In Batman: Knightfall – Part 1: Knightfall, Arkham Asylum has been destroyed, and all its inmates have been unleashed upon Gotham City. As Batman races to round up some of his greatest enemies, he is pushed to his physical and mental limits and into a final confrontation with a new threat: the man called Bane!
For writer Jeremy Adams, bringing Knightfall to life was an understandably daunting challenge. Having previously penned Warner Bros. Animation movies Mortal Kombat Legends: Cage Match, Justice League: Warworld, Justice Society: World War II, and several others, he's no stranger to telling huge stories on screen.
With countless issues, tie-ins, and storylines to draw from, Batman: Knightfall – Part 1: Knightfall required serious streamlining, but splitting the story across three movies allowed Adams and the creative team to give Bane, Jean-Paul Valley, and Bruce Wayne the attention they deserve.
We caught up with Adams to discuss adapting Knightfall, finding the story's emotional through-line, introducing Azrael, why the film's brutal Bat-Signal finale was the perfect way to leave audiences eager for the sequel, and more.
You can check out our Batman: Knightfall – Part 1: Knightfall interview with Jeremy in full below.
Like a lot of fans out there, I love the comic, and I’d love to know when DC first came to you, how relieved were you to know this story would be told over three films and not one?
Well, you know what’s funny is I’ve been doing so much for Warner Bros. Animation throughout my career. Comics is really a recent endeavour for me. So I’ve been working with Rick Morales, who’s a supervising producer and really the mastermind behind all these things, and my mentor and friend and often co-writer Jim Krieg. So I knew that Rick was, like, you know, hell-determined to do Knightfall and excited about it. We have done probably 10 films together, so he asked me to come write it, and I wrote the first one. The second two are written by… I don’t think they’re announced yet, so I can’t really tell you. But the first one was an incredible endeavour to try and distil what feels like hundreds of comics into an 85-minute movie. And you know, I’m a kid that grew up with comics, so it was a large task, but I was very honoured to be able to do it because not just the art and all the writers that I grew up loving—I mean, Dixon alone when he was doing the Bat-office and Nightwing and Robin together and Bruce Wayne: Fugitive, all that stuff was really impactful for me in my DC reading. And so Knightfall was just, I don’t know, it seems to be kind of the high point after The Dark Knight Returns in a lot of ways for the different Batman stories.
How do you decide what to keep and what not to include? You're setting the stage for this huge moment when Bane breaks the Bat, but there’s so much to choose from with the comics, with all those tie-ins, one-shots, all the Batman books at the time. It must be quite challenging.
I mean, it’s great. It’s such a collaborative process. Literally, we went to Rick Morales’ house and in his pool and hung out in his pool, and we had a whiteboard on the side of the pool, and Jim, Rick and I just kind of said, okay, what is the through line of action for this? What is this about? You know, this is about a man, Bruce Wayne, in particular after Jason Todd, who is unwilling to let other people get hurt, unwilling to let Gotham get hurt, unwilling to let Tim get hurt. And really, you know, burning the candle at both ends in that regard. So his storyline is really straightforward. It’s like, well, somebody’s going to take advantage of that because no human can just do that, can live their life without help and think they can do it all. And we see him getting increasingly tired and hurt and damaged, and start to affect him, which is Bane’s master plan.
And then we thought, okay, this is great. We have kind of Tim Drake’s story of trying to prove himself as a Robin and get in the game. Jean Paul Valley, who we know is going to take a bigger part in Knightquest because of the way Knightfall is. And we’re like, okay, we can tease a little bit about him. And then we have Bane. The thing about Bane was that Rick and I had a big discussion about how we have to spend some quality time with Bane for this to work. And, you know, there are a lot of restraints on what you can and can’t do in terms of how many characters you can have, how many voice actors you can have, etc., like that. So we really spent a lot of time streamlining, looking at Vengeance of Bane and then putting in there that we have Michael Mando, who does such an incredible job, and then you just weave that all together.
So those are like the main storylines. And when you just distil it down to those main storylines, you have to kind of cut out some of the rabbit trails that a monthly book would go on, because they obviously knew they had a hit and they were going to ride that sucker as long as they could, you know. And so that was really easy. But, you know, we didn't just break the first one. We talked about what was going to… We thought at first it was just going to be two movies. And then they said, okay, we can do it as a trilogy. And so we were like, okay, now this makes a lot of sense because we can concentrate on Bane for the second movie. We can concentrate on Jean Paul. And obviously Bruce is dealing with, you know, the back being broken. And, you know, KnightsEnd is about, you know, Batman doing what he needs to come back. Spoilers if you haven’t read the book, but you should.
I've got to ask you about the end of the film and that great visual of Bane throwing Batman down onto the Bat-Signal. That's a new addition to the story. Where did that come from? It caps off that "Break the Bat" moment so perfectly.
Yeah, you know, it is the culmination of, like, probably all the John Carpenter movies I’ve seen in my life. What’s interesting about it is it is funny to see people go, oh, he threw him on the Bat-Signal. And you actually just threw him on a spotlight. Because the Bat-Signal is on top of Gotham PD, but because it’s Batman and it smashes on the light, we see the broken Bat into the sky, you know. And it was just a way for us to… If it ends just with the back breaking and not knowing the complete dread of Gotham that’s about to, you know, pour over everything, the fact that they see their hero and protector… You know, we go through this entire movie talking about how Gotham is a mess without Batman, and Batman has made a mess for Gotham, a mess of himself for Gotham, and just see him broken.
That’s the ultimate exclamation point for Bane. It’s not just a… Because Bane’s story in this adaptation is that Gotham is his dream, in a way. The dream of Thomas Wayne. And Gotham being this paradise that he hopes for. It’s the thing that kind of keeps him driven in prison, Santa Prisca. And so when he sees it’s bad, it’s like, in his mind, this is… And he blames it, obviously, on Batman and Bruce Wayne as a failure. He has to show the city, well, there’s a new boss in town and that there are new rules. And that saviour, that guy that you relied on, is gone.
And doing it so publicly seemed like such a… It’s such a downer, though. But it’s such a great place to be because there’s this feeling of anticipation right where the city sees him broken, Gordon sees him broken. It’s broadcast everywhere. And then you have Jean Paul, who’s just had this vision that’s in the crowd, and it’s that, oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, what’s gonna happen next? It’s almost like writing a really dark second act. Or like, I just showed my daughter some Rocky movies, and it’s almost like Rocky gets knocked down and you cut before you see him get back up. So you’re sitting there going, wait, no. What happens now? And that’s exciting for a trilogy because you wanna get somebody… You know, it’s like The Empire Strikes Back, you’re like, what do you mean, Han Solo’s in carbonite? I don’t understand. When’s the next movie? It’s like, well, five years from now. Luckily, nobody has to wait that long. Yeah.
You introduce Azrael, and comic fans will know that he’ll be taking over from Bruce in the sequel. So you've got to make him someone that we’re invested in, and we care about. Was it quite a challenge to throw him into the mix here?
Yeah, it was. Because, I mean, we want to do it enough that you’re interested in who he is. And there’s an element of, you know, with the cold open and the switcheroo of thinking, oh, is this gonna… You think it’s gonna be Batman? And then Azrael shows up and starts doing damage. And Azrael having that revelation, like, oh my gosh, you know what’s happening to me? Like, that shock, or it’s happened again. And he kind of knows this Jekyll and Hyde transformation’s happening with him and Batman, and helping them out. Teasing enough of that without really diving into the origin story. Because that’s what the second movie’s for, right? Just like the first movie is about Bane, the second movie is about Jean Paul. It’s about this person who’s taken over as Batman and really taken over, because Bruce Wayne, again, him being broken by Bane reinforces the idea that this is too dangerous for the people he loves.
So, you know, there’s a certain distance Bruce has from Jean Paul. It’s like, they know he’s skilled. They know all this stuff, but it’s not him. It’s not Dick. He lets this other person, which is kind of a selfish way of keeping his family safe in a way. So that’s gonna be… That’s what I think is clever about the way that they wrote Knightfall, Knightquest and KnightsEnd is there are these three distinct chapters. And so this is a really great opportunity to dive deeper into Azrael and the System and the Order of St. Dumas and all that stuff, which is… I don’t know how you say it. I would say, Dumas. Because if I say Dumas, it just sounds like I’m calling somebody, you know. And Rick and the storyboard guys and all the artists, they were just like… Rick was like, I’m just gonna do one-for-one the classic Azrael look. And I’ve seen, you know, Azrael’s armour, and it looks fantastic, so it’s really quite an achievement. Rick and Jeff, the director and all the storyboard guys. There are too many to name, but they’ve done such an incredible job. Just in the background, the music, everything.
Batman: Knightfall - Part 1 is now available on Digital, 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and DVD.