Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Spider-Man's probably my favorite. You see, Batman is a billionaire and there's nothing really cool about a billionaire saving the world. But Spider-Man is Peter Parker, a conflicted character who puts on a suit and saves the world. I love that.
I don't own an ounce of the work I've ever done on 'Batman,' and I still work on 'Batman.' I love the character, I think it's a lot of fun, and it's kind of fun to be in that ballpark every once in a while, where you're seeing a different crowd.
So many heroes are driven by destiny. Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, they were all chosen and born to heroism. Even with Batman, it doesn't feel like Bruce could do anything else. His whole life was leading him to become the Dark Knight.
I was chosen for 'Wolverine' because there weren't any other Japanese actresses available who could speak English. With 'Batman v Superman' and 'Hannibal,' I got the roles as a result of previous work I'd done, not just because of my nationality.
I'm a big Batman fan; to be honest, to be a part of any superhero movie would really fulfill all of my childhood fantasies. If I could get beaten up by Batman, and just be part of the franchise, even getting kicked through a window would be great!
My absolute favorite growing up was 'Super Friends.' The assemblage of so many mighty heroes in one place was, to me, mind-blowing. It was Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Aquaman, and then sometimes Hawkman and some other, lesser heroes.
Of all the things I've done, the first 'Strongman' story was one of the easiest things to write. It was almost fully formed from the get-go. It's almost a 'Dark Knight Returns' riff, except you have a battle-worn Mexican wrestler instead of Batman.
It's truly an honor to get to write Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman and all those great people, but when you can take something that's not well thought of and make it something that people do think highly of, that's much more gratifying, I think.
I was playing the villain 'Falseface' on Batman, and I got wind that they were going to pay a young starlet $25,000 to be in the same episode. Well, I wasn't getting anywhere near that amount of money, so I refused to let them put my name in the credits.
My father worked in Chrysler's drafting department and used to bring home tracing paper, No. 2 pencils, and masking tape from the office. With these, I used to trace off drawings from the 'Superman' and 'Batman' comics and put them up on my bedroom walls.
Thanks to the comic book publishers. Batman and Captain Marvel were responsible for my learning to read at least a year before I showed up at school. They got me interested in writing. Started my first novel at about eight. The title: 'The Canals of Mars.'
'Batman Begins' came out and it was really successful, and it had gritty naturalism. And suddenly... I can't tell you how many movies I was pitched where it was, 'We want to do what you did with 'Batman' but with 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,' or whatever.
Superman is the hardest character to draw. There are a couple of things that make him difficult. He's got a very simple costume and doesn't have the long cape like Batman. He's not a character that is necessarily always in shadow, and he doesn't have a mask.
I'm incredibly grateful to be playing the villain in a world which, if I really thought to hard about what I was doing, I would get very nervous about the size and the magnitude of the importance and responsibility of being a villain in the world of 'Batman.'
You can have villains like the Penguin, who strut around in a tuxedo with an umbrella, and Poison Ivy and all of the fantastic stuff she does, but unless there's a bit of a human in there, and unless there's a credible threat, then Batman himself doesn't work.
For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously. He's not from another planet, or filled with radioactive gunk. I mean, Superman is essentially a god, but Batman is more like Hercules: he's a human being, very flawed, and bridges the divide.
In Hollywood, the guy who plays Batman and Spiderman also plays normal characters. The biggest stars in the world want to play different characters. We can't give the excuse that because an actor played a superhero in his previous film, his next one won't work.
I can easily come up with ten really iconic stories/trade paperbacks for Superman, Batman, others... name me ten equally big, iconic Wonder Woman stories. Much harder. That ain't the character's fault, that isn't sexism, that's just not servicing the character.
Persistence is half the battle. That's what I love about independent movies. They don't have to be made. There's no studio with an agenda to set up a franchise like 'Batman' or to make a vehicle for a celebrity actor. My films are made because I love the process.
I want to play everything. I want to be like Christian Bale: I want to be able to be Batman and then, like, his character in 'The Fighter.' That is what is so impressive about really good actors, that they can be character actors and leading men at the same time.
I always used to put on plays when I was younger for my family to watch, when I was 10 or something. I used to force older members of my family to watch the plays and younger members of my family to be characters in the plays - and my personal favorite was Batman.
I think Wonder Woman is a very difficult character to crack. More difficult than Superman, who is also more difficult than Batman. Also, a lot of people in Hollywood believe that it's hard to do a big action movie with a female lead. I happen to disagree with that.
Don't treat your heart like an action figure wrapped in plastic and never used. And don't try to give me that nerd argument that your heart is a 'Batman' with a limited-edition silver bat-erang and therefore if it stays in its original packing it increases in value.
Some of the greatest actors have turned superheroes into a serious business: Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson in 'Batman'; Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, the first venerable knights of the X-Men, who have now passed the baton to Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy.
The appeal of the Golden Age heroes for me is their simplicity, even their naivety - they represent the fundamental building blocks of the whole superhero genre, whether it's a 'super' man able to lift cars, or a vigilante who terrorises criminals at night like Batman.
The thing about 'Dark Knight' is its objective is to set Batman into your world, so that you can imagine the moral dilemmas he faces are exactly parallel to moral dilemmas that you would face in this world, today, if you were out there fighting crime dressed like a bat.
It's funny, you know: my mother-in-law, who doesn't have an ounce of nerd in her, is just so excited by the fact that I write 'Batman' because she'll see an article about me in the 'Washington Post' or 'The Wall Street Journal' or something. And that means so much to me.
One of my favorite things, coming of age, reading comics, was these ideologies and these philosophies of these characters. Seeing those on the page really represented in amazing ways some of my favorite 'Batman' comics like 'The Killing Joke' or 'The Dark Knight Returns.'
Certainly as a kid, I grew up with Batman, Superman, whoever - they didn't need to be black for me to relate to them. But when a character like Cyborg came along, I got excited, because he looked a little bit more like me; his experiences were a little bit more like mine.
Batman gets close to the insanity of Gotham, to the craziness, to what drives that city mad, and not be driven mad himself - or, at least, most of the time he isn't. That's most like the mission of the C.I.A. We get into the heads of our enemies without becoming our enemy.
In truth, I've never been a big superhero fan. I don't mind some of the movies, and a couple of the cartoons were alright - that Batman series from the early nineties where Mark Hamill voiced the Joker is sweetness. But largely, I've not really had much time for superheroes.
It's about the characters, it's about the film, it's about the process of making stunning visuals and a huge, epic movie. It doesn't matter if my head was covered in a black plastic bag and I was bouncing around in a space hopper: That's the villain of Chris Nolan's 'Batman!'
When I started writing 'Batman,' I lobbied heavily to get rid of Robin - or at least not use him in the stories I wrote. Fighting crime with a teenager dressed in primary colors while you're sporting a gray-and-black outfit always struck me as child endangerment, if not abuse.
I think writers process their own experiences through the characters and situations they write. So for Batman, I used my own experience of losing a loved one. Grief is a strange place; it's like an altered state. You might sleep too much, so you can see the dead in your dreams.
There is a scene in one comic from the '60s-'70s where Batman finds a film, a newsreel film, of his father. This newsreel film is from the '50s, and his father has come to this costume ball in a Zorro costume, which strangely enough looks a lot like a Batman suit in the footage.
What Christopher Nolan and I have done with 'Superman' is try to bring the same naturalistic approach that we adopted for the 'Batman' trilogy. We always had a naturalistic approach; we want our stories to be rooted in reality, like they could happen in the same world we live in.
If you love Tarzan, you can read stories from the 'Jungle Tales of Tarzan,' where he's just a kid, all the way up until he has a son of his own and beyond. Same with 'Batman' - you can follow him from Gotham, as a kid, to 'Dark Knight,' as a cranky old weirdo. I really love that.
As it turned out, if you look at the history, everything in superhero comic books pretty much lies between Superman and Batman: Superman being the greatest superhero there is, and Batman being the one of the few superheroes who has no superpowers and is, in fact, not a superhero.
'The Cape' is a really good comic! They invented the whole character, and now they've built a book of 'The Cape' for the show. When I was a kid, I used to love Batman, and I loved Spider-Man. My favorite was this guy called Judge Dredd. I know they made a movie of that in the '90s.
Looking at the Batman pages is like revisiting my youth. My first seven years in New York were the first seven years of Batman itself. While my time on Batman was important and exciting and notable considering the characters that came out of it, it was really just the start of my life.
My youngest son has a very clear idea of what he wants to be when he grows up: he wants to be Indiana Jones, Batman and Jack Sparrow. Yes, all three at the same time. So he basically wants to be an archaeologist who wears tights and fights crimes on pirate ships. That's pretty cool, huh?
There was a time when 'Batman' really kept me from getting some pretty good roles, and I was asked to do what I figured were important features. However, Batman was there, and very few people would take a chance on me walking onto the screen. And they'd be taking people away from the story.
When you grow up looking at Superman, Batman, and all those superheroes, you take it for granted that is what superheroes are supposed to be. So then, when I see art books at the library, and I'm seeing Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo and Rembrandt, I think that's what artists look like.
I was doing a tour of the 'Batman' live stage production, and I challenged the cast to join me to run. One time, we were running in Switzerland just before Christmas, and it was heavy snow. Another time, we were running down the Seine in Paris on Christmas Day, and we all had Santa hats on.
If we go back to the birth of 'Superman' and 'Batman' in America in the '30s, they were created because of events like the Great Depression, crime and Al Capone, among others. Everybody was corrupt back then, and if you can't have a hero in real life, it helps to have one in your fantasies.
The Wonder Woman that you see in 'Batman v Superman' is a woman who has been around, and she's very experienced. She understands a lot about man. Whereas, in the standalone movie, we are telling the grown-up story, Diana becoming Wonder Woman, and this was a story that was never told before.
When I read the news that Wonder Woman was going to be resurrected for a blockbuster movie in 2016, 'Batman vs. Superman', it made me excited - and anxious. Would the producers give her a role as fierce as her origins - and maybe some shoulder straps - or would she just be cartoon eye candy?
It's kind of appropriate to me that Batman is still a part of the 'Justice League Dark' story. I think it would be strange if any of the other 'Justice League' characters were involved in putting together this kind of motley crew of dead people and mediums and ghosts and demons and phantoms.
I don't want to be Batman. Let Val Kilmer do it. I just want to be Uncle Batman. I have this whole 'warm relationship' plot in my mind. In the final scenes, the new Batmobile breaks down, the new Batman's stranded on the side of the road. We grab our old Batmobile, pick him up and drive away.
But I think it shortsells any idea when you say there's a similar part to something else, like 'aw man, 'The Avengers' is ripping off 'Batman.' You've got people running around in outfits.' Of course, there are outfitted people and there's superhero stuff, but it's not just ripping off 'Batman.'