Director Matt Reeves may be eager to resume shooting The Batman — its production was shut down last month due to the coronavirus pandemic — “when the time is right” but says for now “there are bigger things” that he and his team “have to do to make our loved ones and the people that we care about safe.”
“The whole thing is quite surreal. As much as we wanted to proceed, we wanted to make sure we were safe,” Reeves said of his film getting put on hold over a global pandemic in an interview with the New York Times.
“We didn’t want anyone on our crew to get sick. But there was a crew member who actually got it, an incredible dialect coach named Andrew Jack, and he passed away. We were all in utter shock and heartbroken. It’s been weeks since we shut down, so I don’t think it was passed among the crew. But it’s very, very upsetting.”
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Reeves also allayed any concerns about whether Warner Bros. shared his vision for The Batman — which he previously said was a noir-style, detective-driven story — by saying he wouldn’t have made the film just to make another Batman movie.
And as Joker took inspiration from the early films of Martin Scorsese, Reeves cited two classic 1970s detective films when explaining what he was going for with The Batman.
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Reeves said he told the studio “I want to do something that has some emotional stakes. My ambition is for it to be incredibly personal using the metaphors of that world. It feels like this really odd throwback to the movies I came up on from the ’70s, like Klute or Chinatown. I’m not saying we’re achieving anything like that. Those are masterpieces. But that’s the ambition.”
For more on The Batman, check out Reeves’ picks for his favorite Batman movies, learn what composer Michael Giacchino had to say about scoring the film, and trace the origins of the new Batmobile.
Source: IGN.com The Batman Director Matt Reeves on the "Surreal" Production Shutdown