This may have been a somewhat unique situation, but I was thinking about stories that you would tell about being on the Justice League set, in a hotel room in London, and you're by yourself, miserable, drinking—
Quite a bit.
Exactly. And it would be understandable if you were like, yeah, "I'm never doing that again."
There are a number of reasons why that was a really excruciating experience. And they don't all have to do with the simple dynamic of, say, being in a superhero movie or whatever. I am not interested in going down that particular genre again, not because of that bad experience, but just: I've lost interest in what was of interest about it to me. But I certainly wouldn't want to replicate an experience like that. A lot of it was misalignment of agendas, understandings, expectations. And also by the way, I wasn't bringing anything particularly wonderful to that equation at the time, either. I had my own failings, significant failings, in that process and at that time.
[...]
Do you have a coherent thought or postmortem on your time with the Batman character?
I had a really good time. I loved doing the Batman movie. I loved Batman v Superman. And I liked my brief stints on The Flash that I did and when I got to work with Viola Davis on Suicide Squad for a day or two. In terms of creatively, I really think that I like the idea and the ambition that I had for it, which was of the sort of older, broken, damaged Bruce Wayne. And it was something we really went for in the first movie.
But what happened was it started to skew too old for a big part of the audience. Like even my own son at the time was too scared to watch the movie. And so when I saw that I was like, "Oh shit, we have a problem." Then I think that’s when you had a filmmaker that wanted to continue down that road and a studio that wanted to recapture all the younger audience at cross purposes. Then you have two entities, two people really wanting to do something different and that is a really bad recipe.
