If you look at all the comic book films that have come since then, in terms of tone, in terms of look, even in terms of Danny Elfman's music for Batman, so many that followed have been inspired by that, specifically. It had a cultural impact worldwide.

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.

I really became a hardcore Batman fan when I was eight years old. What was clear to me, the reason I liked him better than Superman or Spider-Man or the Hulk or whoever, was the fact that he was human, and I could identify with him, and I really believed in that character strongly. In my heart of hearts, when I was eight years old, I believed that if I studied real hard, and worked out real hard, and if my dad bought me a cool car, I could be this guy.

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.

If you talk about genres - I don't care if you're talking about war, Westerns, science fiction, horror, fantasy, humor, romance - anything you can find, strolling the aisles of a Borders or a Barnes & Noble, I can bring you many comic books representing each genre.

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.

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.