The Joker Will Come to Gotham!
By Skip Harvey
Gotham’s big boss show runner, Bruno Heller, recently spoke with Entertainment Weekly about the upcoming series. His plans for the scope of this show frankly surprises me. Numerous Batman villains are in the pipe, including the Big One. When asked about the Joker…
"He’s the crown jewel of the Batman villains. He will be brought in with great care and a lot of thought.…It will be a different character. It’s certainly going to be more Heath Ledger than Cesar Romero. But like I say, all of these people are real people with feelings and emotions and history and parents. I just build from that."
On the vision for the series as a whole…
"Actually I would [pauses … considers] — yeah, in that area, I would say in terms of what [director and executive producer Danny Cannon and director of photography David Stockton] are doing — visually — Gotham will surpass the Batman movies. The movies are a very rigorous, kind of Germanic take on that world. They’re visually stunning, but not particularly visually pleasurable. I would say this is much more on the street level of Gotham. There’s more people, it’s a more colorful place, it’s a more vivid place, it’s more crowded. The inspiration for me and Danny was New York in the ’70s, because we both remember that as a seminal moment, coming to the city for the first time. This is very much that kind of Gotham — intensely visual and three-dimensional and layered and gritty and dirty and sexy and dangerous. From that point of view — and it’s easy for me to say, I just have to write the thing, Danny and David have to visualize it — but I think you’ll see it’s fabulous."
This is my favorite bit. When asked about the reception of a Batman show without Batman…
"For Gotham, if we could bring Batman in to say hello, he’d say hello. It’s not that the celebrities are in the VIP lounge while you’re out front wondering where they are. In this case, the heroes aren’t “born” yet. They’re kids. I am cognizant of that as an issue. But look: Most stories that people tell don’t have Batman in them. You’ve just got to make the story you tell as compelling as it can be."
This show is starting to look less like
Smallville
and more like Heller’s previous work
Rome
on HBO. It’s getting more interesting every day.