'The Batman' Director Matt Reeves Gives Update on Film During Coronavirus Hiatus

Matt Reeves is updating fans on the status of The Batman.

Production on the 53-year-old director’s movie, starring Robert Pattinson, is currently on hold due to the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis.

“We’re not officially editing right now,” Matt told Deadline, “We’ve actually shot a quarter of the movie and I have been pouring through dailies, looking at takes, and what’s to come.”

Matt is currently quarantined in London, England, where shooting last took place. They were going to move from London to Liverpool before that was called off.

When asked if the film would need to completely relocate outside of the UK for safety, Matt replied, “It’s way too early to say, I can’t imagine we wouldn’t finish in London. The situation is fluid.”

Matt added that he doesn’t plan to re-write anything as of right now: “It took me two years to work on that story, and it’s a very specific mystery noir that’s been really thought out by me and my partners.”

What he might reconsider, though, is “the tone of things. It happens any time you shoot anything. The unexpected — happy accidents and things you didn’t quite expect: That is the lightning in a bottle for something that is alive. I would say that the changes really have to do with ‘Oh, seeing the tone of this with these scenes we haven’t done which connect to that part of the storyline. It feels like there might be an opportunity to explore some of that unexpected tone that we found.’ With these movies you never have enough prep time because they’re so complex and so enormous in so many ways. It also gives me a moment to think about the larger sequences that have yet to come up and how I want to realize those.”

If you missed the news, the movie’s dialect coach Andrew Jack has sadly died from COVID-19.

“He was a lovely and special person and it’s one of those things where it makes you re-prioritize and realize how fragile everything is,” Matt Reeves shared. “I’m tremendously focused on the movie, and of course, it’s nice to be able to stop, but the real thing I’ve been thinking about is the state the world is in, and hoping that everyone is going to be OK and that everyone is going to social distance and do everything to be safe because it’s a very scary time.”