Gotham director explains influences and teases another villain

June 23rd, 2014 by Dave Bowling Comments

More info has come out about upcoming Fox series Gotham, detailing Batman’s origins in the western world’s most violent city.

Director Danny Cannon is the man who put together the much anticipated pilot. He spoke to HitFix about the films the production team looked at for inspiration when creating a modern-day Gotham City. Essentially, he is creating a New York that had continued to get worse at the end of the 1970s, much like Demolition Man showed a 1996 where the LA riots never stopped.

Cannon stated in the interview:

“It’s scary. I was on something and Bruno[Heller, show creator] was on something and we met at Thanksgiving and he’d just pitched the story and it had gone very well and he instantly knew that he needed a visual partner and we talked on Thanksgiving, that morning, extensively about where to place this. I had not heard the pitch and I did not know what was in his head, but instantly I knew – and we shared this, thank God – I’d watched ‘Serpico’ again when I heard the concept, and ‘The French Connection’ and ‘The Warriors,’ and I said, ‘If New York had not been gentrified, if there was no Koch, if there was no Bloomberg, if there was no Guiliani, and New York had just spiraled downwards after 1979…’ we were very interested in that. That was Gotham to us. It was like a romantic version. When I visited New York and Bruno visited New York, we wanted to go to that place.”

Cannon also revealed one very interesting point about the upcoming series, he’s fighting to get Mr. Freeze included:

“I have a big pitch with Bruno about the Mr. Freeze character, whose origins are uncertain. If I can win Geoff Johns over and if I can win Bruno over, then I look forward to the moment where that character can be realized.”

Hopefully the character will be more Animated Series and less Schwarzenegger…

Gotham arrives this fall on Fox from executive producer Bruno Heller.

The cast includes Ben McKenzie as James Gordon, Donal Logue as Harvey Bullock, David Mazouz as Bruce Wayne, Camren Bicondova as Selina Kyle,   Grayson McCouch and Brette Taylor as Thomas and Martha Wayne, Robin Lord Taylor as Oswald Cobblepot, Sean Pertwee as Alfred Pennyworth,  Erin Richards as Gordon’s fiancee, Barbara Kean, Zabryna Guevara as Gordon’s boss at the GCPD, Captain Essen, Victoria Cartagena will play detective Renee Montoya, Andrew Stewart Jones will play detective Crispus Allen, Jada Pinkett Smith as Fish Mooney, and Drew Powell as Butch Gilzean.

Source: Hitfix

 

 

Dave was born at an early age to parents of both sexes. He has been a self-confessed geek for as long as he can remember, having been raised through the 80s on a steady diet of Doctor Who, Star Trek, Red Dwarf and (sigh) Knight Rider. Throw the usual assortment of Saturday morning cartoons into the mix and we have something quite exceptional: someone with an encyclopaedic knowledge of utter tosh; a love of giant robots and spaceships fighting; and the strange desire to leap tall buildings in a single bound while wearing his underpants over his trousers. The death ray is currently in the works and one day you shall all bow to him, his giant space station and fleet of funky orange space shuttles...