Tim Burton
The Christopher Nolan movie I thought was actually really good. He really captured the ‘real’ spirit that these kind of movies are supposed to have nowadays. When I did BATMAN 20 years ago, in 1988 or something, it was a different time in comic book movies. You couldn't go into that ‘dark side’ of comics yet. The last couple of years that has become acceptable and Nolan certainly got more to the root of what the Batman comics are about.”
Adam West
To me, it's an interesting idea because Batman – the character, the legend, the extension of it over all these years – it lends itself to different machinations, layers, different time zones – anything. You could really pretty much mold Batman. He's malleable, welcome and always interesting. They [Christopher Nolan] do The Dark Knight, and I did The Bright Knight. Ours was fun for the whole family.
Micheal Keaton.
I've only seen a little piece [of the sequels] here and there since I finished mine, not for any reason except that I didn't have any real interest. The reason they weren't interesting was the reason I didn't want to do them anymore. I read the script [for "Batman Forever"]. I wasn't into it. But how I wanted to do the third one is what they did in ["Batman Begins"]. I read an article about how they were going about it and I said, "That's exactly what I thought should be done." [Christopher Nolan] is so good and [Christian Bale] is so good. I really would like to see ["Batman Begins"]. I'm sure it's good and I'm sure ["The Dark Knight"] is going to be better.
It was awesome. It was so cool. It was so much work. Now it would be done so much more efficiently; that guy [Christopher Nolan, the director of the new Batman trilogy] is great, he’s really, really talented.
Joel Schumacher.
"I think what's very interesting about Batman and how brilliant Chris Nolan is is, if you look at the last Batman, ours were at a much simpler time,"Schumacher says. "Our job was to entertain the whole family. To make it fun and sell a lot of toys. It was a franchise. The last one is really about what we're going through, the extraordinary gap between the haves and the have-nots... I think right now the last Batman is very reflective of the times we're living in, which are scary times. I'm not a predictor of revolutions and I don't think there will be one in the United States, but there are the seeds of it. When you have too many poor and too many rich, those are the seeds of revolution."
“I think Chris Nolan is brilliant and I think Heath [Ledger] was extraordinary [in 'The Dark Knight.'],” he added. “Chris is a master and he’s so young, and god knows what’s coming from him now.”
Val Kilmer.
“They are doing what I hoped we would do, but didn’t do,”
“In the original film the Joker gets the hell kicked out of him and thrown off the bell tower. He suffers, and that sort of went away. Things became cute. It’s entertaining, but I think what they’re doing with the Batman films now is more in the original spirit of the character.”
Chris ODonell
"Its pretty good, a lot better that Batman and Robin HAHAHAHA...
Kevin Feinge you know from Marvel
“[T]he truth is I root for every single [superhero movie], whether it’s our movies or not, because while you and I know the difference between who publishes what, I’ve been in supermarket checkout lines where one of our characters is on the cover of a magazine, somebody says, ‘Is Green Lantern in the Avengers? Is Aquaman in that one too?’ People don’t know. So I want them all to be great. […] Chris Nolan’s Batman is the greatest thing that happened because it bolstered everything. Imagine the one-two punch in 2008 of ’Iron Man’ and ‘Dark Knight’? It was great. Six years earlier I was having conversations with studio execs where they’d say, ‘Why don’t you come work for us? These comic book movies can’t last forever. It’s probably towards the tail end.’ And I, being with big bright-eyed naiveté would go, ‘I don’t know, I think we can do more. I think there’s more fun to be had.’”
James Cameron:
"The last two Batman pictures — actually, they're the only two I can watch. i couldn't stand the other ones.
I don't want to throw anyone under the bus by name, I didn't like them. I didn't get them. But the last two films were spectacular."
Paul Thomas Anderson:
"I’ve never really been asked to do [big tentpole blockbusters]. You look at what Christopher Nolan did with Batman, that’s like the meeting of the highest level of artistic skill & a kind of commerciality and appeal to a wide range of people which is what anybody would want. It’s kind of unparalleled actually, and they don’t come to me with those. And that’s alright."_
Guillermo del Toro :
That ties into something else I was going to ask: do you think that blockbusters are perhaps a bit too cynical now? There's a bit too much soul-searching and darkness, perhaps?
Not at all. I think there's a certain examination of the superhero myth that is really, really beautiful when it's created by a genuinely creative filmmaker like Chris Nolan. Then it's really genuine. It's a little harder when you don't feel the cohesiveness within somebody's work.
To me, Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy is of a piece with Memento, or The Following, or Insomnia, or even The Prestige - you can feel the same hand. Sometimes I feel that some of the conventions of other summer entertainment, the darkness, is an affectation that is not of a piece with the rest of the work of the person who made it.
Nicholas Winding Refn:
'With Nolan you got a guy who came from a background like me and the studios gave him a possibility to make the dark knight movies, or batman movies, the bat movies ? ....... And A: made really good films, but also made movies that had a lot of substance, and the audience wants that, of course everybody wants that, and they should get it'
Wes Anderson:
"I enjoy Chris Nolan's work in general, but I watched the Blu-Ray and it has a thing where you can go to any scene in the movie and go to the making of that. There's nothing that has ever made me feel less like a professional than watching Chris Nolan's group at work. The remote-control miniature cars. Just every technique. The rehearsal of flipping the semi-trailer end over end in the middle of the desert before they blow it up in Chicago... There's one scene where a guy jumps off the top of a skyscraper — they rehearse the jump but for the actual thing they did it CG. 'But for the rehearsal you did jump off the building?' 'We have it as a reference.' Wow. Chris Nolan is quite great. My favourite is Memento, but I'd like to learn how to do these things."
Werner Herzog:
In a way, I was totally astonished by The Dark Knight because, on the one hand, it’s a huge, mainstream movie. But it also astonished me at how dark it was, as though it was a premonition of something coming at us. I went to see the film, and ran into Christian Bale, which was the only reason I saw the film: I wanted to see how Christian was doing, because I so love that man, as an actor. I ran into Christian and (director) Christopher Nolan, and said to Nolan ‘Congratulations, this is the most significant film of the whole year.’ He thought I was kind of making it up, or joking. And I said ‘No, no, no! This is a film of real substance. It doesn’t matter if it’s mainstream or not.’ And it’s wonderful that he made the film the way he did.
Paul Greengrass:
"There have been a round of movies that haven't worked lately, but it's not so long ago that we were feasting on Dark Knight and Dark Knight Rises," he said. "You can't expect that every one of these films will be a Dark Knight Rises or an Inception or a Bourne."
Steven Spielberg:
"The Chris Nolan Batman film are arts films very succesful well told stories, but also with beautiful visual art."
Bruce Timm:
I really like The Dark Knight, and even Tim Burton’s Batman films as well, maybe the first more so than the second. I love what Nolan did but I also still enjoy what Burton did.
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