Jonathan Nolan bullied big brother Christopher into making Dark Knight

Sometimes, when the chips are down, the best way to get your brother to direct a sequel to a Batman movie is bullying. Just ask Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan’s arm-twisting younger brother. Appearing on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast [per Variety], Jonathan Nolan set about embarrassing his older, Oscar-winning brother by telling Shepard about how he bullied his big bro into making another Batman. What’s Chris going to do about it? Cry?

Nolan said that he worked on Batman Begins in “a slightly arm’s length capacity,” which was “cool,” but he wondered, “ What [more] can we do with this?” He has since collaborated with his brother on numerous projects, including The Prestige and Interstellar, but back then, he was just a kid on set, presumably giving his sibling director wet willies in front of a very impressed Christian Bale.

However, Jonathan says his brother was “on the fence” about a sequel to Batman Begins. Despite ending the movie with that Joker card, a pretty rude way to leave fans hanging, he “didn’t want to become a comic book movie director.” One can get away with directing one comic book movie, but a second feature earns a call from Martin Scorsese, who asks, “What the hell is going on?” and he isn’t very polite about it. Neither was Jonathan, who bullied his brother into shutting up and making another Batman.

“I was literally sitting with [producer] Charles Roven and Chris and being like, ‘Dude, don’t be a chicken shit. Let’s do this!’” Jonathan told Shepard. “And I knew with the script—and he developed the story with David Goyer with a little bit of input from me—it was like first act detailed, second act somewhat detailed, third act … uh, he rides away at the end—once we had the script done, I was like, ‘This is going to be great. This is exciting. We gotta make this movie.’ And eventually, he came around. He did manage to avoid being pigeonholed.”

See that? Sometimes, a little bullying can get us a good Batman movie.