This is from hollywoodreporter.com
Christopher Nolan is responsible for many of the most critically and/or commercially successful films of the 21st century: Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins,
The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises and, in 2014, the epic interplanetary/interdimensional sci-fi drama Interstellar, which he
co-wrote with his brother, Jonathan Nolan, and directed alongside his longtime producer and wife of 17 years, Emma Thomas.
The much discussed and debated Interstellar cost $165 million to make and has thus far grossed more than $650 million worldwide, making it the only title among
2014’s top 10 worldwide earners that is not a remake, sequel, reboot or adaptation, but rather an entirely original film, something that is increasingly rare
among the output of the big studios. While some have taken issue with elements of its plot and sound mixing, many — including more than a few of Nolan's most
distinguished fellow filmmakers — have applauded the rare ambition and skill that it took to get it made at all.
Was a Batman film something that you had long had a desire to tackle? And was there something specific that you wanted to bring to it?
Yeah. It came to me in a very interesting way, which was my agent, Dan Aloni, called and said, “It seems unlikely you’d be interested in this, but Warners
is sort of casting around for what they would do with
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Batman.” It had reached the end of its last sort of life, if you’d like. And at the time, nobody used the term "reboot" — that didn’t exist — so it was really
a question of, "What would you do with this?" I said, “Well, actually, that is something I’m interested in,” because one of the great films that I am very
influenced by that we haven’t talked about was Dick Donner’s Superman — 1978, that came out. It made a huge impression on me. I can remember the trailers for
it, I can remember about Superman the movie, all of that. And it was very clear to me that however brilliant — and it was very brilliant — Tim Burton’s take
on Batman was in 1989, and it was obviously a worldwide smash, it wasn’t that sort of origin story, it wasn’t that real-world kind of epic movie; it was very
Tim Burton, a very idiosyncratic, gothic kind of masterpiece. But it left this interesting gap in pop-culture, which is you know, you had Superman in 1978, but
they never did the sort of 1978 Batman, where you see the origin story, where the world is pretty much the world we live in but there’s this extraordinary figure
there, which is what worked so well in Dick Donner’s Superman film. And so I was able to get in the studio and say, “Well, that’s what I would do with it.” I
don’t even know who was first banging around the term "reboot" or whatever, but it was after Batman Begins, so we didn’t have any kind of reference for that idea
of kind of resetting a franchise. It was more a thing of, "Nobody’s ever made this origin story in this way and treated it as a piece of action filmmaking, a sort
of contemporary action blockbuster."
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