Darren Aronofsky talks about his ideas for the abandoned Batman: Year One.
It’s almost become the norm that news of the development of the next Batman movie comes in the don of often unsubstantiated rumours. With the involvement of lead actor Ben Affleck in doubt and more recently director Matt Reeves’ confusing statements over whether the movie will be part of the DC Extended Universe or a standalone movie, as the new Joker Origins movie is reported to be.
With the recent development hiccups it’s easy to forget that a lot of proposed Batman projects have failed to get out of the development stages. Perhaps one of the most interesting and different proposals would be Darren Aronofsky’s vision of the caped crusader with his “Batman: Year One project.
It’s fair to say that Aronofsky had a clear mission statement to make a movie unlike any of the Batman movies we’d seen before. His version would have been an R rated film with Bruce Wayne no longer a millionaire playboy but rather an inner city homeless character after he was swindled out of his inheritance. Aronofsky recently spoke about why he thought the project never got made and named his number one choice for the role;
“It’s funny, I think we were just sort of out of time with our idea. I understood that [with] comics, there’s room for all different types of titles, but I think Hollywood at that time was still in the Golden Age of comics, and they were still just doing the classic titles in classic ways. I think audiences now, they’ve seen enough comic films that they’re game for that, so I think we were a little bit out of time for our idea. I always wanted Joaquin Phoenix for Batman.”
Whilst Phoenix never got his chance to don the cape and cowl, the director believes that this was only down to his pitch being ahead of its time;
“You know what, I think it’s finally… I think we were basically — whatever it is — 15 years too early. Because I hear the way they’re talking about the Joker movie and that’s exactly — that was my pitch. I was like: we’re going to shoot in East Detroit and East New York. We’re not building Gotham. The Batmobile — I wanted to be a Lincoln Continental with two bus engines in it.”
The project also had Frank Miller on board on writing duties and as well as the change of financial circumstances for Bruce Wayne, a change in his (at that time) no killing policy was also said to be off the table. Aronofsky has obviously kept tabs on the comic book movie world and stated;
“I think we were ahead of our time. And I was always like; why can’t we make a more lower-budget rated-R [movie], just like in comics you have different brands but and now they’re finally doing that. They’re doing the spinoffs, which is great. This is an exciting time because they’ll be able to take more risks and we won’t be seeing the same superhero movie over and over again. You’ll get things like Deadpool, which was a relief as compared to seeing the same film over and over again.”
Source:
Yahoo Movies, Cinemablend.