During a wide-ranging interview on his prolific career as a Hollywood screenwriter, and his work on the upcoming streaming series Sandman and Foundation, David S. Goyer revealed how Man of Steel became a movie thanks to director Christopher Nolan forcing him to take a break while Goyer was writing The Dark Knight Rises.
As Goyer tells it, he hit a wall while writing the third installment of Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, and he couldn’t figure out how to resolve key elements that the two wanted in the film. “It was a number of things,” Goyer told The Hollywood Reporter. “How Bruce was going to defeat Bane, how he was going to escape the Pit and the switch reveal — that the child was actually Talia. Chris and I just hit a wall, and Chris suggested we take a break for a week and put our pencils down.”
While Goyer initially thought taking a break would be counterintuitive, he heeded Nolan’s advice because, sometimes, you just have to “hope that your subconscious will come to the rescue.” In Goyer’s case, he ended up coming up with an idea for an entirely different movie that we now know as Man of Steel. Via THR:
What happened during that week is I ended up rereading the first few years of Action Comics and writing down a two-pager for a Superman movie. So when we came back, Chris said, “Well, have any ideas?” And I said, “I’ve got this Superman movie that has nothing to do with The Dark Knight Rises.” That’s how Man of Steel happened. We ended up pitching it to Warner Bros. and getting that going.
So there’s a new piece of trivia for DC film buffs. Man of Steel happened because Goyer didn’t realize he can just have Batman punch Bane really hard in his face mask thing. Seriously, go back and watch. Batman’s big plan is, “Guess I’ll just hit this thing harder,” and it works. Movies, everybody!
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)