I think it's one thing if you are turning out dozens or even a hundred stories a year, you've got to have a great supporting cast behind you. Superman had a family that developed, and it's only natural that Batman has a family of sorts that developed. I think it's a great way to keep the comics interesting and varied, to appeal to different segments of an audience, to bring new perspectives to it.

Part of battle has been getting Hollywood to recognize that comic books and superheroes are not synonymous. That's been a huge breakthrough, just in recent years really, and as a result of that recent breakthrough, we've had movies like 300, Road to Perdition, and A History of Violence, that very few people realize were based on comic books and graphic novels. It's very important to make that differentiation.

I reject the concept that comic books in movies are a genre. I have been fighting that for many years, with the powers-that-be in Hollywood.

In a sense, comic books are frozen movies. If you look at a comic book, you are generally seeing the storyboard for a film. The great advantage of comic books, over the years, has been that, if they are frozen movies, they are not limited by budget. They are only limited by imagination.

There's so much technology [in the Batman movies] that's unbelievable and seems unreal, so it's hard trying to get the audience to believe that it all exists. So we got Morgan Freeman to tell them that it's real. And that is why Christopher Nolan is a genius.

When you are dealing with approximately two-plus hours every few years to do a story, you don't have the luxury of having excessive screen time to explore, in detail and in-depth, lots of other subsidiary or ancillary supporting characters.

There have been so many interpretations of both Batman and the Joker in the comic books themselves over the decades, from one extreme to the next, and in the media, from one extreme to the next.