‘The Penguin’ Director Unveils Vision for Gotham’s Evolution and Storytelling Following ‘The Batman’

When Colin Farrell was cast as Oswald Cobb, also known as The Penguin, in Matt Reeves’ The Batman, many fans were uncertain about how the character would be portrayed.

However, the Irish Oscar nominee delivered such an impressive performance that HBO quickly commissioned a standalone series centered on The Penguin, with Farrell reprising his role. The show has become a significant success, generating buzz across social media, which is why we’re diving into it as well.

To explore the series’ lore and provide more insights, we came across an intriguing interview with The Penguin director Craig Zobel, conducted by ScreenRant. In this interview, he addressed several compelling questions about the show’s development, and in this article, we will share his insights.

The interview took place as part of the promotional efforts for the series premiere, during which Zobel shared some intriguing insights about the show. One question focused on how they intend to evolve Gotham as both a setting and a character, particularly considering the conclusion of The Batman. Here’s what Zobel had to say:

Screen Rant: Considering how much Gotham is a character itself in The Penguin, did you look to other screen versions of the city before building your own and fleshing this version of Gotham out?

Craig Zobel: Yeah, good question. We started with what Gotham is in the movie. In The Batman, which was largely only seen at night, it’s very kind of often from above, often in these very gothic spaces, and we realized that the story we were telling was a story more about, you know not a mob boss, but a mid level guy, and, like, a street level guy, you know, not far away from that . And so what would the world look like from that pov?

And also, what does Gotham look like during the day? There wasn’t really any scenes in the day in the movie, except for, like, one where it’s raining really bad.

So, like, it was kind of like, well, what does that look like? And from there, you know, what are representations of New York which has pretty much always been the kind of initial reference for Gotham, I think, at least in the movies.

Also going back to elevated trains. Basically, I was like, take me everywhere there’s elevated trains, and let’s see if we can make the show there. That was really kind of the initial push.

Gotham obviously isn’t a great place, now more so even after it’s been flooded. How did you work to make sure that the city environment and its people felt like a product of those tragic circumstances?

Craig Zobel: I think that one of the major kind of themes inside of the story is really class disparity. It’s a different way to talk about class disparity inside of this that is not possible to do when your lead character is Bruce Wayne .

It was exciting in that way that we got to kind of tell the story that had that thematic element. And I just started, like, I went back and started looking at a lot of stuff. Kalina Ivanov, the production designer, and I both bought these kind of photo books from post-Katrina and just looked at, like, kind of putting yourself back and reading stuff and watching video from Katrina and what happened there.

And, like, how quickly the line between sort of civilization and not really happened during that was an interesting thing to kind of reflect on, and sort of assume something like that would be a similar scenario. Just truly a scary and crazy thing. It was for sure, sort of reflective of, I think, where we all started when we were trying to decide, what’s the Gotham version of that?

Source: ScreenRant

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