Director: New Batman More Like Kurt Cobain Than Billionaire Playboy

In a new interview with Empire Magazine, The Batman director, Matt Reeves, said that the forthcoming movie’s star, Robert Pattinson’s characterization of the famed Dark Knight is more akin to Kurt Cobain than Billionaire Playboy.

In fact, the concept for the new Batman came from listening to music.

“When I write, I listen to music, and as I was writing the first act, I put on Nirvana’s ‘Something In The Way,’” Reeves told Empire Magazine. “That’s when it came to me that, rather than make Bruce Wayne the playboy version we’ve seen before, there’s another version who had gone through a great tragedy and become a recluse.”

As a “recluse,” that would mean Pattinson’s version would be different from past more slick versions shown to us by Christian Bale, Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck.

Reeves added: “I started making this connection to Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, and the idea of this fictionalized version of Kurt Cobain being in this kind of decaying manor.”

Reeves said he knew Pattinson could handle the part after seeing him in the Safdie Brothers 2017 thriller Good Time.

“In that movie,” Reeves said, “you could really feel his [Pattinson’s] vulnerability and desperation, but you could also feel his power. I thought that was a great mix. He’s also got that Kurt Cobain thing, where he looks like a rock star, but you also feel like he could be a recluse.”

Pattinson himself said of the Batman character in the same interview, “Bruce has been hiding away. He’s not really a socialite at all. He’s building all these little contraptions and things, just with Alfred. And even Alfred thinks he’s gone insane!

“He’s been out every single night for two years, getting beaten up and shot and stabbed and burnt, and it shows,” he added. “There’s a bullet graze on the cowl, right at the beginning. I don’t think that’s been done before.”

The film, which is scheduled to come out on March 4, will also star Zoe Kravitz as Catwoman, Colin Farrell as The Penguin, and Paul Dano as The Riddler.

No word, as of yet, if those characters are based on Tina Bell, Eddie Vedder or Chris Cornell.