“When the director who directed the third one, I said, ‘I just can’t do it,'” Keaton continued. “And one of the reasons I couldn’t do it was — and you know, he’s a nice enough man, he’s passed away, so I wouldn’t speak ill of him even if he were alive — he, at one point, after more than a couple of meetings where I kept trying to rationalize doing it and hopefully talking him into saying, ‘I think we don’t want to go in this direction, I think we should go in this direction.’ And he wasn’t going to budge.”
According to Keaton, he told Schumacher that he could no longer play Batman if the tone was moving away from the dark nature of Burton’s movies. Schumacher allegedly told Keaton, “I don’t understand why everything has to be so dark and everything so sad,” to which the actor responded, “Wait a minute, do you know how this guy got to be Batman? Have you read… I mean, it’s pretty simple.”
