Interview: ‘Gotham’ Showrunner Bruno Heller On Gotham Before Batman

Bruno Heller is best known for The Mentalist, but he’s about to get a much higher profile as the head of Gotham, which is rapidly turning out to be Fox’s biggest freshman show. In a wide-ranging interview with several reporters, including yours truly, he talked about how he approaches the comics and the challenge of adapting a show about Batman’s universe without Batman in it.

Will it be more of a “villain of the week” or what’s the plan for the future, as well?

Obviously, the demands of opening big mean that we will frontload it with lots of characters in front just to indicate where we’re going. As the show rolls on, it won’t be villain of the week simply because these are such great villains and their story lines are so big and epic that it would be short changing everyone if we did it in that sort of production line way. So there are a lot of big characters in that first episode, but as it rolls on, other iconic characters will be introduced, but in a much more measured way, if you like.

I’m wondering how much the city itself really shapes the story you’re telling?

Very much so. It’s an urban story, it’s about city life. I think often it’s kind of a dream world that everybody shares. Everyone has a vision of Gotham in their mind, so you really have to create a three-dimensional, believable world that is both believable but a notch above reality, that has that fantastic element. Both me and Dan Cannon, the director, had kind of seminal moments in New York in the ‘70s when it was a really gnarly, dark, but very sexy and attractive, charismatic place. So that’s the seed of the city is that old New York.

The show very much relies – Danny and his crew did such an amazing job creating a believable but fantastic world. What that allows us to do is it allows the actors inside that city to be a notch up. It’s both real but slightly surreal, and that means you have a broad and powerful canvas to work off of.

What did you look at and draw inspiration from for the series?

To me, the immediate attraction of this story was precisely the chance to tell origin stories. Those are always the aspects of the superhero legends that I enjoy most. It ties into a kind of childlike curiosity of how did things get the way they are? It’s just the Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling, How Did the Leopard Get its Spots?

This is a world that everyone knows. Everyone knows who Batman is, everyone knows who the Riddler is and who the Joker is, so telling their fully fledged, adult stories is kind of – it’s not been-there-done-that, but it’s tough to find a fresh way in. This way, you get to learn how things go to be the way they are, and that, to me, is one of the great gifts of good narrative. It’s like seeing pictures of your parents before you were born. There’s something intrinsically fascinating about that period before the period we know, and that’s really the feeling we were going for. I hope that answers the question.

Would a show like Gotham even be possible, say, 10 or 15 years ago?

I think you’re probably right, it wouldn’t be possible, and I think that’s a combination of the brilliance of what the Nolans did to revivify the Batman franchise and also the shows you mentioned. People could see that there’s both an audience and a way of convincingly doing that larger than life world on the small screen.

I would say that the difference, to a degree, between those shows and this show is those were cable shows, this is network, and there are slightly different demands, there. The analogy would be those are arena shows and this has to be a stadium show and has to appeal to an even larger audience. So it has to appeal to both people who love Batman and love Gotham and love that world and also people who have no particular love for the world and you just have to grab them on the strength of the story and the characters.

But yes, absolutely, all of those – one of the things about working for an old school studio like Warner Bros. is there is a kind of institutional culture and institutional memory, both in terms of production design, camera work, directors who understand how to do this kind of thing. So it’s very much within the parameters of the wheelhouse – that’s definitely a mixed metaphor, but you get my point. Absolutely, we’re in the middle of, just like in the 50s it was a Western cycle, we’re in the thick of a superhero cycle, here.

When you were developing the show, how much did you decide to stick to the comics versus decide to just take your own way with those characters?

It’s a tricky balance, because obviously you don’t want to simply create a new character. You have to create a character that is that iconic character and you recognize who that is and they have to have their iconic characteristics. But on the other hand, if we just deliver the character that people have seen before, than we’re failing the audience. There is so much – the Batman world is such a vast world full of so many great iterations of these characters that you can’t simply take those elements and regurgitate them. You have to give the audience a fresh look.

For me, with Penguin, it was important to be true to the psychology of that kind of person. This is Penguin as a young man, striving and struggling and hungry. That’s going to be a very different character from who he is when he’s reached his goals in life. Right now, he’s that hungry, violent, scrabbling character that he must have been to get where he got to.

In general, like I say, it’s important, even if some of the audience goes that’s not my idea of that character, well at least a little friction and a little controversy in those terms is not a bad thing. All I can promise is we work very closely with Geoff Johns at DC to make sure we’re not betraying the essence of who these people are, because that would be pointless. We’re never going to sort of change up the characters simply for the shock value of changing them. It’s just our job to deliver something new and interesting, and that involves taking chances now and again.

What has the process been like creating the path that leads each character to their eventual destiny?

I guess the main challenge there is reverse engineering enough that we have a journey to take without destroying all of the iconic elements of the characters that people know and love. But at the same time, you want that journey to be as long and as interesting as possible, so we can’t start with the fully fledged characters, even if we wanted to. There’s a whole bunch of history that has to happen before those characters emerge in all their finery.

For me, that’s a big part of the fun of the show, both making it and watching it, I hope, is seeing
these people as young people and seeing how they’re going to change over time and giving them space to grow. It’s hard to describe in simple terms how that works.

A lot of the challenge with TV as opposed to making movies is that you have to leave room for the characters in the story to tell themselves. Sometimes you don’t know where a character is going to go and what’s going to happen to them until you’ve seen the actor take that part and make it their own. Then, you know, sort of like novelists say the book starts to write itself, the characters start to tell their own story, and then we know where they’re going as opposed to mapping it out step by step. We have broad, general [indiscernible], but you’ve got to leave space for these characters to live and breathe, you know. I hope that answers that answers the question.

Are there any parts of the DC Universe where you definitely don’t want to go?

There are certain characters that would be very, very difficult to put on the screen. Killer Croc is a tough one – although we may go there. We haven’t excluded anyone from the mix, potentially. But generally what we’re looking at is characters where there is some drama or a story behind how they got to be the way they are, and we’re looking for characters who can live in the real world of Gotham as opposed to the even more super-real world of Metropolis, if you like. It’s not about super powers; it’s about super will, if you like. So we have veered towards those characters who are interesting as people rather than interesting for their particular power or their particular gimmick or their costume. So that’s how I would divide that world.

Alfred is going to be a very strong father figure, but then you also have Ben as another, with Gordon acting as another father figure. Is that playing out very deeply?

You know, absolutely there’s sort of – I wouldn’t say Alfred’s the bad father, but he’s certainly the permissive father, the enabling father as opposed to Gordon, who represents the law. What Sean brings to it is a kind of avuncular strength, but also a sense of irony and a sense of – he has strength and power, but he’s – liberal is the wrong word.

To take it a step back, in order for Bruce to turn into Batman, Alfred had to be an enabler, there. Bruce could not have done this in secret; at some point they made a pact, whether an unspoken or a spoken pact, that this was going to be allowed. So you had to have an actor with an edge of danger to him, who was not simply the good, loyal caretaker, but also someone with his own sense of rage inside him. Someone who could carry that, but lightly, and that’s what Sean does so brilliantly. He is exactly like – and to me, that’s who Alfred was, he was like one of those great – which is what Michael Cane used to play. I’m not sure that it is such a leap from the previous characters. It’s a leap from the very old style of Alfred where he’s kind of much more the English butler than the soldier.

We went for a dynamic character who can carry his own stories, who is a genuine, positive, dynamic influence in Bruce’s life, and that requires an actor with great charisma and strength and also, underneath, you have to feel that he loves and cares for this kid. So it’s a very tricky line he’s walking, there, but he’s walking it brilliantly.

Want to see how this all works out on screen? Gotham begins airing September 22nd on Fox.

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