(The following interviews with The Batman director Matt Reeves and stars Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright, Colin Farrell and producer Dylan Clark contain no plot spoilers — but do detail Reeves’ vision for the film.)
What everyone involved in The Batman mentions about director Matt Reeves is his specificity.
“There were times when I thought, maybe we don’t need that comma there,” says Jeffrey Wright, who plays the incorruptible Gotham cop Lt. James Gordon. “And he’s like, ‘Wait a minute — that comma relates to a comma in the next scene. If you take that one out, then it changes the value of the next one.’ It’s a really tightly woven script.”
Speaking to Wright, a few months before the film’s release, I assumed he was kidding about the comma — trying to make a point about Reeves’ exactitude without giving away any plot points of the most-anticipated movie of 2022.
So I asked Reeves.
“I’m sure that is true,” he says, adding: “Hearing that makes me feel somewhat bad.”
We’re speaking over Zoom, and his hair and mustache make him look a little like a cross between Ethan Hawke and the version of Jim Gordon played by Gary Oldman in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films. His response, like his thinking about the comma, is patient, deliberative, and a little apologetic for being so deliberative.
“The first thing that I’m doing when I’m working is I’m trying to internalize everything. Because if I have it internalized, then my compass is functional,” Reeves explains. “So I’m trying to feel what it would be like for everybody. But I am not the actor that any of these people are — I’m just an actor on paper in my head, and in a vision, and I have an instinct about what the emotional path is.
“When Jeffrey comes in, he has so many great ideas. He’s an amazing actor, so he brings something to life. So the last thing I’d want to do is to have him do it the way I would do it, because it won’t be nearly as good,” he explains. “But the specificity of the comma has to do with emphasis — and that is narrative. There are moments when the comma is narrative, the comma is something that sets something apart that’s going to come back in an important way. And this story, in particular, is the most intricate narrative I have ever, ever tried to tackle.”
The details really do matter, says Robert Pattinson, who plays Bruce Wayne and Batman, two personalities who are painfully intertwined in The Batman. Pattinson says he was worried at first when Reeves would ask for a lot of takes.
“Your first thought is, Oh my God, I’m absolutely terrible,” he laughs, with trademark self-deprecation. But when Reeves would show him the playback of scenes, which Reeves likes to do, he began to see the same make-or-break nuances the director did. For example, the mask. The Batman cinematographer Greig Fraser, who also shot Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, told Pattinson early on: “The two most difficult things to light are Darth Vader’s helmet and the cowl.”
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“There’s a whole different language, body language, you have to learn to make it do what you want it to do,” says Pattinson. “If you look too much into the light, it looks completely ridiculous, and you’re wearing a Halloween costume. But if you’re like two millimeters down, it’s like — oh, that’s completely totemic, and like it looks exactly how it’s supposed to look. But to learn how to feel that and learn how to react to how the light hits it, takes forever.
Every millimeter matters.
“There was a scene where I — Selina — was coming out of a club and I’m upset,” recalls Zoë Kravitz, who plays Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman. “And he said, ‘You know, you walk out and you’re upset and your mouth is kind of open, because you’re breathing, because you’re emotional. And then you’re closing your mouth, but we’re just kind of getting rid of the emotion, just slightly. So try to just keep your mouth relaxed the same way.’ But then I watched back and I can see the difference. And I was like, ‘You are a freak and I love it.’”
Besides directing The Batman, Reeves co-wrote the script with Peter Craig. “Every day, night and day, he eats, drinks, sleeps Batman, and all the characters in this mythology,” says Colin Farrell, who plays Oz, aka The Penguin. “He’s no doubt hunched over a monitor as we speak, still finishing putting the final touches together.”
“Matt is the most specific person and director I’ve ever worked with,” adds Kravitz. “And I really think it’s one of his biggest strengths. I think sometimes he beats himself up about it, because he can probably drive himself almost crazy sometimes. But his specificity is really beautiful, especially in a film like this where it can be so easy to just focus on the big action sequences or the explosions. And he will pay attention to the way you put down a cup.”
A puzzle is its pieces. A mystery is its clues. The Batman is assembled and informed by Reeves’ reverence for films released in his 1970s childhood — conspiratorial thrillers including Klute, Chinatown, and All the President’s Men.
Every detail is important, because this Batman, more than any before it, is a detective story.
Disappearing
In the 1950s, Reeves’ dad got a Super 8 camera. His sister, 13 years older, married a New York detective, and together they had a huge family, and Reeves’ dad shot their home movies. Eventually, he gave the camera to his father-in-law, Reeves’ grandfather.
If that sounds overly complicated, just remember:
Detective.
Camera.
Matt Reeves was born in 1966, the same year the Batman TV series premiered. His parents soon moved from New York to Los Angeles. But his father hadn’t completely left his old life behind.
“There was always a bit of that kind of volatile New Yorker in him,” says Reeves. “Which to me is very Gotham.”
One day, when his grandparents were visiting from the East Coast, the family went to Marineland, a tourist attraction where guests could watch killer whale shows, feed seals, pet dolphins, and snorkel in a vast aquarium filled with fish — even sharks.
“I saw these tourists filming the dolphins with their camera,” says Reeves. “And the idea so tickled me — I was like, Oh my God, here we are seeing the dolphins, but they’re filming them. So they’re going to bring the dolphins home. And anytime they want, they’ll be able to put the dolphins on their wall. It blew me away. That concept was so exciting to me.
“And my grandfather said, ‘Well, you know, I have a little wind-up eight-millimeter camera — do you want it?’” Reeves recalls. “So when they went back to New York, they sent it back to me.”
The camera became an escape.
“I just started making movies on this little windup camera. And it was like, that became for me, the tool of socialization, the way of creating meaning, of having a little control, of doing something creative. So a camera became my lifeline, to be honest with you. I got very into movies from a young age.”
He took to filmmaking almost immediately.
“I remember one of the first things I did was — and my mother even to this day still talks about it as if it was miraculous, and of course, anyone that knows anything about cameras knows that of course it isn’t — but I took the camera, I didn’t have a tripod, and I put it on this little brick wall that was in front of our apartment building. I wound it up, I turned it on, I stood there, and then it turned off. And then I moved and turned it back on, and made myself disappear. And I showed my mother and she was like, ‘Oh my God, he’s a genius.’”
“The kind of manipulation that you can do with a camera is magical,” he discovered. “And I think for me, that magic is something that just got in my blood very early.”
Reality could be harder.
“My parents… had a very volatile relationship,” he says. “And they fought bitterly at times.”
“I love my parents,” he explains. “I think they loved each other deeply. But they also were deeply wounded by each other. And it was something that honestly never resolved.”
“And also, I was shy,” he adds. “And so as a kid, you know, moviemaking was a way for me to — it was a bridge for me to go up to someone and say, ‘Hey, you want to make a movie?,’ which I would never have had the courage to do if I didn’t have the cover of the camera. That’s the metaphor for friendship, right?”
One of Reeves’ films, 2008’s Cloverfield, is built around one character agreeing to videotape his friends at a party because it will give him an excuse to talk with his crush. Another of his films, 2010’s Let Me In, a remake of the 2008 Swedish film Let the Right One In, includes a scene when bullies mock a little boy, calling him a little girl.
“That was very personal for me, because I always, you can even see now, I have a high voice. I’m often mistaken on the phone for being a woman,” he says. “And some kids were pretty brutal to me.”
One of the friends he made through filmmaking was J.J. Abrams. They got their films on public access TV by their early teens, then into a 1982 Los Angeles film festival at the Nuart Theatre, highlighting 8mm films made by teens. They drew the attention of Steven Spielberg, who enlisted Abrams and Reeves to clean up the Super 8 films that he himself had made as a teen. Then Reeves got into USC, where one of his films was scheduled to play at the First Look showcase. Agents would be there, and producers, and assistants, looking for the next Spielberg.
But his parents would also be there. And at the time of the festival, a restraining order required them to stay 150 feet apart from each other.
“That moment in time for a film student is a critical moment. And the thing that I was thinking of the most that night was that both my parents would be under the same roof in that theater. And I thought of them as antimatter and matter. And I thought, if they get too close, this whole place will blow up.”
The tension between his parents never ended, until his father’s death in 2016. But Reeves had escaped into the world of moviemaking.
An assistant to director-producer Ed Zwick had seen his student film. So had an agent at CAA. He was on his way. And he had spent his childhood and teenage years accumulating a fierce and abundant film knowledge that would fuel everything that would come next, including:
—the 1994 David Schwimmer-Gwyneth Paltrow comedy The Pallbearer, which Reeves made in his late 20s, aspiring to a “Hal Ashby sad comedy, you know, that kind of thing”;
—Felicity, the beloved Keri Russell college drama Reeves and Abrams created together;
—the Abrams-produced Cloverfield, which proved Reeves could lead an emotionally grounded blockbuster;
—Let Me In, which displayed his gift for finding deeply personal meaning from others’ original material;
—two smash Planet of the Apes sequels, which embraced and escalated the original franchise’s big questions about what it means to be human.
And now, the biggest movie of them all.
Welcome to Gotham
Syndicated Batman episodes provided a joyous, colorful backdrop to many 1970s childhoods. But also lurking in the background were frequent references to something called Watergate, a real-life cynical political drama that in 1974 brought down the president of the United States.
Two key characters in The Batman — Gotham Mayor Don Mitchell Jr. (Rupert Penry-Jones) and District Attorney Gil Colson (Peter Sarsgaard) — share last names with key figures in the Watergate scandal, which is portrayed in the 1976 ripped-from-the-headlines film All the President’s Men. In real life, President Nixon’s advisor and hatchet man, Chuck Colson, was the first member of the administration to be imprisoned for his political dirty work. John N. Mitchell was Nixon’s campaign manager, a proponent of “law and order” sentenced to prison for multiple Watergate-related crimes. News of the scandal broke thanks in large part to the work of sleuthing reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the movie, which was directed by Alan J. Pakula and written by William Goldman, based on Woodward and Bernstein’s book).
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Ask Matt Reeves if there’s any significance to his use of the names Colson and Mitchell, and you’ll see how methodically he’s thought everything through.
“I wanted to do a story in which the corruption of Gotham was one of the most important aspects of the story, because Gotham is a sick place. Bruce is desperate to try and make a change,” says Reeves. “He’s still stuck, to be honest, emotionally stunted at being 10 years old, because that’s a trauma you don’t get past—witnessing your parents murder in this place.
“He’s looking to create meaning, right? This is the only meaning he can find. …I think he imagines that if he can do this, somehow he can reverse what’s happened, which will never be reversed. This is a very human impulse, right? To try and relive something and remake it.”
Reeves notes that from the first appearance of Batman — Detective Comics #27, published in May 1939 —creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger presented him as a noir figure, in line with the other hard-charging detectives of the novels, comics and films of World War II and the postwar era.
The comics would eventually come to describe him as the World’s Greatest Detective.
“This idea of a place that is corrupt, and you try to swim against the tide in order to fight against it and make a difference, is quintessential Batman. And at the center of those noir stories is almost always the detective, right? And that’s why he is the world’s greatest detective. And so this story is, in addition to being almost a horror movie, and a thriller, and an action movie, at its core, it’s also very much a detective story. It’s very narrative.”
Wright concurs: “Matt built an architecture within his script that was extremely well-considered.”
Pattinson was impressed that all the detective talk wasn’t just lip service.
“In the first meeting, he was saying, we want to lean into the ‘world’s greatest detective aspect,’ and be a detective noir movie,” he says. “And, you know, normally when directors say that, they just do like
a mood board, and it’s just about the imagery. But I read the script, and it is! It’s a detective movie. It happens all the time in the graphic novels, but it’s always kind of on the backburner in the movies.”
The film noir of the 1930s and ’40s was a major point of reference for Roman Polanski’s 1974 neo-noir Chinatown, in which Jack Nicholson’s cynical private detective, Jake Gittes, realizes that Los Angeles is even more crooked than he imagined.
“Chinatown is a kind of metaphor for just how corrupt we are,” says Reeves.
“And so I knew that this story was going to be, as he went on this path, to come to understand these crimes that he’s being led on by the Riddler — it needed to go back ultimately into a sense of expansive history that started to explain why this place was this way in a way that, while it starts seemingly on this path that’s impersonal, because he’s investigating these crimes, it ends up taking him in unexpected ways to something that was incredibly personal.”
He didn’t want to do another origin story — we’ve all seen Bruce Wayne’s parents die outside a theater, inspiring his crusade against crime.
“There had to be a very deep conspiracy going on. And so I watched All the President’s Men, I re-read the book, and I just started saying, OK, so how do we start to describe just how high the corruption went? It’s very much like All the President’s Men in that way.”
Enter another dark icon of the 1970s: the never-identified Zodiac Killer who taunted the Bay Area detectives who tried in vain to stop him. The Zodiac inspired The Riddler, played in The Batman by Paul Dano.
“The premise of the movie is that the Riddler is kind of molded in an almost Zodiac Killer sort of mode, and is killing very prominent figures in Gotham, and they are the pillars of society. These are supposedly legitimate figures. It begins with the mayor, and then it escalates from there. And in the wake of the murders, he reveals the ways in which these people were not everything they said they were, and you start to realize there’s some kind of association. And so just like Woodward and Bernstein, you’ve got Gordon and Batman trying to follow the clues to try and make sense of this thing in a classic kind-of-detective story way.
“I wanted bits of those names because I wanted the conspiracy to come with that forcefulness of history and believability for me,” Reeves explains.
Hence, Colson and Mitchell.
Follow the Money
All The President’s Men was the third film in Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy,” which began with 1971’s Klute. In the film, Jane Fonda plays a matter-of-fact call girl stalked by a killer. Donald Sutherland plays a private detective who tries to save her. He is smart and determined, but also naive.
Reeves and Kravitz talked about Klute a lot.
“That film kind of became a Bible for me in terms of tone and the relationship between the two of them, and that’s one of the most incredible performances I’ve ever seen—Jane Fonda just blows me away,” says Kravitz.
“Also, one of my favorite actors is Donald Sutherland,” says Reeves. “And what I love about Donald Sutherland in that movie is he judges her — he judges her and yet he falls in love with her.
“And I just thought that there was something about that, that related to what I thought could be a Batman-Selina Kyle story. He doesn’t understand… what it takes to survive in this place. What you have to do just to survive in a place this rough.”
Like Bruce Wayne, Selina Kyle has no super powers. Both rely on their tenacity, deductive skills, and courage. But Bruce is super rich, and Selina has nothing.
“Selina has had a very difficult life, and has lived on the street, and is trying to survive,” says Kravitz. “She really knows how scary the world is. Just based off of certain things that Batman says, she can tell he grew up wealthy.”
“It’s a really interesting dynamic, and yet, they are very similar. And that really is about them having similar values and being people who do want to take what they believe in into their own hands. They’ve both also felt like outsiders their entire lives. But I think she has a much harsher view of the world, maybe a nihilistic view.”
Reeves says Selina helps Bruce realize how much he’s taken for granted.
“It takes a very special safety net to even be able to do what he’s doing. Yes, OK: He’s risking his life, but he’s risking his life in the way that only someone who has all the resources that he has can do. He absolutely has privilege, there’s no question. He was born with privilege. He is a descendant of city royalty.
“I wanted him to have an awakening of sorts where he would question her about what she was doing,” he says. “And she says, you know, I don’t know who you are. But whoever you are, you obviously grew up rich.”
Overlooked
Then there’s that other well-regarded film from the 1970s. Reeves’ filmmaking heroes include Martin Scorsese, Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, and Francis Ford Coppola — whose The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, widely regarded as two of the greatest films of all time, influenced The Batman in a surprising way.
Colin Farrell, like Reeves, first knew Batman from the campy TV series. One of the more outlandish characters in the Caped Crusader’s rotating rogues gallery of villains was The Penguin, portrayed by a scenery- and quellazaire-chomping Burgess Meredith as a grumpy, gaudy parody of an aristocrat, with a top hat, tuxedo, tails, monocle, long cigarette, and predilections for birds, ice, and bat-traps that never quite work.
Reeves saw him differently.
Colin Farrell’s Oz, who prefers not to be called The Penguin, is the shady proprietor of The Iceberg Lounge, a Gotham underworld hangout, doing the bidding of reclusive crime lord Carmine Falcone.
“There’s a certain amount of brokenness in Oz that, I think, as a reference, not for me performance-wise, but just emotionally, as a reference for Matt — I think Fredo from The Godfather was a bit of a reference,” says Farrell.
Played by John Cazale, Fredo Corleone is the weak son of Vito Corleone, who is stepped over by his more capable younger brother, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), and in turn betrays him. Farrell’s performance is by no means an imitation of Cazale’s — he’s doing something entirely new, and is unrecognizable thanks to the work of makeup artist Mike Marino. But he shares Fredo’s sense of being stepped over.
“Matt was just talking about somebody who had very real and very lofty ambitions, but never really had the opportunity or the chance to explore them, and was maybe looked upon as someone who was handicapped, whether it was psychologically, intellectually — Fredo was frowned upon as less than the other brothers, and maybe Oz as well, in his life, was looked upon as somebody who wasn’t capable,” says Farrell. “And so that’s one of the things that fuels Oz.”
Memory Cloth
While Batman may share moral clarity and mental acuity with Jake Gittes, Woodward and Bernstein, and John Klute, none of those screen heroes share Batman’s peculiar modus operandi.
Bruce Wayne is a man for whom, for some reason, bat-ears feel essential to the war on crime.
One reason the Batman TV show worked so well — with its bright, skin-tight costumes, punny exchanges, and the BAM!-SOCK!-POW! fight scenes — is that it acknowledged the absurdity of a man dressing up in tights to battle a penguin impersonator, a succession of Catwomen, and a Joker played by a makeup-caked actor (Cesar Romero) who couldn’t be troubled to shave off his mustache. It was a playful comedy.
Tim Burton’s Batman films celebrated the grotesquerie of Gotham, treating Batman as a kind of earnest, steely ringmaster trying to corral a menagerie of freaks. His Batsuit looked restrained compared to Nicholson’s tacky Joker, Danny DeVito’s ghastly Penguin, and Michelle Pfeiffer’s glossy, mischievous Catwoman. Joel Schumacher’s Batman films went for comedy again, embracing garish colors, hammy performances by the likes of Jim Carrey as The Riddler and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze, and, at Batman’s cinematic low point, a nippled Batsuit.
Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy pulled things hard back to reality, coolly and logically justifying even the most bizarre aspects of the Batman myth. In Nolan’s Batman Begins, inventor Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) understatedly introduces a lightweight fabric called “memory cloth” that might be helpful for “BASE-jumping.” It becomes the cape that helps Batman (Christian Bale) leap from tall buildings. Other accoutrements are similarly justified. Why does he dress like a bat? “Bats frighten me,” Bale’s Bruce Wayne explains. “It’s time my enemies share my dread.”
No matter how well-made they are, one thing that tends to separate Batman movies from the kinds of films that Oscar voters like is the idea of a vigilante disguising himself as a scary animal, a childish image many cineastes just can’t get past.
“Even in the early comics, there was something which I really liked,” says Pattinson. ”In a lot of the early tellings of it, he’s just sitting at home and a bat just smashes through the window, and he’s like, ‘That’s it!’ I’ll be a bat!’”
He laughs. “That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.”
The Batman script, Pattinson explains, finally embraces the madness. “There’s an element in the other iterations of the story where Bruce goes off, does his training, masters himself and then comes back to Gotham as a fully realized character and the delineation between Bruce and Batman — the public Bruce, the private Bruce, and the Batman Bruce — are very contained and he can control them more easily,” says Pattinson. “And in this, the lines have totally blurred. His self as Bruce is sort of disintegrating.”
After his massive breakout success in the Twilight movies, Pattinson took care to prove himself outside of big franchises. He disappeared into the role of a bearded, bespectacled, deeply beleaguered early 20th century explorer in James Gray’s 2016 film The Lost City of Z, and the next year played ferociously against type as a desperate criminal dirtbag in Josh and Benny Safdie’s mesmerizing crime thriller Good Time. Then he signed up for The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers’ slow-burn, black-and-white horror film.
Reeves and The Batman producer Dylan Clark took note.
“We’re like, he’s just making insanely bold choices, this guy. He went from being, very early on, in a giant franchise where he was a poster boy, to really pushing himself as an actor, working with incredibly talented directors and pushing himself all the way. And we just respected that,” says Clark.
Clark and Reeves started working together after Rupert Wyatt, director of the 2011 reboot Rise of the Planet of the Apes, didn’t return for a sequel. Clark, producer of the recent Apes films, met with Reeves, who went on to direct both 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes.
“He loved the Planet of the Apes television series. And my grandfather produced that,” Clark recalls. “The level of detail that he knew about the TV show was mind-blowing. He’s just a savant in those kinds of ways. The thing that just endeared me to him was just how emotional he felt about those characters on the TV show. And he loved what we had done with Rise.”
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When Ben Affleck, who had played Bruce Wayne/Batman in 2016’s Batman v Superman and the subsequent Justice League, decided not to go ahead with plans to direct and star in a solo Bat-film, Warner Bros. turned to Matt Reeves, who enlisted Clark to join him on the project.
Meanwhile, as questions swirled about who would replace Affleck under the cowl, Pattinson became fascinated by the idea of taking on the role.
What Pattinson didn’t know was that Reeves had begun writing The Batman with him in mind.
“Batman is an amazing myth that has endured for over 80 years,” says Reeves. “And it’s because of that crazy mix. There’s a part of it that is just simply cool, right? He looks cool. He’s got a cool car. He’s got all the stuff. He’s like James Bond, I guess, in a certain way, right? But there’s also something very relatable to the pain that he’s gone through.
“And so that, for me, was how you ground it — those aspects are part of the story. And this story emphasizes those things. This story pulls those things out. So that’s why I was so excited about Robert Pattinson because he’s such a wonderful actor. And I knew that he would be able to go on that search with me for the depth and complexity of this character. I mean, I knew he wasn’t going to play him straight ahead.
“In writing, from the beginning, I was imagining the character in my head. And I started watching movies of actors in the age range. And he just really kind of captivated me, and I started writing for him at a certain point. I had no idea if he ever would want to be in the movie.”
Reeves had spent many years resisting blockbusters, for fear of too many cooks and too many concessions to corporate demands. (“When the opportunity came to do Cloverfield, I said to J.J., I just want to understand why you want me to do this, because this fantastical part of it is not really the thing that I focus on,” says Reeves. “And he goes, ‘I know — you’re gonna make everything else real.”)
He worried that Pattinson might have a similar aversion to big-budget films.
“I’ve never auditioned for any comic book movies before,” Pattinson explains. “And at the time, even my agents thought it pretty out of character to just suddenly get fixated on Batman. And I didn’t even really know the status of the project.”
Around that time, Pattinson and Clark had a general meeting about potential collaborations, with no specific project in mind.
“We’re talking about 20 different things. And then he starts kind of saying, ‘So what’s going on with Batman?’” Clark says.
Adds Pattinson: “I had no idea that Matt had seen Good Time and thought, ‘I want to do a really dirty, dirty, slimy Batman.’”
“It was a kind of almost fated thing,” says Reeves. “Of course, at that point, we were still working on the script. And so there was nothing to share. But I met with him probably about eight months later, and I shared the script, and we just really connected.”
Bam Sock Pow
And then, despite all your planning, sometimes you lose control.
In March 2020, about two months into production, The Batman became one of countless films that shut down due to the then-mysterious coronavirus. It was one of the most scrutinized productions in the world, and one of the major films that Hollywood looked to as a test of how dramatically moviemaking might change because of the pandemic. Interest in The Batman was so high that Pattinson set off a fandom kerfluffle when he self-effacingly told GQ, in an interview conducted from quarantine, that he wasn’t actually working out that much for the role. “I think if you’re working out all the time, you’re part of the problem,” he told the magazine.
He was being dryly funny, not that anyone noticed.
“That really came back to haunt me. I just always think it’s really embarrassing to talk about how you’re working out,” he says, laughing about it now. “I think it’s like an English thing. Unless you are in the most unbelievable shape, where people are just genuinely curious, going, ‘How have you achieved, like, physical perfection?’ or whatever.”
He further clarifies: “You’re playing Batman. You have to work out.” He laughs again. “I think I was doing the interview when I was in lockdown, as well, in England. … I was in a lower gear of working out.”
It’s not the first time an offhand comment from Pattinson has been taken too seriously.
“It’s the same thing as saying in an interview when I was like 21 that I didn’t wash my hair,” he laughs. “It just sticks for 15 years.”
The attention was nothing compared to the headlines in September 2020, when shooting resumed, then had to pause again because of a positive COVID test for an unnamed member of the production.
The production kept everything very tight when filming resumed.
“It was like a military operation,” recalls Pattinson.
“We had earpieces in to have direction a lot of the time to kind of limit the amount of interactions. The most odd thing is that a lot of scenes had no one behind the camera, because we were trying — if it was already a setup, they’d just be remotely controlling it. Odd. Especially when you’re on a big set — just no one around at all. That took a lot of getting used to.”
Pattinson remembers it being very busy, intense and dark.
“We were basically in night shoots the whole time. I can’t even tell if people were there or not. And also your peripheral vision inside the cowl — I could hardly tell if there was anyone there or not.”
Kravitz felt the isolation as well.
“We all had to adjust to what that felt like — to be on set and to have to wear masks, to not see the crew’s faces, and not be able to just sit and chat with the crew and stuff. It became very impersonal in a way. So that was a little bit sad, because I love getting to know the crews I work with, and hanging out with them.
“I think we were all just happy to be there. But everyone was working really, really hard, and going home, and not able to go anywhere to let off steam or even go to a dinner, especially,” she says. “We were all supposed to be bubbling and stuff. I was very thankful to be there at all. But it was definitely bizarre.”
Wright remembers Reeves remaining “on point” throughout the COVID challenges — “and very passionate.”
“This process is a big behemoth that he was shouldering and in a really challenging environment,” Wright says. “But he was a fully masked, fully protected bull in pulling us through this thing.”
Stop
And while COVID compounded every problem, it wasn’t the only challenge to overcome.
Reeves recalls one scene, during the COVID stage of production, where some dialogue between Kravitz and Sarsgaard just didn’t gel.
“One of the things I think that I’ve learned is to never be afraid to just stop. Don’t get carried away with the energy of something. Because if you do, you might find yourself being carried down a current that’s totally wrong.
“We were shooting a scene with Peter Sarsgaard and Zoë, and it was something that was a beat we talked about in rehearsal. And Peter had said, ‘I’m not sure about this.’ And I was like, ‘No, I think it can work,’ and I had tracked in my head how it could work. And we started doing it, and it was clear, it didn’t work. And we were shooting it. I was like: We’re either going to shoot this, and I’ll be back here six months later, or something bad is gonna be in our movie. And I can’t allow that.
“And so I just said, OK, it’s not working, let’s stop.’ And then when we stopped, I just took out a piece of paper, and started trying to rework the dialogue. And we all were together, and I was trying to figure out where it wasn’t working. And I always think that that’s very important. That’s almost the scariest thing for some people to do — to stop when you’ve got, like, 500 people going, ‘What’s next?’”
“I do remember that scene, and do feel like it wasn’t working,” says Kravitz. “And he didn’t give up. This is what I love about Matt, you know? We sat down and we figured it out. We sat down for a while. And we just looked at the scene and talked it over and kind of ripped it apart.
“It was a dialogue thing. It was a story thing. It wasn’t flowing, right? We had been shooting for a few hours. And so the fact that he was willing to just say, ‘OK, let’s just stop and start from scratch’ — and basically rewrite this scene — that’s the level of care.
“He’s like, ‘What’s the point? We’re here, we’re doing this, we’ve written the script, we’ve gotten the money, we’re here, we’re in COVID. Let’s get the scene, right, you know?’ ”
She adds: “It’s scary to sit down in the middle of shooting, and after shooting the scene for three hours, to stop and rip it apart. But he will do that.”
You need to stop, Reeves says, “to get that compass to function again.”
That’s probably the biggest lesson that I learned. The thing that enables me to stop is to have a level of an internal understanding enough to be able to have a compass. And so that’s what I’m always looking for, is how to find a way to do something that might be genre, and then finding a way to make it personal. And if I can find that, then I can do that story. And that’s why Batman was a perfect one for me.”
The Batman, directed by Matt Reeves, is scheduled to open in theaters on March 4, from Warner Bros. Photos by Jonathan Olley/DC Comics