Bryan Cranston who provides the voice of James Gordon in Batman: Year One talks to CBR:
CBR News: Bryan, I wanted to start with “Year One,” with your knowledge of comics coming into this project and whether or not you had an idea of the pedigree this Frank Miller story has when you came onto the movie.
Bryan Cranston: I did not. I was into playing baseball and collecting baseball cards when I was a kid, and that took up most of my time. So in a way, I thought, “I’m not a good choice for this” initially. But then I thought, “Well, why not? Why not instead of someone coming at it from the position of a longtime fan who might have a preconceived notion of how to approach this character, have a fresh approach?” I actually almost had a negative take on all this in that I remembered Commissioner Gordon from the old “Batman” TV show, and I quite frankly thought he was kind of a buffoon. So I wasn’t really keen on that. I thought, “Why would I want to play high farce?”
But my agent called me up and said, “No, read this. This is more true to the original comics.” And I was still thinking of Archie and that, but I thought I’d read it. They know that I’m all about the writing. I would pound this mandate into my agency over and over again. It’s all about the writing. It doesn’t matter if it’s a children’s play. If it’s well written, I’m interested. So they threw this back at me and said, “Don’t pass until you’ve read it! You always talk about the writing, so read this script.”
I read it, and I was blown away by it. I was just really impressed that there wasn’t this connotation of animation…I realized I had a prejudice to it. But after reading, I knew I had to give it a fair shake. What I said at Comic-Con [International] was that I learned that there’s a distinct difference between a cartoon and animation. This type of work shouldn’t be called a cartoon. It really does it a disservice. It is adult storytelling and adult issues handled in intrinsically complicated ways, where not everything is tied up in a neat little bow. Certainly at the end of our show, we don’t know where that relationship is going to go with Jim Gordon and Batman. We don’t know for sure if they’re going to continue to develop this relationship. It’s not as apparent, even though historically, the story does go that way. But it comes at a price. Jim Gordon is trying to find his moral center. Who is he? He keeps getting shot down and is lamenting that he has to come and work in this hellhole of a city. It’s no place to raise a child, and he’s hated by his fellow cops who are rogue. And he’s hated by the criminals and his superiors and everybody. He seems to be an island. It’s just multi-layered storytelling that’s so interesting. So I happily ate my hat and said, “I’m glad you had me read this because now I’m interested in doing it.”
Check out the entire interview here.
