STACK #150 Apr 2017

CINEMA INTERVIEW

visit stack.net.au

Get the STACK Magazine app for more digital content

Brick by Brick

Director Chris McKay lovedWill Arnett’s LEGO Movie Batman so much that he gave him his own film.We caught up with the self-proclaimed DC fan to discover the origins of LEGO Batman . Words: Alesha Kolbe

B atman may not have been the main character in 2014’s The LEGO Movie , but that hasn’t stopped him building his own spin-off flick. The LEGO Batman Movie follows the Dark Knight as he inadvertently adopts young Richard Grayson, AKA Robin, and struggles to accept his newfound responsibility. A standalone LEGO Batman flick was a given following the success of the original movie, and director Chris McKay tells us that the studio was pushing for it barely a week after The LEGO Movie hit cinemas. “Warner Bros. right away saw the response people had to Batman, and the company is heavily invested in Batman with all these new movies they’re doing," he says. "Literally the first week The LEGO Movie premiered they were like, ‘is there a Batman movie here?’ It all just grew from there.” Though the film eventually ended up centering on the relationship between Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson, it had very different beginnings. “At one point they thought The Joker would somehow trick Batman into going to see a therapist,” laughs McKay. “When we were first working on the story, [writer] Seth Grahame-Smith pitched this version where Batman was tricked by The Joker into going into therapy, and Harley Quinn was the therapist,

and that was what unravelled Batman. It wouldn’t have been as fun to watch Batman go and sit in a therapist chair and talk about stuff.” The LEGO Batman Movie culminates in a fight of epic proportions, with villains from more than just the DC Universe making appearances. Despite the celebrity-heavy bill, there were still some who didn’t quite make the cut. “Some of the villains that I wanted to put in were people like Kathy Bates from Misery , Daniel Day-Lewis from Gangs of New York , Alex from A Clockwork Orange , and HAL from 2001 ,” says McKay. And if you're wondering why all these guys didn’t

assistants very busy trying to chase down the rights, and who wrote which character, and who owns what," the director explains. "There could be a whole movie made about chasing down all the different rights holders for all these characters.” Finally, we prodded McKay about where he drew Arnett’s Batman from – apparently he's a cross between the Chris Nolan and Frank Miller versions. “The Zack Snyder Batman v Superman came out when we were in production, too, so there’s a bit of Affleck in there. The idea of putting Burt Ward – the ‘66 series Robin – in a Batmobile with a Christopher Nolan/

There could be a whole movie made about chasing down the different rights holders to all these characters

this movie’. I think we ended up finding a good balance.” As you can

Frank Miller/Ben Affleck version of Batman was too good to pass up; will this indefatigable, kind of Book of Mormon , super-positive character rub off on him and change him? It seemed like a fun premise, one of those ‘what if?’ games. What if this character from the ‘60s was put in the Batmobile with this dark, brooding, modern character, and how would they affect each other. It seemed like a fun thing to do.”

quite make it: “There were quite a few that we pitched

out – I think even Moby Dick at one point. Some of them

imagine, trying to get all these baddies

into one movie proved to be a lot of work as far as licensing was concerned. “I kept a lot of lawyers and producers and

you couldn’t interpret very well in LEGO, some you couldn’t develop a clear joke about, and then some of it was just LEGO put their foot down and basically said, ‘you can’t put all these R-rated properties in

• The LEGO Batman Movie is in cinemas now

16

APRIL 2017

jbhifi.com.au