STACK April 2017 Issue 150

16 / 97

Get the
STACK
Magazine
app
for more
digital
content
Batman 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
quite make it:
“There were
quite a few
that we pitched
out – I think even
Moby Dick at one
point. Some of them
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
this movie’.
I think we
ended up
finding a good
balance.”
As you can
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
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/
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.”
16 APRIL 2017
visit CINEMA INTERVIEW
Director Chris McKay lovedWill Arnett’s LEGO Movie Batman so much
that he gave him his own caught up with the self-proclaimed
DC fan to discover the origins of LEGO Batman. Words: Alesha Kolbe
There could be a whole
movie made about
chasing down the
different rights holders
to all these characters
• The LEGO
Batman Movie
is in cinemas now
Brick by Brick