With 1995’s Batman Forever, which also starred Jim Carrey as the crazy Riddler, filmmaker Joel Schumacher put the Batman franchise in a campy, flamboyant direction that is well remembered. Tim Burton’s previous two films, Batman and Batman Returns, showed Gotham as having a noir aesthetic, with Michael Keaton delving into Bruce Wayne’s torturous past to find it in his present.
According to the Backstage podcast (via The Playlist), Keaton subsequently declined the part in Batman Forever that went to Val Kilmer because he and director Joel Schumacher had different ideas on where the character should go: away from haunting vigilante and more to the character’s comic-book roots.
Michael Keaton shares how he looks at the story of Batman
In the podcast, actor Michael Keaton expressed his perception when it comes to the story of the legendary Caped Crusader. According to Keaton, the Batman story relies heavily on Bruce Wayne, making him the center of the narrative. The actor explained that even though most of the audience focuses largely on the superhero, they forget to take into consideration that Batman is the way he is because of Bruce Wayne’s dark past. During the podcast, Keaton said,
“It was always Bruce Wayne. It was never Batman, To me, I know the name of the movie is Batman, and it’s hugely iconic and very cool and culturally iconic and because of Tim Burton, artistically iconic, [but] I knew from the get-go it was Bruce Wayne,”
He added,
“That was the secret. I never talked about it. [Everyone would say] Batman, Batman, Batman does this, and I kept thinking to myself, ‘Y’all are thinking wrong here.’ [It’s all about] Bruce Wayne. What kind of person does that?… Who becomes that?”
Michael Keaton felt that director Tim Burton looked at the superhero in a similar way so when he was approached by Joel Schumacher, he realized their visions did not match.
Michael Keaton’s and Joel Schumacher’s visions did not match
Keaton explained how Schumacher had a completely different vision regarding the future of Bruce Wayne’s character. While Keaton leaned towards the other darker side, Schumacher leaned to the other side. Keaton revealed this resulted in him walking away from the project since he just “couldn’t do it”.
“And then when the director who directed the third one, I said, ‘I just can’t do it, And one of the reasons I couldn’t do it was — and you know, he’s a nice enough man, he’s passed away, so I wouldn’t speak ill of him even if he were alive — he, at one point, after more than a couple of meetings where I kept trying to rationalize doing it and hopefully talking him into saying, ‘I think we don’t want to go in this direction, I think we should go in this direction.’ And he wasn’t going to budge.”
He continued,
“But I remember one of the things that I walked away going, ‘Oh boy, I can’t do this.’ He asked me, ‘I don’t understand why everything has to be so dark and everything so sad,’ and I went, ‘Wait a minute, do you know how this guy got to be Batman? Have you read… I mean, it’s pretty simple.”
Looks like the actor has no problem with Batman’s story now that he, Micheal Keaton will be reprising the role of Batman once again in Ezra Miller’s upcoming movie The Flash. The movie has been the center of attention for a lot of reasons, one of them being Keaton’s epic comeback.
Source: IndieWire
