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But
Oh, Those Gotham Nights...
An Interview with Bruce Timm at WonderCon,
Part 2
In
part one, Bruce talked about working on Justice League:
The New Frontier. But his days shepherding DC's characters
to the screen are far from over, and here he talks a bit
about the upcoming Batman: Gotham Knight...
Derek
McCaw: When we talked before Superman: Doomsday
had its premiere at Comic-Con, you were very nervous. Are
you nervous tonight?
Bruce
Timm: No.
Derek
McCaw: You got over it?
Bruce
Timm: That was a learning experience for me. Again,
I had different qualms with Doomsday, because we
did take some really radical changes from the comic. Here,
we stayed really true to the comic, and anybody who loves
the comic, chances are they'll love this movie.
Having
sat through that screening at San Diego with Doomsday,
knowing the kinds of things that they reacted really well
to, they're going to love this movie tonight. They're going
to go out of their minds.
Derek McCaw: Do you get a break now, or
are you rolling into the next thing?
Bruce
Timm: It all ebbs and flows. I have slow weeks
and I have really crazy intense weeks. Since New Frontier,
we finished up the Batman: Gotham Knight project,
the anime project. We're actually in production on our next
film in the DC Universe line, which I can't talk about yet
because it hasn't been announced.
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"It's
pretty darned cool."
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I get
little breaks here and there, but I'm keeping busy.
Derek
McCaw: Did you find a big difference in working
in the anime style for Gotham Knight?
Bruce
Timm: Because of the nature of it, we wanted it
to be genuine anime. We didn't want it to be like Teen Titans,
where it's Americans trying to do Japanese-style animation.
We wanted it to be literally anime. We actually hired six
different animation teams in Japan, six different Japanese
directors to handle each segment.
It
wasn't a matter of me adapting to the anime style, it was
literally sending it off to them and seeing what they did
with it. Again, my job on that production was even more
hands-off than on New Frontier because specifically
it was really meant to be an anime project.
We would
look at their character designs and their storyboards and
stuff and it's a real culture shock. The way they storyboard
things and their storytelling is really different than Western
storytelling. So I'd read the storyboard and I'd be really
be tempted to put notes on it, "you need a close-up here,
you need to do this here, that's not going to work…"
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What new
projects bubble in this man's brain?
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I had
to really stop myself, and say, you know what? I don't know
if this is going to work or not, because it's a different
language. I just had to say, okay, I will approve this and
cross my fingers and hope it comes back great. And it did.
There
were some things when we got the film back, my editor and
I just looked at certain sequences and said, no, this isn't
going to fly. It's just too weird or too different or whatever.
We needed to do some trims to make the story a little bit
more focused. For the most part, we really tried to stay
out of the directors' way and let them do their thing.
I think
it's a really interesting movie. It's kind of what it was
meant to be. What if Japanese animators did Batman? Wow.
It's pretty darned cool.
We
hope so, and we'll find out in July when Warner Home Video
releases Batman: Gotham Knight to retailers...
Other
New Frontier Coverage:
An
Interview with Phil Morris
Review
of Justice League: The New Frontier
An
Interview with Stan Berkowitz, writer
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