"When Chris first approached me and said he wanted to do a Batman film, I was kind of surprised, because we’d just finished Memento and Insomnia and I’d assumed we were just going to continue down the track of those sorts of dark detective stories. Little did I know that that was exactly what Chris had in mind for Batman! Of course, I was initially just like ‘Really? A superhero movie?’ To be honest I wasn’t really that excited about it. I do grounded filmmaking; I’m not really a big superhero fan. But at the same time, Chris and I have a lot in common in that sense, we both like Kubrick and what-have-you, so I knew that whatever it was we were taking on, he had seen something in that material that would allow us to continue in the vein that… we were doing what we were doing. That certainly became the case. By the time I read the screenplay in the fall of, I guess, 2003, I was blown away by what Chris had put together. The size of the project and the budget was a little intimidating, but we started putting the cast together, and we got Gary Oldman, and Freeman, and obviously Christian, and it was incredibly exciting."