‘The Penguin’ Director Reveals Plans for Gotham’s Evolution and Crafting the Story Post-‘The Batman’
When Colin Farrell was selected to play Oswald Cobb, aka The Penguin, in Matt Reeves’ The Batman, many fans were skeptical since they didn’t know what to expect from the interpretation.
But the Irish Oscar-nominee has done such a great job that HBO immediately ordered a standalone series focusing on The Penguin, with Farrell reprising his role. The show has been a major hit and everyone is talking about it, which is why we are reporting on it as well.
In light of exploring the series’ lore and explaining more about the show, we have found an interesting interview with The Penguin director Craig Zobel, which he gave to ScreenRant. In it, he answered several interesting questions about the show and its evolution, and in this article, we are going to report on these answers.
The interview was part of the promotion for the series premiere, and Zobel revealed some interesting details about the show. One of the questions asked was related to how they were planning on evolving Gotham as both a setting and as a character, especially in light of The Batman‘s ending. Here is what Zobel said:
Screen Rant: Considering how much Gotham is a character itself in The Penguin, did you look to other screen versions of the city before building your own and fleshing this version of Gotham out?
Craig Zobel: Yeah, good question. We started with what Gotham is in the movie. In The Batman, which was largely only seen at night, it’s very kind of often from above, often in these very gothic spaces, and we realized that the story we were telling was a story more about, you know not a mob boss, but a mid level guy, and, like, a street level guy, you know, not far away from that . And so what would the world look like from that pov?
And also, what does Gotham look like during the day? There wasn’t really any scenes in the day in the movie, except for, like, one where it’s raining really bad. So, like, it was kind of like, well, what does that look like? And from there, you know, what are representations of New York which has pretty much always been the kind of initial reference for Gotham, I think, at least in the movies.
Also going back to elevated trains. Basically, I was like, take me everywhere there’s elevated trains, and let’s see if we can make the show there. That was really kind of the initial push.
Gotham obviously isn’t a great place, now more so even after it’s been flooded. How did you work to make sure that the city environment and its people felt like a product of those tragic circumstances?
Craig Zobel: I think that one of the major kind of themes inside of the story is really class disparity. It’s a different way to talk about class disparity inside of this that is not possible to do when your lead character is Bruce Wayne .
It was exciting in that way that we got to kind of tell the story that had that thematic element.
And I just started, like, I went back and started looking at a lot of stuff. Kalina Ivanov, the production designer, and I both bought these kind of photo books from post-Katrina and just looked at, like, kind of putting yourself back and reading stuff and watching video from Katrina and what happened there.
Like, how quickly the line between sort of civilization and not really happened during that was an interesting thing to kind of reflect on, and sort of assume something like that would be a similar scenario. Just truly a scary and crazy thing. It was for sure, sort of reflective of, I think, where we all started when we were trying to decide, what’s the Gotham version of that?
Source: ScreenRant
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