Christopher Nolan reveals the fib he told Warner Bros about 'Superman'

Christopher Nolan really took his time getting Christian Bale into the cape and cowl of the Dark Knight in Batman Begins.

And as the director himself tells it, Warner Bros, the studio which made his Bruce Wayne trilogy was a little concerned too.

It's not until the scene at the docks, a solid hour into the movie, that Bale turns up in his work stuff to batter some drug dealing scumbags.

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But it was all down to Nolan's love of Richard Donner's 1978 superhero benchmark Superman that he was allowed to get away with it.

That and some low-level lies.

Over the weekend, Nolan joined Bat-fans at a special marathon screening of all three of his Batman movies in Hollywood.

And he explained how, in using Donner's yardstick and a bit of artistic licence, he got away with not revealing Batman for so long.

When the studio got in touch with their concerns, he said (via THR): “I was able to say ‘Well, Christopher Reeve didn’t put on the suit until 53 minutes in.’

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“That statistic is not true by the way. It’s actually a little earlier.”

He also aped Donner's classic in other ways, by assembling a notably star-studded cast.

“We tried to put together that kind of cast for Batman Begins just to give it that weight of event cinema and not let it be dismissed as what, at the time, we felt as a dismissal, which is a comic book movie,” Nolan added.

“We didn’t want to view it as that. Of course, now, comic book movies are a very different thing and they’re the biggest films being made now, so the world’s changed in that regard.”

The cast was indeed pretty impressive – with Bale joined by Liam Neeson, Morgan Freeman, Sir Michael Caine, Katie Holmes, Gary Oldman, Rutger Hauer and Cillian Murphy.

As the crowd settled in for the seven-and-a-half hour marathon, he was asked whether he'd ever seen the films back-to-back too.

“Christ, no,” he joked. “I’ve seen the films plenty. Maybe one day, I’ll convince my kids to do that with me.”