Christopher Nolan’s Brother Jonathan Details How He Convinced Filmmaker to Direct ‘The Dark Knight’

Christopher Nolan wasn’t initially sold on the idea of directing The Dark Knight.

The 2008 sequel to Batman Begins starred Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne aka Batman and Heath Ledger as the Joker. The Dark Knight is Christopher‘s highest-grossing film to date, having generated over $1 billion worldwide.

Christopher‘s brother Jonathan Nolan recently revealed that the Oscar-winning filmmaker didn’t want to direct another comic-book movie after Batman Begins.

“Chris was on the fence about making another one,” Jonathan told Dax Shepard in the Armchair Expert podcast. “He didn’t want to become a superhero movie director.”

On Batman Begins, Jonathan recalled, “To me, it was like we built this amazing sports car, and I’m like, ‘Let’s take it for a drive. Don’t you want to make another one?’”

The Westworld co-creator then explained how he convinced his brother to direct The Dark Knight.

“I was literally sitting with [producer] Charles Roven and Chris and being like, ‘Dude, don’t be a chicken sh-t. Let’s do this!’ And I knew with the script — and he developed the story with David Goyer with a little bit of input from me — it was like first act detailed, second act somewhat detailed, third act … uh, he rides away at the end — once we had the script done, I was like, ‘This is going to be great. This is exciting. We gotta make this movie.’ And eventually, he came around. He did manage to avoid being pigeonholed.”

Find out why Christopher Nolan‘s movies almost never have deleted scenes.