How one superhero earned his wings

When we last left the movie version of the Caped Crusader in 1997’s widely panned “Batman & Robin,” he was as glibly useless as the nipples on George Clooney’s outrageous leather get-up.

With “Batman Begins,” the hoped-for reinvigoration of DC Comics’ storied avenger, Warner Bros. and writer-director Christopher Nolan (“Memento”) believe newfound cinematic legitimacy lies in the character’s transformation from a boy whose parents are murdered to a costumed night crawler thirsty for justice.

It also meant that Nolan and co-screenwriter David Goyer could add to a legend that 65 years after its creation still had missing biographical chunks. Explains Goyer, “Who taught Bruce Wayne all his skills? He didn’t just emerge fully formed. And where did the Batmobile and batsuit come from?”

In answering those questions, the filmmakers feel they’ve made the first Batman flick in which the guy behind the mask -- played by Christian Bale -- is the central figure, not a coterie of outsized villains.

“Our mandate was to make Bruce Wayne as interesting a character as Batman, so the audience wouldn’t just mark time until he put on the batsuit,” says Goyer. (There are, of course, baddies, namely phobiameister Scarecrow and cult leader Ra’s Al Ghul, and top-drawer actors such as Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Gary Oldman, Tom Wilkinson and Morgan Freeman.)

An emphasis on character work may be an outgrowth of the success of the “Spider-Man” and “X-Men” adaptations, but Nolan and Goyer stress audiences shouldn’t expect anything too comic book-y, strangely enough. They instead wanted Batman’s singularity as a crime fighter without superpowers to dictate a more filmic reality for their story.

“We’re trying for a representation of Batman that is rooted in who this guy would be in the real world,” says Nolan, who favored large sets, human stunt work and photographic verisimilitude over computer graphics. “Part of his mythic attraction is that any of us could be Batman.”