Batman: The Long Halloween Part 2 is now available digitally and on Blu-ray, concluding DC’s animated adaptation of the cult Batman Story. The films were written by Tim Sheridan and directed by Chris Palmer.
“Inspired by the iconic DC story from the mid-1990s by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, Batman: The Long Halloween Part 2 continues while the Holiday Killer is still at large and with Bruce Wayne under the spell of poison Ivy, Batman is nowhere to be found, ”the official summary reads. “Freed from an unlikely ally, Bruce quickly finds the real culprit: Carmine Falcone, Poison Ivy’s employer. The Roman, whose ranks have been decimated by Holiday and his business spiraling out of control, has been forced to attract less desirable partners – Gotham City’s Villain Gallery. Meanwhile, Harvey Dent is fighting on two fronts: trying to end the mob war while grappling with a strained marriage. And after an attack that horribly disfigured Harvey, the prosecutor unleashes the duality of his psyche, which he has wanted to suppress all his life. Now, as Two-Face, Dent decides to take the law into his own hands and convict those who wronged him, his family and all of Gotham. Ultimately, the Dark Knight has to piece together the tragic pieces that came together to create Two-Face, the Holiday Killer, Batman and Gotham City himself. “
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ComingSoon editor-in-chief Tyler Treese spoke with Batman: The long Halloween Screenwriter Tim Sheridan on the adaptation of the classic comic into two films, the challenges of its length and what the film is really about.
Tyler Treese: I’d like to hear about your relationship with the original graphic novel. When did you first read The Long Halloween?
Tim Sheridan: Well my relationship is such that I’m going to be the big nerd here and you correct that it was actually a monthly book that was published. It wasn’t technically what we’d think of as a graphic novel, but graphic novels can certainly be published monthly. So I won’t argue with you too much.
I love this book. I think most die-hard Batman fans like me, and maybe like you, love this story. It has inspired so many other writers and other creators, and given so much to the mythology of Batman. It’s great because it really happens at such an early point in Batman’s timeline that it has no choice but to let our understanding know who he is and who he becomes. You see how we get into that a little in the movie, I mean, we really play up the aspect that he’s new to a detective and kind of has to figure out how to be a Batman in the new Gotham that shows up.
Yes. That’s a great point because you think of DC, that’s Detective Comics and Batman, he’s not the best detective this time. He focuses on the false suspects, all of these people are killed during his investigation. On this interesting time standpoint, can you speak of Batman that he’s not really at his peak of deduction skills?
Well it’s funny. I mean, I feel like it was so obvious. Some people say to me, wow, the thing about Batman being new and being a detective is something you made up and added to the story. I’m like, wait a minute. We all know this takes place around the second year of the book, right. For Batman, he has all the costumed guys, many of whom are already locked up. But it takes him a year to solve this mystery, and probably a lot of people would read the book and say it’s not really Batman who solves the case. There are big, great questions about interpretation because that’s what we get when we get a great work of art like The long Halloween Comic.
So it’s totally organic to me about the story, that this is a Batman, it’s going to take a year. I mean, these days Batman would probably solve the Holiday Killer case in one issue, maybe two. To see how he struggles to get his kind of sea legs and figure out how to do this job in the future. He learns from Harvey and from Jim Gordon. We see Harvey at the very beginning of The long Halloween, he’s putting together a case. He works hard and is devastated when Johnny Viti goes down because that was all his case. He’s devastated in this film when things don’t go as they should with Sal Maroni. He’s still trying to set up the suitcase properly, this is the stuff Batman needs to learn.
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You talked about it for a whole year. If you adapt this comic, how difficult is it to transfer that length of time over the two films and then work from such a popular script, is it difficult to decide what it does and what you need to change?
Butch Lukic, James Krieg and I, when we first sat down to talk about these films, when you know your goal is to get the story and the essence of the story as best you can as fans of the book and its final point in a new medium, in a new format that could never be the graphic novel, but is a version of its own that exists in its own part of the multiverse. It makes these decisions a lot easier to make. One of the big challenges for this story is dealing with the calendar. I mean, originally this film was supposed to be the whole book. The entire 13 issues should be a 72- to 80-minute film.
As I looked at it I thought folks, I just don’t know how to do this and it still feels that way The long Halloween at least in spirit. I don’t even know how. We should have shifted elements, big plot points, into an act of the film that wasn’t supposed to happen for a long time. In the book it played out for over a year. We had to wait a month to find out what would happen next. Well, if we’d done that in a 70-minute movie, every minute and a half, every two minutes, we’d jump in time for a new holiday. It would just be some kind of snuff movie or someone is murdered as someone is murdered as someone is murdered. So we needed the air, we needed it to be able to breathe a bit, so we could get a feel for Gotham and because that’s the story in the end. This is a story about Gotham City and its transition from organized crime to disorganized crime. That’s how we went in there.
There is such a great cast. Jensen Ackles is fantastic as Batman, there are so many strong performances. Can you speak to Ackles’ performance as Batman?
The day I heard he’d agreed, I was jumping for joy. As a fan of his, I knew what he would do to help. I knew he could do it. Whenever you are making a great Batman movie based on a giant book, you need to make sure that you are getting the right man. A guy who could potentially play Batman at a very early stage in his career. He has a lot to learn as we discussed and it would be really hard to believe that Batman would have a lot to learn if we had one of the guys who played this role for so long and we really trust and know each other so well . We really had to get together with an actor who knows Batman and knows her really well, but was able to bring that element to the story, the element of being a little bit new, and Jensen tackled it absolutely directly and to the point of perfection like it I’m going. I couldn’t actually be happy. He was happy to join in, play Batman, play Bruce Wayne, and as a fan of his, it gives me endless pleasure to know that he could do it.
While Batman is obviously the protagonist, the story has all of these characters that are usually on the side here in the foreground. Can you talk to
As I said, this story is about Gotham City. It’s really the main character, isn’t it? Gotham City’s transition from this particular type of crime to a new type of crime. In fact, the story is represented in the story through the various families who all live in the service of Gotham City. This is the Waynes, this is the Falcones, this is the Gordon, this is the Dents. In order to tell this story the way we do in a movie, I think it’s important to really get under the skin of these characters a bit and learn about the sacrifices and costs they made around the end from The long Halloween. I mean, the real question is, in the end, it was all worth the price and what it cost these people, these men and women who served this idea of Gotham City, this once bright and shining idea that might be bright and shining again could.
The story is so grounded compared to some of the other Batman bows. How did you get that on screen?
One of the great things about The long Halloween I was about to script this as a live action movie. I said look, I’m doing a live action adaptation of The long Halloween that we will animate randomly. That led to some decisions we made along the way about what would work and what would not work in live action and how we would bring that to life.
