Warner Bros. Wanted Leonardo DiCaprio As The Riddler For Their Bold Batman Movie Plan
Two years after the mammoth success of Christopher Nolan's Batman epic "The Dark Knight" in 2008, the filmmaker teamed up with film star Leonardo DiCaprio for the mind-bending blockbuster "Inception." However, "Inception" wasn't the first Nolan movie Warner Bros. wanted DiCaprio for.
Speaking with Josh Horowitz for his "Happy Sad Confused" podcast," "The Dark Knight" trilogy co-writer David S. Goyer alleged that the studio pushed for DiCaprio to be in the next Batman film, which eventually became "The Dark Knight Rises" in 2012. "After 'The Dark Knight,' the head of Warner Bros. at the premiere said, 'You got to do the Riddler. Leo as the Riddler. You got to tell Chris, Leo as the Riddler,'" Goyer told Horowitz. "And I was just, 'Dude, that's not the way we work.'"
Explaining how Nolan is a process-driven director, Goyer said the next Batman story has to materialize first. After that, whatever villain Batman would face depended on the framework of their narrative.
"[It was] like with the 'Spider-Man' movies or once superhero movies started getting made and your sequels, that studios would say, 'Who's our villain of the next movie going to be, and let's build a movie around that,'" Goyer told Horowitz. "Chris was staunchly against that because that's not a bottom-ground up way of telling a story. [The thinking was] 'Let's do it in a very naturalistic way ... let's figure out what kind of story we want to tell and what we thematically want to explore with Bruce and then, let's figure out a villain that fits that story.'"
How Goyer and Nolan arrived at Bane for The Dark Knight Rises
Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight" trilogy concluded with "The Dark Knight Rises," where Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne-Batman starred opposite Tom Hardy's back-breaking strongman Bane. Thematically, David S. Goyer — who co-wrote the film with Christopher Nolan and brother, Jonathan Nolan — decided that Bane was simply the villain who worked best for the story.
Noting how Heath Ledger's Joker challenged Batman intellectually in "The Dark Knight," Goyer said they wanted Gotham's Caped Crusader in "The Dark Knight Rises" to come up against a much more physical villain. "The dirty little secret of 'The Dark Knight Rises' is that it's kind of modeled after 'Rocky III' and you got to get knocked down to get back up and [Bruce] is getting old and you need someone who is just a brute — and I just remember saying, 'It's Bane,'" Goyer told Josh Horowitz. "But it's a process and it did seem in hindsight that it had to be Bane."
To this day, Goyer appears to remain happy with the direction he and Christopher Nolan took with the main villain in "The Dark Knight Rises," and how Tom Hardy — who coincidentally starred opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in "Inception" — embodied Batman's formidable nemesis. "Hardy did an incredible job bringing Bane to life and Chris as well, and so much of that was Chris figuring out how to make Bane cool and not look like a WWF wrestler," Goyer told Horowitz.