guy who’s not only super-powered, but has been training since birth to use those super powers, who exists as a superhuman killing machine, who has stated, ‘I will never stop until I destroy all of humanity.’ “

“If you take Superman out of it, what’s the right way to tell that story? I think the right way to tell that story is if you take this powered alien who says, ‘You can have your race back, but you have to kill your adopted race,’ the moral, horrible situation to be in is to actually be forced to kill, not wanting to, the only other person from your race. Take Superman aside, I think that’s the right way to tell that story.”