Jonathan Nolan wrote The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises alongside his brother, filmmaker Christopher Nolan, and he's since shifted focus to small screen projects like Westworld and Fallout.
Talking to Josh Horowitz to promote the latter, Nolan confirmed he had ideas for The Riddler in the trilogy's final chapter. However, he explains that, "It did feel like it was close enough to the space of what we'd done with Heath [Ledger] that you really needed to...shift there."
Nolan would go on to explain that they wanted to make The Dark Knight Rises a "post-apocalyptic" movie, making Bane a better fit for the story being told.
After The Dark Knight was released, we started hearing rumblings about Leonardo DiCaprio playing The Riddler, something David S. Goyer recently confirmed the studio pushed hard for. That could explain why Jonathan started mulling over ideas for the villain.
In a separate conversation with Dax Shepard, Nolan revealed the extent of his involvement with Batman Begins (the one movie in this trilogy he didn't get a screenwriting credit for) and confirmed Chris wasn't initially keen to return for a sequel.
"I worked on 'Batman Begins' in this slightly arm's length capacity, but it was the one comic book my brother ever given me as a kid, 'Batman: Year One,' for my fourteenth birthday, and ten years later, I was on the set working with him."
"Chris was on the fence about making another one," he continues. "I think he didn’t want to become a superhero movie director. He was very proud of 'Batman Begins,' but to me, it was like we built this amazing sports car, and I’m like, 'Let’s take it for a drive. Don’t you want to make another one?'"
"We spent an hour telling the origin story, and that’s great, but it’s like, 'What [more] can we do with this?' Can we take the same characters and shift ever so slightly into a different genre? Can we go from an adventure film to a crime film, to a mob movie, and bring that feeling into it?"
You can hear more from Nolan on his early plans for The Riddler in The Dark Knight Rises in the player below.