Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy may be one of the best, most surprising superhero tales of all time, but—according to co-creator David S. Goyer—it almost looked very different. Instead of Christian Bale’s gritty, brooding take on the titular vigilante, we could have had Jake Gyllenhaal’s… probably equally heady take on the character. This is still a Christopher Nolan film, after all.
“There were a number of people who screen tested, and I had advocated for Gyllenhaal,” said Goyer—who co-wrote Batman Begins and story-crafted The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises—on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast (via Variety). “I mean, Gyllenhaal is amazing. Christian Bale is amazing. So who knows,” he clarified.
Jake Gyllenhaal wasn’t the only actor denied entry to Gotham. “After The Dark Knight, the head of Warner Bros. at the premiere said, ‘You’ve got to do the Riddler. Leo as the Riddler. You’ve got to tell Chris, Leo as the Riddler,’” Goyer recalled. “I was like, ‘Dude, that’s not the way we work.’” (That’s “taking nothing away from [DiCaprio],” of course, according to Goyer.)
Nolan, who Goyer called “very process driven,” was vehemently against “the sense that, with the Spider-Man movies or when superhero movies started getting made… that the studios would alway say, ‘Who’s our villain of the next movie going to be? Let’s build a movie around that.’” Nolan apparently preferred a much more “naturalistic” approach, in which he and Goyer would “figure out what kind of story we want to tell… and then figure out a villain that fits that story.” It’s “one of the things that in hindsight was revolutionary,” Goyer said.
As such, since the late Heath Ledger’s Joker had challenged Bruce Wayne “intellectually” in The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises needed a “brute,” which the team eventually found in Bane. Here’s another “dirty little secret of The Dark Knight Rises”: “It’s kind of modeled after Rocky III. You’ve gotta get knocked down to get back up.”
You can watch Goyer’s full “Happy Sad Confused” interview here:
