Holy flaming cows, Batman! with Jonathan Gems - Part 1 (of 3)

The British screenwriter & playwright speaks candidly about his life, career, and working with Tim Burton

I sat down with Jonathan Gems in October 2023 for what was meant to be an hour or so. Much to my surprise (and great pleasure) we spoke for over four hours. The first part of our conversation appears below.

Kicking things off.

Mr. Gems, Jonathan, thank you so much for being here. It’s a real treat for me.

It’s nice to meet you, too.

I’m loving that massive collection of books behind you.

Yes, this is my library [points behind him]. And this is my home that you see, off the south coast of England. I’ve got a living room with books, a bedroom with books.

It looks like a proper book shop.

Yes, and I’ve got a flat in London that’s shelved and filled with books too [laughter].

I love it. When I was a kid, my dad had an “office” in the house shelved from floor to ceiling with books and vinyl.

What a cool dad.

He wasn’t precious about his collection either, I could mostly read or listen to whatever I wanted as long as I showed it to him first.

My father never read a book in his life [laughter].

What was your old man like?

He liked camping and sailing, and may have been dyslexic, so he didn’t like to read. But my mother was the complete opposite, though. She was like your dad with her rooms full of books, and she always reading. When she died, my father tried to destroy all her books.

Did he just not want to think about it anymore?

Yes, he said they were just getting in the way. And Mum had collected over the years a tremendous library.

Do most of your books come from your mom?

Yes, some of them are hers. I managed to save some of them. But Dad sold off about a hundred thousand pounds worth of books for maybe five thousand dollars.

Oh, damn.

There were so many books that the bookseller who came to buy them couldn’t take them all in one day. He picked out all the really expensive first editions and took those. I turned up on the scene and kind of went, “What the fuck’s happened to all the books?”

You would’ve been pretty hot under the collar.

My dad was keen to get rid of them and I said, “No you’re not!” So, I did save what I could.

Early life.

Since we’re talking about your family, could you tell me a little about your childhood?

If I talk about that, we’d be here for days [laughter].

Hey, anything goes. We can do a deep dive if you like, or we can keep it short and sweet.

Well, I’ll tell you a little bit so that you know who I am. I was born in 1952, in east London, within the sound of Bow Bells. Bow’s a part of east London, if anyone doesn’t know. If you can hear the church bells there, then you’re a Cockney, from the East End. But I guess I’m not really a Cockney because I wasn’t raised there… my family moved all the time.

Why were you always on the move?

My father had a family business which he’d inherited, but it was started by my great-grandfather. He was a German-Jewish immigrant from Schleswig-Holstein, and he was the man who invented shop window mannequins. He was from a typical sort of family of tailors, but he was the black sheep because he was no good at being a tailor. In those days, you’d displayed clothes on a tailor’s dummy.

That’s just a sort of torso really, isn’t it?

Well yes, but he had the bright idea of putting on a head and arms and legs, and they took off straight away. All the clothes shops wanted them, and he made a fortune. He created a factory and was mass-producing these mannequins. So, when he died my grandfather Leo took over the business, which was Gems Wax Models. After school, I would play in the factory, and I loved it. My grandad Leo worked there all his life, and he was a lovely man… he was like an old-fashioned kind of pater familias to the thirty or forty people that worked in the factory.

Kinda like the Godfather?

Absolutely [laughter]. He would give them Christmas presents, and take them out for holidays to the beach, and be their confessor, really. He’d give them no interest loans if they were in financial trouble or whatever. But he could be strict, too, he’d dock their pay if they were late. The sort of hard but fair daddy-figure. But they all loved Leo, and I remember when I was young he made me promise that I would take over the business.

So, you really started working at a young age then.

Yes, because my father didn’t like working. He wanted me to take over the business as soon as possible, too, as long as he had enough money. And once I was trained up, my father announced he was selling everything, at the age of forty.

Had he gotten sick or something?

No, he just wanted to retire so that he could sail his boat and drink wine… living his life for pleasure. He wanted to have a good time all the time [laughter]. That was his motto. And he was a very popular guy, he had lots of buddies and he was always having fun. But he spent all the money that had been built up by my grandfather and great-grandfather, so I was kind of left with nothing.

Did your Dad’s sort of cavalier attitude make things tougher at home?

My parents were always arguing, so my childhood was not terribly happy. Mum and Dad were totally incompatible. I don’t know why they got married. I think maybe my mother stayed with my dad because she had grown up poor. She grew up in the 1930s, and her father died when she was very young. She literally didn’t have shoes… I mean they were living on bread and sugar. Living on charity.

And your dad could take her away from all that?

Yes, by her standards my father was rich. But they were completely unsuited to one another.

My parents were wonderful and loving people but they seemed to butt heads a lot. They hardly ever saw eye to eye, except for maybe when it came to us, their children. Even as a kid I picked up on all of that stress in the air.

That’s very similar to my own upbringing. The tension in the house was such that we’d move every two years or so. Eventually my mother would say, “I’ve gotta get out of this house!” And so, there was this period where there would be a sort of ceasing of hostilities.

Because they’d be busy making plans.

Exactly! They’d be looking for a new house, selling an old house. Then after the nesting and settling in, the cycle would start over, and we’d move again. So, I was in and out of different schools all the time, and dealing with this angry atmosphere. Once my father had inherited the family business he sent me off to private school, and I was okay with that because things were really not happy at home. Now I don’t know if you know much about English boarding school back then, but they were… [pauses].

Boarding school Hell.

They tend to be portrayed with a bit of malevolence… like Another Brick in the Wall.

Oh yes, the abuse was rampant. All the pretty boys got fucked in the first week. The schools were evil. My life at school was worse than my life at home.

It sounds like you jumped from one unhappiness to another.

I liked school originally, when I was at state school, but private school was very liberal with the use of the cane. They’d beat you for anything, and the trouble with me was that I was an angry kid. I was a real tough nut back then, and I refused to accept authority. They used to call me “the three i’s”… impertinent, impudent, insubordinate.

Your childhood “crimes.”

Oh, they hammered it into you. “Impudent, impertinent. And we’re giving you six of the best because of insubordination.” And they’d whack you on the bare bottom. This sort of thing happened every week.

When stuff like that happens at such a young age, you tend to keep it all inside, and often for a long time.

Yeah, because you’re a child, and you don’t know if you’re going to get into more trouble if you talk about it. Everything you do is wrong, and everything they do is right. You don’t know what the game is. So, it wasn’t until I was about fourteen that I figured it all out.

Did you think about asking your parents to let you transfer to another school?

I remember things got so bad that I started writing to my mother to get me out. I’d already written letters about being beaten, but I was being ignored. Then I had the idea that, because I didn’t like being sodomized by all these boys, my mother probably wouldn’t like that. And that did the trick, because she finally told my father and they finally got me out of there. I was fifteen.

How’d you get through those tough teenage years?

Well, I was fascinated by humour. It’s like if you’re colour-blind and you can’t see purple, but one day you see purple for the first time, then you become obsessed [laughter]. I remember seeing cartoons like Popeye and Tom & Jerry around that time and they baffled me. Is it funny? I mean, what is it? I just didn’t understand them.

I remember kids at school getting in fights, and I think I must’ve had the thought that if I was funny I could avoid all that. Bullies would leave me alone, and I sort of became a class clown to some degree.

Oh, the only good thing about school for me was that there were one or two class clowns who’d make me laugh. And the other kids would laugh too, and I often didn’t totally understand why. But I became mad about comics at that time, Mad Magazine and what have you. It was just this encyclopedia of comedy.

Did you get into comic books at all?

I used to get these horrible old English comics like Billy Bunter… and The Magnet.

It sounds like The Shadow crossed with Sherlock Holmes or something.

It was so horrible, like this weird Victorian thing. There was another one called Biggles, who was a kind of ace fighter pilot. Not really great comics by any means.

They didn’t change your life or anything [laughing].

No [laughter]. But I did have a life altering experience when I was about nine or ten. My father took the family to Arizona where he was building a wax museum, and I was there for six months and went to junior high school there. We lived in one of these ranch style houses, and it had stables, and I had this pony I’d ride him to school every day.

That wasn’t a euphemism, you mean you rode an actual pony?

Oh yeah, his name was Blue. And there was a big corral for the ponies, and I remember Blue would get really excited when he saw all the other horses. Arizona was sort of this polite, white-bread version of the Wild West, you know? Everybody was friendly, and I loved American school. It was totally different than an English school. Everyone was direct, and the teachers seemed to care about you, and there were no physical punishments.

The students would’ve loved your English accent.

Oh yes [laughter]. I was very popular. [Puts on an American accent] They’d all gather around and go, “Can you say something? Now say something else.” So yeah, the way I experienced school in America was totally unlike how its depicted in Hollywood movies. You know how in the high school movies there’s always some football player who picks on the younger or weaker ones.

The jocks versus the nerds.

That’s right. But that wasn’t my experience. In America, the girls were always telling the boys what to do. You can’t walk there, you can’t do that [laughter]. And they’d reprimand the boys for always screwing around. I had never met girls like that. It seemed to me that America was more of a matriarchy in that sense, whereas England felt patriarchal. But going back to that life-changing experience, I was playing baseball in one-hundred degree heat, and I got heat stroke really bad.

That happened to me when I was kid too. It’s scary.

Playing baseball?

No, I was in the back garden one day in the middle of summer. I remember getting tunnel vision and I could hear, but everything was shrinking and going dark, and I kept saying “I can’t see, I can’t see!” And Dad was like, “You’re fainting, son.” [laughing]

Oh wow. Well I remember when I had my heat stroke they put me in a darkened room for like six weeks, and my parents said, “Well what do you want?” And I remember I said, “comics.” And they brought me these piles of comics… EC Comics, and horror comics, and I was fascinated. I was reading Tales From the Crypt and Where Monsters Dwell. They gave me nightmares [laughter]… but they were incredible books.

I was reading stuff similar to that in my early teens… Ghost Rider, and Morbius. Fairly intense comics that kind of scared me but I couldn’t look away.

You couldn’t get those kinds of comics in England. I was so inspired by these American comics that I started drawing my own when I was about eleven, when I’d gotten back to England. I had a buddy who was inspired by what I was doing, so we started doing comics together. We’d print these books using a Gestetner, and you could print twenty or thirty pages with it. So, we’d staple them together and try to sell them to the other kids.

Did you sell any?

No, nobody ever bought them [laughter]. We’d end up giving them away.

Enter Richard Branson.

What’d you do after you left school?

Believe it or not I started a magazine called Student, because I hated school so much. And I developed a whole series of thought around everything that was wrong with school, and what needed to change. I wanted it to be a kind of forum or platform for people to discuss how to change the school system. But I was just a fifteen year-old kid. However, there was a boy at school who was a few years older than I was, and we became friends. He was a very dynamic guy, and his name was Richard Branson.

You mean Virgin Records Richard Branson? What are the odds of that?

Well it just so happened that he left school too, around the same time I did, and he liked my idea for the magazine. So, we decided that we would go and live in my parent’s basement and do the magazine. Richard was selling the advertising, and every page was like nine-hundred pounds. I think he sold fourteen pages right off the bat, and the magazine didn’t even exist! And he got credit with the printers so that we could print it for no money. I mean he was just brilliant, so he made that happen… he was only seventeen and already a genius businessman.

At that age, it’s amazing anyone took you guys seriously.

It was difficult because I was fifteen, and had a squeaky voice. I looked like a child [laughter]. But fortunately Richard looked more mature and a bit older than he was. He was able to get everything done, really. And the first issue was a big success, we sold about fifty-thousand copies.

Fifty thousand copies is no small thing!

No, it was a huge hit. Richard and I sort of became the “voice of youth.” Back in the late 60s, there were television programs that were like talk shows, or discussion programs, and there’d be a panel where the audience could ask questions of the guests. And whenever they wanted the youth opinion they’d put Richard and I on the stage. One day I remember my mother called me up from the basement where we were working, and she said, “I just saw you on television! What are you doing on television?!”

She had no idea what you were up to [laughing].

No clue [laughter]. Neither did my father. So, I told her about the magazine and she said, “Well this has to stop.” She thought it was ridiculous. And she talked to my father about it, and they discovered that they had changed the laws in England and you couldn’t leave school until you were sixteen. When my parents were young, you could leave at fifteen, but they had since changed it to sixteen. So, technically, I was illegally out of school… and my father was like, “Right. You’ve got to go back to school.”

You had to stop the magazine?

Richard was pretty pissed off. I mean we were just getting started. We had the second issue planned out, and the third issue was underway. We had started what would become Virgin Records down there.

Wow, you two were onto it.

It was a mail-order company originally, and we did it through the magazine. We’d give ourselves a full page where we’d list all the records with the price, and you’d get it cheaper than you would in a shop. And that was Richard’s idea to make a few bucks on the side. I remember getting up early one morning and the postman dropped off a huge sack of mail, and I said “What’s all this?” And then he came back with a second bag.

Like kids writing to Santa Claus.

Just like that [laughter]. So, I started opening all the letters and there was all this money! A five pound note… a ten pound note… it was all these people ordering records from the magazine. So, I got a new ledger out and wrote down all the names and addresses and how much money they had sent in, and what they ordered.

Exit stage left.

You guys hit the jackpot.

But I had to quit all that to go back to school. I remember it was called Holland Park Comprehensive. To my amazement, I loved it there… totally loved it. It was mixed with both boys and girls, and there seemed to be hardly any rules… there were certainly no beatings. It was like heaven for me. There were a couple of good teachers who’d talk to you like an actual human being, and I made real friends with people there.

Why do you think that school was so different to others you’d been to?

Because it was a state school. In the middle class, or private schools, you’re trained up to be a boss. You’re above the lower classes, so to speak. You can feel sorry for them, or sad for them… and you must be charitable to them, but don’t take any nonsense from them.

This is what you were taught?

That’s what you’re taught. But the good thing about being in the lower classes is that… you have a good time [laughter]. They’re clever, they’re street-smart, and they know how to get around corners, you know. They’re the “enslaved” class, so they learn compensation. Humour is a good compensator.

The healing power of laughter.

Yes [laughing]. So, I loved it there, and my comedic taste buds were being improved at state school. But unfortunately, I was soon expelled. They kicked me out. And I hadn’t really been in any trouble there. They never really told me why, they just said it was because I was a “bad influence.”

I wonder if the teaching staff had read Student magazine? Maybe you pissed off the wrong people.

Oh, shit. I never even thought of that [laughter].

I mean you said yourself the magazine was very anti-school.

But I wasn’t anti this school [laughter]. Holland Park was actually a much better model than the others I’d been to. In state school, which was free, the teaching was actually better than it was at the expensive private schools.

What did you end up doing after that?

I drifted for about ten years. I did lots of different things. I remember I did a stage management course at RADA. I was walking down the street and saw a sign that said “Stage Management Interviews” and I thought, well, I should try that.

You just sauntered in off the street?

Yeah, why not? After I walked in they said they’d put me on a list, and I was the last one to be interviewed. But they liked me, and they accepted me, and that role came with a grant. I was supposed to be there for two years learning about stagecraft, acting, running lights and sound, and all of that. But ultimately, I didn’t like it, so I quit that after a year.

You must’ve felt wayward after all the back and forth… leaving school and then being forced to go back to school.

Well eventually it got to the point where I had to have a job… I had to work. And because I’d been to RADA, I got a job as an actual stage manager, and I took to it like a duck to water. I worked at the Open Space Theatre in a place called Tottenham Court Road. I did that for a year, and then ended up at Half Moon Theatre in the east end of London, and this place was in a bit of trouble at the time. I remember they had already advertised the Christmas show, which was A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. They’d already sold tickets to it, but we didn’t have a play, we had nothing except the stage equipment really.

There was no money?

I was working for no money [laughter]. And the administrator, who hired me for no money, said can you do an adaptation of A Christmas Carol? So, I said okay. And I took the story and adapted it in about three weeks, and I put songs into and really made it into a musical. We had actors come in and do it for nothing, which was amazing.

Were you an actor in it as well?

Yes, I had a small part in the play and I was also doing the music, so I’d run back and forth backstage to do the music and lighting cues… and I loved it. Watching these actors do what you’d written, I got the bug for it straight away.

Early successes.

Was that gig enough to make you stick around?

Well I stayed there for about a year, and eventually I quit and went on the dole because I wanted to study… learning about Ibsen and Chekhov and the like. So, I was studying and writing as much as I could to come up with my own plays. But I had made lots of contacts being a stage manager, and so the first plays that I wrote I put them on myself, for free. In these fringe theatres, they’d often have gaps where they didn’t have a show for a week or two, and so I’d get a bunch of friends together to come act in what I’d written.

Something was blossoming.

Oh yes. The first play had a handful of people turn up, and then the second play was successful in a small way because it was picked up by BBC radio, and then the third play did okay as well. But all of that led to my hit play which was called The Tax Exile, which was done at the Bush Theatre, and that put me on the map. After that I was offered commissions by the Royal Court Theatre, and all the sort of top theatres wanted me to write for them.

Did you run from that? Or did things keep snowballing?

After The Tax Exile, I did Naked Robots for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and one called The Paranormalist starring Denholm Elliott. That was quite successful, and it was going to transfer to London’s West End, but Denholm got cold feet and changed his mind… I think he didn’t want to do eight performances a week for six months, you know. After that I did another play at the Royal Court which was very controversial called Susan’s Breasts. That was selling out, and they were breaking the fire regulations by cramming more people in the theatre than they had seats [laughter]. But still, I was frustrated by the system.

So, you couldn’t even enjoy it?

Well I wasn’t necessarily popular with the critics, but I was popular with the people. The trouble with the system in England is that it’s all funded by the government. At that time, they didn’t like anything that was remotely conservative. They didn’t approve of it, and I think they wanted things to be more socialist.

You considered yourself conservative?

Well I wasn’t advancing the socialist agenda because I was just writing comedy, and people like comedies… they’re popular. All the successful writers getting good reviews were writing Marxist-Leninist leaning plays, whereas I wasn’t political.

I guess the establishment wasn’t exactly going to lift you up at that point.

Yes, and I think because the plays were so successful that I unintentionally incited a lot of envy. Some people see comedy as inferior, you know. They might enjoy the show but they’d still criticize it for not being “proper.” All these playwrights were coming out with this socialist twaddle, but no one was going to see them.

Because they weren’t putting asses in the seats.

That’s it. They were getting good reviews, but no business. I mean, Susan’s Breasts sold out in the first two days, and so I think the other playwrights sort of hated me for that. It was just very competitive, and there was a lot of nastiness, and ugly things being said… so I wanted to get away from that.

Had you ever thought of jumping from playwright to writing novels, maybe?

I didn’t want to be a playwright, I just sorted of backed into it, and I was dead against it because my mother was a playwright. She was always in her room writing television and radio plays, and she just wasn’t available. You’d see her at breakfast, and then you’d hear the typewriter clacking away, and you’d not see her again until about six o’clock. So, what I saw in my mother was that it made her miserable because her work was constantly being rejected. But I remember reading The Possessed by Dostoevsky, and I thought… this is the pinnacle, if only I could write something like that. And I read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, and that blew me away too.

I’ve met people that don’t see the humour in Catch-22. I mean it’s funny to me, but it’s also funny if you let it be funny. The neurotic doctor getting the orderlies to take his temperature every day? C’mon [laughing].

Oh yes, I had steam coming out of my ears when I read it [laughter]. I was laughing so hard, it just blew my socks off. And I remember thinking if I were to write a novel, it would be like this. And Catch-22 in particular seemed to me to be a kind of cross between Dostoevsky and Mad Magazine, and I thought, well this is me. So that’s where my style kind of came from I think.

You mentioned Mad Magazine a couple of times, so I’m surprised you hadn’t done your own comic.

In my twenties, I actually published my own comic called It’s All Lies, believe it or not. It was what they called an “underground” comic. And I would draw some of it and write, and I brought in other cartoonists. We had a whole gang… and I couldn’t pay anybody, they all did it for nothing. But we used to put on parties every week, and all the guys involved would turn up, and I’d invite the girls. I think that’s one reason we did it for, to meet girls, you know.

Was that comic influenced by The Magnet?

Oh, not The Magnet again [laughter]. No, It’s All Lies was a funny mixture… a sort of experimental thing. A British version of the underground stuff like what Robert Crumb was doing in San Francisco. We were just making it up as we went along, and didn’t really have a plan. Alan Moore wrote one of them. One of the artists was a guy named Matthew Freeth, and he was just so talented.

Was that an ongoing thing? A monthly comic?

We only did seven issues before we ran out of money. It was a pity because we had no capital really, just this great idea. I think it could’ve developed into something good like Mad Magazine.

1 9 8 4.

But you were officially a playwright by then. Did you shift your focus back to that?

I was being offered things left and right. Around that time, I met this guy randomly in a copy shop, and his name was Michael Radford. I remember there was a line of people in the shop, and I was next in line for the copy machine, and I started copying my play. And someone taps me on the shoulder, and he says, “Excuse me, I know this is an awful lot to ask, but may I jump in ahead of you?”

Please tell me you didn’t tell him to take a hike [laughing].

Well [laughter] I looked at him and said, “Okay, but why?” He said, “It’s a bit of an emergency. I’m a film director, and I must have six copies of this for a meeting for this afternoon.” So, I let him go in front of me, and while he’s copying his screenplay, the machine broke down.

A serendipitous paper jam.

The young lady working there, she didn’t know what to do. Mike was flipping out a bit because he needed these copies, and so I just opened up the machine and sort of got it working again. I just unjammed the rollers or the cogs at the back. Anyway, we’d been talking as he was copying his screenplay, and Mike hadn’t seen any of my plays but he’d heard of them. Before he left the shop, he gave me a copy of the script and said, “Here you have a copy. Read it and let me know what you think.” And he gave me his details. That was the script to 1984.

Oh wow.

Bear in mind I didn’t know anything about screenwriting, and I’d never written a screenplay at that point. But I read it and thought it was… well, I thought it was crap [laughter]. And having been in showbiz for as long as I have, I know now that you never ever say anything negative about anybody or anything, ever, because people are extremely sensitive. If you say to an actor you sucked in this or that, they’ll never forgive you. They’ll remember it until the end of time. So, I knew not to say anything negative to Mike about the script.

But you did it anyway?

[Laughter] I remember Mike actually called me and he asked me what I thought. I said it’s very good. He asked was there anything there you didn’t like? Tell me the truth. And so, I said well there’s a slight problem with the characters, and one or two issues with the story, but otherwise it’s really good [gritting his teeth]. And there was this silence… then he says, “Everyone who read this script all say it’s genius! You’re the only one making any criticisms!” And I said, all I’m saying is that the love story isn’t working as well as it could do, and the characters could be sharpened up a bit. He says, “You don’t know what you’re talking about, everyone says it’s brilliant!” And BANG, he put the phone down on me.

He hung up on you?

He was so angry. But about a week later I got a second phone call from him, which was a surprise. And he said, “Hey, it’s Mike… I’m down at this pub, would you like to come have a drink?” And it was just around the corner from me, so I go over and he’s sitting there and we’re having a beer, and he says, “I showed this script to seven people and they all want jobs on the film. They said it’s brilliant because they want to work on the movie. But you’re the only person to tell me the truth.”

Your honesty had sunk its teeth in.

And he asked me to re-write it in three weeks for something like two-thousand pounds a week… which was huge. But it ended up being like four months or thereabouts, because Mike asked me to stay on the show.

Were you doing re-writes that whole time?

Well Mike had gotten sick toward the end of production, so he told me to work with the editor and cut the film together, so that’s what we did. And it became obvious when we put it together that there were gaps, weaknesses, and problems that needed fixing. But we didn’t have much money left, so I wrote a few voice overs, and had John Hurt come in and do those. But we stitched it all together while Mike was away, and that’s how I learned about the process of making a movie really. That film was interesting because it was financed independently by Richard Branson. And it was only released in one theatre, in all of England.

One cinema? How is that even possible?

Hollywood controls all the theatres, even in England. 1984 was independent, so they didn’t want competition. Richard [Branson] had to sell the film to MGM so they could distribute the film, and they paid him exactly what the film cost to make, which was about six million pounds. So, Richard didn’t make a penny off of it.

It doesn’t sound like a wholly positive first experience.

What it taught me was how and why there really is no British Film Industry anymore. We used to make fifty or sixty films a year, and now it’s almost none, which is very sad. Of course, they make a lot of American films in England using the old studio production houses that we still retain when we had a film industry.

On the plus side, I love how that all came about because of a random encounter at a copy machine. What’s equally interesting is how Richard Branson popped back up into your life.

It’s always the same bunch wherever you go [laughter]. You can be in New York, Los Angeles, or London… it’s the same people.

Bringing up BATMAN.

Did that experience lead into you to getting the job with Tim Burton?

I got a call from my agent. He tells me Warner Brothers is coming over, and they’re building sets for Gotham City over at Pinewood, and that they were looking for a writer since there was a writer’s strike happening in America. They figured they could use a British writer who wasn’t in the WGA. My agent said there were five other screenwriters who were going to be interviewed, and that Warners had made a stipulation that they’d only interview writers who had two or more screen credits.

And you’d done two movies exactly.

Yes, 1984 and another film that Mike [Radford] also directed called White Mischief, which had John Hurt and Charles Dance.

Do you remember feeling nervous about trying for Batman?

Well I really wanted the job because I was broke [laughter]. I said to the young lady who was one of the co-producers that interviewed me, “Have you been to England before?” And she said, “No, I’m real excited about it!” And I said well maybe I could take you around and show you the sights, and she was kind of apprehensive like well [mumbling] I don’t know if that would be ethical, and uh—

You went home with your tail between your legs?

I said yeah, okay, I understand. And so, a few days went by, and I was friends with Malcolm McLaren at that time. He told me about this big trendy party that was happening. So, I called up the co-producer who interviewed me for Batman, and told her about the party, and that if she had changed her mind she’d meet all the trendy hip and happening people in London. She said, “Okay I’ll do it.”

Smooth move.

And the party was incredible… it exceeded even my expectations. There was music and all these male models in these amazing costumes, champagne was flowing, and it was just fantastic. So, the co-producer who I went with got really drunk. And I helped her into a taxi and got her home, and she couldn’t even get up the stairs [laughter]. I got her through the door and sort of put her in bed and said, “Okay, bye.” And the very next day she called me and said Tim Burton was coming in from L.A. in a few days, and that I need to come meet him when he gets in.

Did you know who Tim was?

I didn’t know anything about him really, and I didn’t know what to expect. The co-producer had given me the Sam Hamm Batman script beforehand, which I had read. But when I went back to Pinewood and Tim came in, I was a bit unnerved because he just looked so young. I think he was in mid-twenties then, and he was quite lanky, and was clearly a goth.

Goth is a good word to describe him, especially back then.

I remember he was wearing an Alien Sex Fiend t-shirt, black pants, black boots… and this mass of black hair like a nest that almost hid his face. You could just maybe see his nose and one eye peeking through the hair, and he was very quiet and seemed very introverted. And I was thinking well this is weird, how can this guy be directing?

Was he friendly toward you?

He was kind of mumbling mostly, and I couldn’t really hear what he was saying. I remember he asked if I had read the script, and I said yes, and he said what do you think? And I said, [pauses] it needs work. And Tim said, okay, well what would you do with it?

Just like what happened with Mike Radford.

Totally the same thing [laughter]. It was like, okay how honest can you be?

You just decided to go for broke [laughing].

I decided to go for broke and just let the chips fall where they may. So, I told Tim that the Joker was very good, he’s a wonderful character. Joker is psycho, and he’s got this great origin… and people love to watch psychos. But the way the script is now, it shouldn’t be called Batman, it should be called The Joker because he’s really the only interesting character.

Since Tim wasn’t talking much could you tell if he was buying into your idea?

He was just sort of nodding. So, I said all the other characters felt like cyphers of Superman: The Movie… you’ve got Vicki Vale who was the Lois Lane character, Alexander Knox was Jimmy Olsen, and Robin was there too. Tim said well tell me what you’d do, and I said the first thing you have to do is get rid of Robin. Tim said but you can’t do that, the studio won’t allow it. It’s Batman and Robin, everybody knows that from the comics and the TV show.

So Robin was in the original script?

Oh yeah. The tone of it felt like the Christopher Reeve Superman to me, but it was very unfunny. But I knew that’s when I connected with Tim because he laughed when I said, Robin is gay.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I said you can’t do this movie with Robin. If you get rid of Robin then you’ve got more time for Batman, to make him more interesting and to make him a stronger character. And again, Tim said, well how would you do that? And I said, well I don’t know I haven’t had that much time to think about it [laughter]. So, he didn’t seem to agree with me on much of anything, but I did make him laugh a bit.

Did he hire you anyway?

Not at that first meeting. But the next time I saw him was at his flat in Kensington. So, I must’ve been told or asked to meet him there to discuss it further. I remember it was after six o’clock, and this beautiful girl answered the door. She was in Beetlejuice… I wish I could remember her name, but she was the woman in the waiting room for the recently deceased who’d been sawed in half. Do you remember?

You mean the magician’s assistant sitting on the sofa?

Yes! That was the same girl, the one with the legs! She answered the door [laughter]. Well anyway, when I’d got there she had been home all day and she was bored. Tim hadn’t arrived back yet and she was sort of kvetching about it… because she hadn’t eaten and it was time for dinner.

Did you talk to her about Batman [laughing]?

No [laughter]. But when Tim showed up he wanted to talk about Batman first thing. And I’d had a bright idea the night before that second meeting. I again told Tim he had to get rid of Robin, but he hadn’t agreed to that yet, he was still thinking about that. And here was the clincher… I said the only way to make Batman interesting is make him equally as psychotic as the Joker was.

Oh wow, you nailed it.

And that’s what really grabbed Tim’s interest. The Joker is so interesting that Batman can’t compete… unless he’s just as interesting. So, my thought was to make him crazy, too. The Joker is a psycho for evil, and Batman is a psycho for good.

Click here to read part 2.

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