Down and Meow-t: John August talks ‘Catwoman’

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When John August got the chance to pitch to Warner Brothers on a standalone ‘Catwoman’ film, he developed a story that would expand on the mythos created in the classic Tim Burton film ‘Batman Returns’. Unfortunately, Warner Brothers - still smarting from the backlash to ‘Batman & Robin’ - had other ideas.

With his feature writing debut about to hit theatres, John August was starting to generate some heat in Hollywood.

“The script for ‘Go’ was very popular, even before anyone had seen the movie,” he said.

“Off of that script and some earlier ones I had been hired to write, I was able to get a lot of meetings and get on projects - I was a writer folks wanted to work with.”

One of those meetings was with producer Denise DiNovi (whose credits included, among others, ‘Batman Returns’ scribe Dan Waters’ feature debut ‘Heathers’ and Tim Burton’s ‘Edward Scissorhands’, along with ‘Batman Returns’).

“I wasn’t a huge DC Comics reader growing up - I knew who Batman was, I knew who Catwoman was as a general character,” he said.

“It wasn’t until I saw the Michelle Pfeiffer character in Tim Burton’s movie that I was like ‘Wow! This is a great character!’ I loved her approach; she was neither hero nor villain. She was just doing her thing... it was a remarkable character that Daniel Waters had created, that Tim Burton had filmed and that Michelle Pfeiffer had embodied. So I was really excited to see more of her, and when the idea of a standalone ‘Catwoman’ film came up, I really wanted to talk about that. I described (to Denise DiNovi) what I loved so much about that character, and I went in with a full idea, a full pitch for what would happen over the course of this movie. She seemed excited, and brought me in to pitch to Warner Brothers.”

August’s pitch begins in Gotham City, picking up where ‘Batman Returns’ had left off to some degree.

“My pitch was a continuation of the Selina Kyle character... it wasn’t a new origin story, it was a continuation of that character,” he said.

“In falling out the window, she loses her memory... an echo to how she originally became Catwoman. She wakes up in hospital having forgotten she is, or was Catwoman. It was a natural extension of where stuff was headed coming out of the two Tim Burton films. It was a chance to step back from the cartoony versions and really look at the human beings wearing these costumes - these damaged, but interesting, human beings. Catwoman is fantastic when she’s in the suit, but I was also really fascinated by Selina Kyle outside the suit. I felt like there was a tremendous amount to explore about a woman who’s in her early forties, who’s just been overlooked by everyone around her, and is considered a disappointment - for not being married, not having kids, not being further along in her career. It was the way she seems like a failure and Bruce Wayne seems like a success when they’re both unmarried loners... I thought there was really interesting stuff to mine there.”

The move from Gotham City to an entirely new location was inevitable, according to August. “It would’ve been challenging to make a Catwoman film that just stayed put in Gotham, because you’d always be waiting for Batman to show up,” he said.

“That just wasn’t going to be helpful.”

Besides, the shift in locale - to the Chicago-esque Lake City - would give the story a different aesthetic.

Testing the Cowl - Image Courtesy of Warner Bros.

“The backdrop I was envisaging was more realistic than what Tim’s Gotham was,” August said.

“What I’ve heard about Tim’s mandate on Gotham City was that sunlight never gets all the way down to the bottom of the street. It was built without building codes, and it just feels oppressive in that way. The Lake City I was envisioning was more of Chicago... more glass and steel and midwestern than the New York of Gotham that you see in Tim’s movie.”

“Bruce Wayne shows up... as a sort of connective tissue,” August said.

“He’s helping send her on her way... he wants and hopes to believe that she’s free of having to be Catwoman, that she’s forgotten who she is and can, therefore, live a good, normal life in the way that he wants her to be happy. There was a real opportunity for that moment... the vision wasn’t for Batman to show up again in the movie; it was just to help send her on her way. What I liked about Selina Kyle’s character - when you look at her from Michelle Pfeiffer’s casting - is that she’s a woman approaching forty who’s a secretary and has nothing interesting about her life. But now she has this secret life she doesn’t really remember. She starts committing these crimes at night and doesn’t have any memory of it in the morning. She finds jewels hidden in her room, and no idea what the origin of these treasures are.”

And, in an echo of the story’s beginning - with copycat heroes and villains running amok in Gotham - Lake City soon finds itself dealing with a crimewave. “There’s a bit of an arms race there... there’s copycat crimes, copycat heroes,” August said.

“In transplanting her (Selina/Catwoman) outside of Gotham City, which already had its clear protector, to a new place that did not have a tradition of superheroes, or a hero guarding the city, she would be a disruptive force. Her presence would cause a change in the city... there’s a real sense in the city of ‘Do we want this to happen? Do we not want this to happen? It’s exciting; it’s good for tourism.’ It was a way of looking at what happens to these cities when they have masked figures running around committing crimes and stopping crimes. Some of the things I was going for I felt were really well done in ‘The Boys’, the Amazon series that looks at the ‘real’ impacts of having heroes running around in the world, and the practical and marketing aspects of what that would be like. The burglaries she’s committing make it clear there’s a super thief in Lake City, so Lake City goes out to find its own protector - she’s caused the city itself to want to bring in their own hero to fight. And the one they end up hiring is the villain from Gotham - the one who blew up the vault and knocked Selina out of the window. They’re rivals over the course of the film - it was a great opportunity to be looking at what it means to be a hero or villain... when you’re arbitrarily on opposite sides.”

Overall, August said he was satisfied with what he’d developed.

Image Courtesy of Warner Bros.

“More so than many other things I’ve pitched on, I really did feel like I could see the movie that could have existed,” he said.

“The best pitches feel like I travelled in time to the future and got to watch the movie, and then got to describe what that movie looked like to someone. With ‘Catwoman’, I definitely felt like I could see the movie... like I sat in an imaginary seat and watched the whole movie... and I really felt confident that that was the movie.”

Unfortunately for August, his vision was entirely at odds with what Warners execs had in mind. “I got through the whole pitch - it really wasn’t a long one... maybe a five-minute thing,” he said.

“It was really clear in the followup questions that it was not at all what they were interested in. I felt like I made my case really well, and it did not land at all with what they wanted to do. They wanted to do a younger, sexier, sensual Catwoman... that was the feeling I got coming out of that. They weren’t interested in making a movie about something - at least not the themes I was interested in. They perceived the value of the Catwoman character as a freestanding thing that didn’t need to fit in with the other films. The only actress whose name I remember being brought up in that room was Sarah Michelle Gellar who, at the time, was at peak early Buffy. And she’s phenomenal, but that was a completely different vision for who that character would be. I don’t think my version of it would have made a lot of sense with her... or with a lot of actors who were not Michelle Pfeiffer. I had no interest in that - for me; it was Michelle Pfeiffer or bust. So much of what I was pitching really relied on the fact that we knew and liked this character from the previous film... theoretically you could swap it in with a different person, but to have to reintroduce all of that stuff over the course of the film would’ve been a lot to do.”

One surreal recollection from the meeting was a desire to incorporate a scene where the Catwoman washed another character’s hair. “This is a pretty strong recollection, so I really do think this happened,” August said.

“The executive really envisaged a scene where she washed somebody’s hair. I think it was an indication of a sensual but kind of unusual fetishy thing. I didn’t have a good sense of why this was being brought up in the meeting, but I just knew that the movie I was pitching didn’t lend itself to a Sarah Michelle Gellar type washing somebody else’s hair.”

De-Cowled Behind the Scenes - Image Courtesy of Warner Bros.

August said that while there’s “some heartbreak”, the experience helped inform future work. “While I wish I could’ve made the movie, I don’t regret the time I spent thinking about it,” he said.

“All the things I’ve pitched, whether they’ve happened or not, it’s good practice. So much of what a screenwriter does never films, so the small heartbreak of a pitch that doesn’t land is much better than the strong heartbreak of a movie that you’ve written that never becomes a movie. Ultimately I didn’t do ‘Catwoman’, but I did do ‘Charlie’s Angels’, and that did use some of those themes... that sense of what it’s like to be a woman with power. We were at the right moment to be talking about these things ... there was a real hunger for the portrayal of women onscreen that was empowering and different and not victim-y. I think ‘Catwoman’ could’ve fit very well into that slot.”

Ultimately, a standalone version of ‘Catwoman’ did make it into production, with French visual FX artist Pitof at the helm and Halle Berry in the titular role. The winner of several Razzie Awards, the standalone ‘Catwoman’ film has almost entirely faded into obscurity, with the role eventually taken by Anne Hathway in the conclusion to Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, ‘The Dark Knight Rises’. In addition to John August, we had hoped to speak to one of the released film’s credited screenwriters, John Rogers (who is much more deservedly known as the creator of the heist-of-the-week series ‘Leverage’). While Mr Rogers politely declined our request, he did offer up the following insight, which he said we could print.

“It is very difficult to make superhero movies for studio execs who do not watch and openly scorn superhero movies,” he wrote.

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