After Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan directed Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman in The Prestige, a movie about magicians that was based on a book written by Christopher Priest. In a new interview with French site Skript, Priest slams Christopher Nolan and calls his Dark Knight trilogy “boring and pretentious”. The only Nolan movies he admits he likes are Memento and The Prestige, referring to all of the others as “shallow and badly written” and “embarrassing”. Priest went on a long rant about Nolan’s Batman movies specifically:
“I’ve got kids who like superheroes and they think the Batman films are boring and pretentious. They like things like The Avengers and Iron Man because they’re fun. It’s a wrong move to take a superhero and give it psychological realism. There is no psychological realism. He’s a bodybuilder who jumps off buildings. I’m sorry I feel really strongly about this.”
Priest goes on to say that he’s seen Batman Begins and The Dark Knight in a theater, and noticed that the audience (made up of mostly teens) was bored and uninterested. He said, “and every now and then the guy jumps off the building on a rope, and they watch it and go, ‘Woo!’ Then they lose interest. To me, that’s a real major lack of judgment in Nolan, to go for superhero films. I feel this very strongly.”
Priest concludes by offering Nolan some advice. “What he’s trying to be is some kind of modern [Stanley] Kubrick. And I think he’d be better off being a modern [Alfred] Hitchcock, basically. A maker of well-made films like Memento and The Prestige. And these blockbusters are just embarrassing, I think. I haven’t seen the new one yet.”
The interview isn’t entirely negative, though. Priest also talks about how he took a chance on Christopher Nolan when he selected him to direct The Prestige, instead of going with the more established Sam Mendes, who had just won an Oscar for American Beauty at the time. Check out the full interview in the video below, the Batman talk starts around the 4:30 mark.
SOURCE: Skript (via The Hollywood Reporter)
