In recent weeks, comments from director Matt Reeves on the ’emotionality’ and ‘Hitchcockian’ nature of what will be his take on The Batman were met with an overwhelmingly positive response — a welcome turn of events for the DCEU’s Caped Crusader after Ben Affleck stepped down as director, leading to a delay in production.
In a recent interview with Yahoo Movies, Reeves seemed to have hit the right notes yet again. Alfred Hitchcock aside, the War for the Planet of the Apes director said Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy has been a inspiration for what one can do with genre filmmaking.
“What I love that [Nolan] did was that he took the genre seriously … What studios are willing to make at the moment is a very, very narrow band of films. What I discovered is that this genre has the potential to be about something more. You can use the metaphors of the genre to talk about [a lot].”
Matt Reeves is no stranger to capitalizing on the potential of a property either, especially in a trilogy format — with the third installment of the Planet of the Apes reboots, after taking over the franchise on its second movie, hitting theaters on July 11. Reeves has already drawn comparisons in the characters of Batman and Caesar, but the similarities seem to go deeper.
“I think that the metaphors of both of the franchises [Batman and Apes] enable you to tell stories that have deep emotional resonance. That’s actually what excites me about it. It’s interesting because I was obsessed with both as a child, and yet there is something potentially very adult about what you can explore under the cover of that fantasy. That is what draws me to it, and that’s what I’m excited about.”
What Matt Reeves has done with the Apes franchise is not unlike Nolan’s take on Batman either. Reeves has injected deep themes that make his installments much more than just a movie about talking monkeys, while still keeping the feel of a blockbuster — something Nolan managed to do with Batman. Nolan’s ability to work with a major studio like Warner Bros. and still manage to keep an identity as a filmmaker is also not something lost on Reeves and is especially relevant today when looking to examples such as Edgar Wright with his Ant-Man film or Phil Lord and Chris Miller leaving the Han Solo project over the dreaded “creative differences.”
“I think the other thing that I really admire in what [Nolan] did was knowing what it is to make a big studio film,” Reeves concludes, “which often can fall into that sense of committee filmmaking where there’s an anonymity to the point of view of the film.”
The Batman has yet to receive a release date, so stay tuned for more updates.
Source: Yahoo Movies
