How do you breathe life into a franchise all but extinguished by the woeful Batman and Robin, a lacklustre George Clooney and a plot well and truly lost? Use a magic formula, that’s how.

Warner Brothers’ successful solution for keeping alive the Harry Potter series was to turn to the young director Alfonso Cuarón — he of the sexy road movie Y Tu Mamá También — for the third instalment of the franchise. And so to revive Batman, Warners has gone for another hip young director, Christopher Nolan.

At first glance, Nolan’s impressive credentials — the beguiling Memento included — seem more suited to independent, edgier productions than riding to the rescue of an ailing franchise.

“I think when people see the film, if they have seen my other work, they will see a continuity of style and ideas,” says Nolan. “But this film is exciting and, hopefully, fun.”

Nolan, who grew up watching reruns of the 1960s TV series, promised that his would be Batman without frills — it’s back to the beginning, a prequel in all but name. Although he is an admirer of Tim Burton’s Batman, his film, he promises, will be different, with Christian Bale as an emotionally scarred, vengeful Bruce Wayne.

“In Tim’s film, Gotham itself is a very stylised place that Batman fits into. What I wanted to do was have Batman as an extraordinary figure in an ordinary world. So our Gotham is based more on a recognisable contemporary American city.

“With every aspect of Batman, from the Batmobile that we’ve designed to his costume, we have tried to explain the reality of how this guy could exist and why he would doing this. I think the ‘why?’ being the most significant challenge to take on. Why does a guy dress up like a bat and go and fight the bad guys?”

Nolan saw just about every young actor in Hollywood for the leading role, and Bale was physically the least impressive — he had just shed 5st (31.75kg) for The Machinist so Nolan told him to bulk up fast for a screen test.

“Several weeks later he had put on the weight and blew everybody away. The significance of all that isn’t about weight loss and gain, it’s about the intensity and self-discipline of the guy and that was what we needed for Bruce Wayne.”

With more than a year of intense preparations, including honing designs and building a vast Gotham City set at Cardington Studios (a former aircraft hangar near Watford), Nolan is confident that his vision of the Dark Knight will restore one of contemporary culture’s icons to his rightful place.

“The problem is, how do you make a sincere, serious and relevant movie about this comic-book character who has been treated in a fairly cartoonish manner in the past?” he asks. “But that conundrum was why I wanted to do it. That was what was exciting to me right away.”

Batman is definitely back.

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