25 years since Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale published their iconic comic series Batman: The Long Halloween, the story is being adapted into a two-part, DC Universe Animated Original Movie of the same name. Written by Tim Sheridan and directed by Chris Palmer, the animated films take place during Batman's early years as a committed crime fighter in Gotham City. Similar to the comic's story, Batman: The Long Halloween follows a serial killer who targets victims on different holidays each month as the Dark Knight's rogues gallery grows bolder.
In an exclusive interview with CBR, Sheridan details the decision to split the upcoming animated adaptation into two feature-length films, highlights the importance of staying true to the spirit and themes of the source material and delves into why the film adaptations change several elements from the classic DC comic book story in the interest of time.
CBR: Batman: The Long Halloween is my personal favorite Batman story of all time. How was it getting to adapt it into two films?
Tim Sheridan: The idea was originally to do it as one movie and I said, "Heck no! We're going to have to give ourselves a little more runway here in order to be faithful to the ideas and themes of the book." We could've done it [as a single feature film] but, to be true to the book, I felt it really needed to be two movies and everyone else felt the same way. Our supervising producer Butch Lukic and producer Jim Krieg and everybody at Warner Bros. Animation and DC felt that was the way to go.
I'm dancing between spoilers but what made the stopping point here the logical conclusion to this part of the story?
We knew right away, it wasn't really something that we had to calculate or think about. The point at which we end Part 1 feels like a monumental beat in the story and, from that point onward in the book, it's a runaway train and mad dash. I think that's something you'll see when you watch Part 2: They're two very different movies and the pace of Part 2 is very different. The idea for me was these movies are two sides of the same coin. This side is the pristine, unmarred side of the coin and, once the events at the end of Part 1 happen, we flip the coin to the faster paced, more aggressive and dangerous story that moves at a very different pace -- with the flipping of the coin obviously being appropriate for the story! [laughs]
One of the big changes is the ethnicity of the gang. Instead of being Irish mobsters, it's a Chinese gang. How did that change come about?
There were two reasons why the Irish mob was changed to be the Chinese Triad. One of the reasons was we were looking for opportunities to have more diversity in our cast so it seemed like a place where we could do that. When you look at the original book, there's not a lot of instances of diversity like that so we felt like that was a good thing to do.
More importantly, at the time in which the book was written and released, we looked at Irish gangs much differently then; we were in a different place politically, with things like the history of the I.R.A., which were very relevant and topical. When Jeph and Tim did the book about the way we saw the Irish back then is not as relevant today. Today, I think the idea of Chinese mobsters is fresh and in our minds now and feels more like a real thing today. That's as much as a calculation that went into it and I think that it works. The only thing that I regret is that the original guy in the book is Nicky Sullivan and I wanted to make it Nicky Sun and just cut out some of the letters in his name but it didn't pass legal for some reason so you meet him as Nicky Chen.
It's been 25 years since the original comic was first published. As the screenwriter on this, what were some other things you wanted to update for modern sensibilities?
There were a lot of things inherent in the book that I wanted to flesh out and felt we needed to flesh out for it to work as a movie but it wasn't hard. The great thing about a work of art is a lot of it is up to interpretation so a lot of what you're getting in The Long Halloween is how Butch, Jim and I interpret The Long Halloween. I wanted to make sure that we were making the women in the story as well-rounded and full as characters as the men in the story. I believe this is a story about Gotham City and what it does to families who serve Gotham City. Just as much as the men, the women are a huge part of that story.
That was important to me but also how we look at mental illness in this story. I think times have changed and so has the way we look at villains and motivations for things and the way we look at mental illness in general. There were opportunities here to look at the characters and be more thoughtful how we approach those things than we may have been if we did the movie in the '90s; what better time than now?
One of the things I love about the story is how much influence there is from classic cinema and the noir genre. How did you want to highlight those elements in the screenplay?
One of the things I was sad about is I went in early on and thought that if this is detective noir, people will accept and expect omniscient narration from Batman. I sat down and tried to make it work but it's a thing that doesn't really work in animation for a lot of technical reasons. One of the big changes we had to make is that a lot of things we learn in the book from the omniscient narration we had to do in dialogue or visually in the story.
That was a key point in the adaptation and how we adapt all these movies, comic books often rely on the omniscient narrator but animation is so tricky in that it can seem like fun parody. The Long Halloween is a weighty story about big, adult themes and it was important to maintain and unfortunately we couldn't get the narration to work.
Why cut the summer wedding at the beginning of the comic story?
When people watch the movie, there's going to be some that wonder why their favorite part of the story is cut or gets less screen time. Like I said, the book is a work of art so people are going to like different things about it. For us, it was a matter of only having so much time, even telling the story with two movies, especially without the convenience of narration. We read comic books different than the way we watch movies, when we read comics, we insert panels and pages where there aren't panels and pages. We can't really do that with a movie and jump from one thing to the next and feel like we're having a cinematic experience, it would look like a hodge-podge collage of The Long Halloween.
Some things had to go and, in terms of the opening of the movie, I think the first scene is the most faithful scene to the book and that was really important to me. I wanted everybody to know that we put that much thought and care into it. When we depart from dialogue and situations slightly here and there, I hope people understand that we're trying to translate something, if not visually then thematically. I think it's important that we did that first scene the way that we did. There's no wedding but all the important beats from that moment in the book are all there playing out in that first scene: The relationship between Bruce Wayne, Falcone and Gotham City is all right there on display and I think that's the heart of what The Long Halloween, Part 1 is.
Batman: The Long Halloween, Part One stars Jensen Ackles as Bruce Wayne/Batman, Naya Rivera as Catwoman/Selina Kyle, Josh Duhamel as Harvey Dent, Billy Burke as James Gordon, Titus Welliver as Carmine Falcone, David Dastmalchian as Calendar Man, Troy Baker as Joker, Amy Landecker as Barbara Gordon, Julie Nathanson as Gilda Dent, Jack Quaid as Alberto, Fred Tatasciore as Solomon Grundy and Alastair Duncan as Alfred, along with Frances Callier, Greg Chun, Gary Leroi Gray and Jim Pirri. The film is scheduled for release on June 22. Batman: The Long Halloween, Part Two arrives digitally on July 27 and on Blu-ray on Aug. 10.
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