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‘The Batman’ Director Matt Reeves Reveals How ‘The Penguin’ Was Born Out of False Starts

Matt Reeves, director of The Batman and executive producer of The Penguin, talks about how the HBO hit came to be.

While director Matt Reeves was developing “The Batman,” his epic superhero movie starring Robert Pattinson as the Dark Knight, he ran into a problem — he had too much story. Reeves remembered saying, “We want to go on this exploration where we have this guy who’s got this deep voice inside of him that makes him the way that he is.” If Reeves’ “Batman” movie was “a mystery, a noir, a series killer movie,” the team got excited that “we could not only change point of view, but in a way change genre.” “The Penguin” would be like “Scarface,” “A gangster story where you’re seeing this guy grabbing for power in a way that is his origin tale.” LeFranc went away, did a deep dive on the character (who throughout the years has been played by everybody from Burgess Meredith to Danny DeVito) and returned with a version of why the character was as “messed up as he was.” It became clear that that would affect everything else that we were doing in a way that wasn’t necessarily to the benefit of those projects,” Reeves said, referring also to the animated series, “Batman: Caped Crusader,” for Prime Video.

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