MOVIE NEWS – Director Matt Reeves spoke to Collider about why he wanted the Riddler to be his first main villain.

After seeing Paul Dano’s version of the Riddler, many compared the character reimagined by Matt Reeves to the real-life Zodiac killer. In an interview with Collider, the director said that the main reason he chose the Riddler as Batman‘s arch-nemesis was the Zodiac himself.

Reeves talked about how the way the Zodiac commits his crimes, leaving clues, cyphers and messages for the police to follow in a sick game of cat and mouse, sounds like a “horrifying version of the Riddler.”

After all, the Riddler is well known for leaving clues or riddles for Batman to solve. While explaining his hopes for the film, Matt Reeves said:

“I wanted to do a Batman story where he was already Batman, but he still was in early days, had to find a way to sort of really evolve. I wanted to do a story that the investigation of this particular mystery would lead him back to something very personal, and would rock him to his core. So knowing that I wanted to do that kind of thing, I started sort of, from Long Halloween, I was thinking about the sort of Calendar Man and the idea of the different sort of killings. Then this idea came to me and I thought, well, we do a thing where at these crimes, there’s correspondence left for the Batman.”

The director explained that a big part of Batman’s character is that he is “anonymous” and how disturbing it would be if that anonymity were broken. He explained:

“I thought, well, that’s a great way in. As I started thinking about that and trying to ground it, I thought about the Zodiac. I thought about how the Zodiac, in this horrific way, left all of this sort of disturbing, these ciphers and these communications to the police and to the newspapers and how unsettling that was.”

“I thought, wow, that actually sounds like a horrifying version of the Riddler.”

Matt Reeves went into further detail when talking about the Riddler: “I thought, wow, that actually sounds like a horrifying version of the Riddler, because he was leaving all these puzzles.”

When the Riddler was created in 1948, social media didn’t exist, of course. When the Zodiac was committing its murders in the late 1960s, the modern technologies that helped connect people were still a world of science fiction. Between the comic books and the real-life case of the Zodiac killer and the film, there will be a significant difference in the use of social media. Matt Reeves was talking about the media use of the Riddler when he said:

“It was very important to me that Gotham not be New York, not be Chicago, not be any particular city, I wanted you to feel like, wow, this is a place we’ve never been before, but it feels absolutely like an iconic American city, a really corrupt, messed up place, but I wanted it to be much of our world. As I was doing that, I was thinking, okay, so he wouldn’t write to the Chronicle the way that Zodiac did. He would start using social media, because that’s what it would be. And this idea of the kind of viral communication, I just wanted it to be very much of our world. So that’s kind of how that came about.”

Batman is set to premiere on March 4.

Source: Collider