Christopher Nolan was “on the fence” about directing The Dark Knight

Christopher Nolan has one of the best superhero trilogies under his belt with Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises, but he once considered calling it quits after the first movie.

Jonathan Nolan recently sat down with Dax Shepard on the Armchair Expert podcast and explained that he had to push for his brother to return for The Dark Knight. “Chris was on the fence about making another one,” Jonathan said. “He didn’t want to become a superhero movie director.” While Jonathan said Chris was “very proud” of Batman Begins, he was also ready to move on to another project and needed some convincing to come back for more.

“We spent an hour telling the origin story, and that’s great, but it’s like, ‘what [more] can we do with this?’” Jonathan recalled telling Chris. “Can we take the same characters and shift ever so slightly into a different genre? Can we go from an adventure film to a crime film, to a mob movie, and bring that feeling into it?“

Jonathan continued: “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!’ 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.“

It’s hard to imagine Christopher Nolan not being the one to direct The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, but it sounds like it could have been a very real possibility. In a separate interview with Josh Horowtiz, Jonathan Nolan also confirmed rumours that they had discussed using the Riddler as the villain for the final movie but ultimately decided the character might have been too close to the Joker. “It did feel like it was close enough to the space of what we’d done with Heath [Ledger] that you really needed to… shift there,” Nolan explained. Back in the day, the studio was pushing for Leonardo DiCaprio to play the Riddler.