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By Root 413 0

morning the phone rang and a voice on the other end introduced himself as Christopher Nolan. I had never met him, but I had seen two of his films, Memento and Insomnia, and had been very impressed. ‘I’m restarting the Batman series for Warner Brothers,’ he said. ‘The first movie is called Batman Begins and I wondered if you would like to play the butler, Alfred.’ This was something completely different for me – a regular character in a Hollywood blockbuster series – so I suggested he send over the script. ‘Tell you what,’ said Chris, ‘I’ll bring it round.’ It turned out he lived very close and an hour later he was on the doorstep, script in hand. I invited him in, expecting to give him a cup of tea and have a bit of a chat about the film, but he was adamant. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I want you to read the script now. I’ll wait.’

I was a bit taken aback, but while Chris sat in the kitchen chatting to Shakira as she prepared Sunday lunch, I went to my office and sat down to read. The more I read, the more excited I got. ‘I love it!’ I said, as I came into the kitchen and it was handshakes all round. As he was leaving, Chris asked for the script back; this project was highly confidential and he was very protective of it – he even used the names of his three children as code for each of the films. I handed it over, waved him off and sat down to a delicious Sunday lunch feeling very pleased with myself. Batman had indeed Begun.

A year later, it really did. We started shooting at Shepperton, the studios in which I had appeared in my first movie, A Hill in Korea, in 1956. It was extraordinary to walk in there and appear again on the sound stage where I spoke (or rather forgot) my very first lines in a movie. I took this as a very good omen and I was entirely right. The cast that Chris had assembled was brilliant: Christian Bale, the best Batman ever, in my view, Liam Neeson, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Tom Wilkinson and Cillian Murphy to name just a few. My first scene was with Morgan, Christian and Liam and was wrapped in only two takes. Chris said, ‘Cut, print,’ after the second one and the journey that is Batman was off the starting blocks.

I decided that Alfred Pennyworth, my butler, was going to be the toughest butler you’ve ever seen – not the sort of suave English butler that someone like Sir John Gielgud played. I invented a whole back story for Alfred: he’d been an SAS sergeant, who had been wounded and because he didn’t want to leave the army, got put in charge of the sergeants’ mess, which is where Bruce Wayne’s father found him. So he knows how to serve drinks and all that sort of thing, but he’s also a trained killer. I based his voice on the voice of my original sergeant when I joined the British army: it’s a very sharp, staccato, military delivery. It’s a great role, because I think I get to represent the audience’s point of view, to be a point of normality for them, if you like. So just when you’re thinking, What’s going on? There’s a man dressed in a batsuit? I come along and I ask, ‘What’s going on? You’re dressing in a batsuit?’ It was a very clever move by Chris to keep the audience on its toes but also in the loop.

Chris is a very quiet director, but his sense of authority permeates the whole set. He always wears a coat with a big pocket in which he keeps a flask of coffee that he sips from all day as he watches rehearsals. It’s not just hindsight speaking when I say I knew it was going to be fantastic: it was clear from the beginning that we were on to something really special. Chris’s whole attitude and demeanour were a big part of it, but the sets, too, were quite spectacular, especially those built in Cardington Hangars, one of two enormous sheds built for the old airships near Bedford. To give you an idea of the scale, our enormous Chicago set fitted into one corner. The Bat Cave in particular was incredible. I remember looking up at the ceiling and saying to Chris, ‘Those bats in the ceiling, they look almost real – how did you make them?’ And he said, ‘Michael, they are real. They’re just asleep . . .’