“I’ve never been so close to a director’s perception of what I was doing before,” TheBatman star Robert Pattinson says of Matt Reeves.
,” Warner Bros.’ latest reboot of the studio’s multibillion-dollar superhero franchise, after a six-month break due to the pandemic. Reeves had spent lockdown working on the meticulous — and costly — safety protocols needed to complete the film, but just 24 hours after shooting restarted in London, he got the news that his star,“All we did was shoot a day, and already it wasn’t just someone got COVID —To Reeves’ relief, Pattinson’s case was relatively mild, and his health recovered quickly.
With a $200 million budget, the question is whether Reeves’ saturnine crime epic will follow in the blockbuster footsteps of “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” or face-plant like the “Batman” films starring George Clooney and Ben Affleck. Those Bruce Waynes, however, didn’t headline a film two years into a pandemic, with movie theaters on life support and the world rattled further by the gathering storm of war. Reeves just may have crafted the perfect superhero for our age of anxiety.
While Reeves may have loathed his physical isolation from his actors — he’s the kind of director who prefers sitting as close to the camera as possible — there was one unexpected benefit. To allow Reeves and Pattinson to communicate on the set across the self-imposed COVID barriers between them, they were both outfitted with earpieces and microphones.
“I think part of what really drew me in is that the conflict in that movie …” He pauses. “My dad was nothing like Jake LaMotta. But he was everything like Jake LaMotta.” Initially, Reeves resisted, unable to see how his creative interests could succeed inside comic book franchises like the interconnected Marvel Cinematic Universe. “I have such respect for Kevin Feige and also for the [Marvel] filmmakers,” he says. “But to be honest with you, I just don’t know how I would make my way through that. There has to be some level of discovery for me, where I have some freedom to find my way.
“I always enter into it with the idea that it’s not going to be me,” Reeves says. “Because then if you want it to be me, you have to tell me you’re willing to do what I want to do. I don’t mean that in some kind of arrogant [way]. You’re not going to get a good movie from me if you don’t let me do what I do, because I don’t know how to do it another way. And so: ‘Please, if you don’t like what I’m saying, do not hire me.’ And that so far has worked for me.”“He’s very methodical,” Pattinson says.
The long takes allowed Reeves to lay bare Bruce Wayne’s all-consuming desire for vengeance — think of that harrowing shot of Pattinson wailing on a kid from the first teaser for “The Batman” — and explicate why he felt so compelled to make yet another movie in the murk of Gotham City.
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