Bruce Wayne and Kurt Cobain are more similar than you might think, at least according to The Batman director Matt Reeves.
The man behind the latest Dark Knight iteration, which stars Robert Pattinson as the Caped Crusader, elaborated on how Cobain at least partly inspired this latest version of Wayne.
“Early on, when I was writing, I started listening to Nirvana, and there was something about ‘Something in the Way,’ which is in the first trailer, which is part of the voice of that character,” Reeves told Esquire . “When I considered, ‘How do you do Bruce Wayne in a way that hasn’t been seen before?’ I started thinking, ‘What if some tragedy happened [ie: Wayne sees his parents murdered] and this guy becomes so reclusive, we don’t know what he’s doing? Is this guy some kind of wayward, reckless, drug addict?’ And the truth is that he is a kind of drug addict. His drug is his addiction to this drive for revenge. He’s like a Batman Kurt Cobain.”
Reeves continued, sharing that Last Days, the 2005 Gus Van Sant film about the final hours of Cobain’s life was a reference point for how his Wayne Manor came together.
“He doesn’t care about any of the trappings of being a [millionaire] Wayne at this point,” Reeves said.
The director’s latest comments come weeks after he first revealed the Cobain inspiration, previously telling Empire that listening to “Something in the Way” off of Nevermind got him thinking about how he could retool the Wayne character to be more like the ‘90s rock icon.
“That’s when it came to me that, rather than make Bruce Wayne the playboy version we’ve seen before, there’s another version who had gone through a great tragedy and become a recluse,” he said.
The Batman hits theaters on March 4, and will be nearly three-hours long.
