8. David Fincher
A very "Dark Knight"...
Limited CV: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Social Network, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Fight Club, Se7en, Alien 3 David Fincher was circling the Batman franchise before Chris Nolan came on board and for a long time the director of Fight Club and Se7en was seen as the comic book communitys favourite to take on the reigns. He is possibly the most visually distinctive director of dark crime thrillers working today and he is an obsessed methodical grafter who researches every single aspect of his films before he presents them on the screen. If Se7en is the best non-official Batman movie set in a Gotham world without a masked avenger as I would suggest it is, maybe its time to seriously think about giving him the reigns? If nothing else, he never lets studio pressure get in the way and his attitude has allowed him to make exactly the movie he sought out to make each and everytime. His recent remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo represented a return to that gritty, underworld motif that he cut his teeth with after a few prestige pictures. Who wouldn't want to see what Fincher would do with a movie about The Riddler, a serial killer who leaves cryptic clues behind for The Caped Crusader? What is Se7en or Zodiac but not forms of the The Riddler? This is Fincher's playground. Essentially, Batman is set in a fictionalised New York; Gotham City is almost akin to the big apple in every way, except that its been even more aggressively consumed by crime and grit. I cant help but feel that a director like Fincher, with as grimy an output as Fight Club, Se7en and even Alien 3, is naturally equipped to envision and create an engaging take on Batmans world.
Fincher's Batman: Grim, bleak, noirish, fascinating.