Christopher Nolan, The Best Batman Director

The Batman series and movies have been a part of our lives since the TV was invented. We have seen some of the best action in Gotham, and to an extent, on screen. People just love the theory that any human being, with no superpower, can use their apps and devices, to fight crime and protect the innocent.

Behind the scenes, all this takes planning, writing, and directing a screenplay, transforming it into the movies we love. Who are those people? These are the directors, and their jobs are to make actors and action flow in such a way that we become convinced that this is real. One of the best directors of Batman movies is Christopher Nolan.

Christopher Nolan was born in London, England on July 30, 1970. From an early age, he found an interest in filmmaking and decided to pursue professional studies in literature, graduating from the University College London. When he was a kid, he made films using his father’s camera, with his younger brother Jonathan.

Nolan entered the movie stage professionally with the 1998 thriller Following.  The film landed well with the audience and the print media was widely impressed; The New Yorker wrote that it “echoed Hitchcock classics”, but was “leaner and meaner”, and The New York Times was impressed with its “spare look” and agile hand-held camerawork, saying, “As a result, the actors convincingly carry off the before, during and after modes that the film eventually, and artfully, weaves together.”

It would take Nolan many more films before he landed as Warner Bros. Studios in 2003 with an innovative plan for Batman. Using more traditional sets and miniature stunts, he moved away from computer-generated imagery, without losing the larger than life action known in Batman movies. The plan had its weaknesses, but overall functioned, and in 2005 all of his work culminated in Batman Begins.

The movie was a complete success and critics had enough ammunition to critique previous superhero movies built on comic-style tales. The New York Post called it “a wake-up call to the people who keep giving us cute capers about men in tights. It wipes the smirk off the face of the superhero movie.”

The Batman Sequels

In 2008 Nolan sent Batman to the screen again this time, according to the New York Times, “Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment, it goes darker and deeper than any Hollywood movie of its comic-book kind.”

The sequel, The Dark Knight, was a record breaker from its release; with a box office income of over US$1 billion, eight OSCAR nominations – winning two, and was designated as “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress in 2020 and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Nolan did not stop there, he continued to put Batman on higher planes. And in 2012 released his third caped movie, The Dark Knight Rises.  Like the two pieces before the film took the stage and kept it record-breaking grounds with more than sixteen nominations, crossing the $1 billion gross threshold, and dragging the media and fans behind it.

Christopher Nolan did more for the DC Comic’s Batman than any other director in its history.