The Batman director and co-writer Matt Reeves said he’d based his version of the character on Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, and explained why Robert Pattinson was the right actor to depict him.

Reeves’ superhero franchise reboot is set to arrive in theaters on March. 4, with the first trailer (available below) featuring the Nirvana track “Something in the Way,” and a more recent promo featuring an orchestral version of the same song. In a recent interview with Empire, the director said the selection was deliberate.

“When I write, I listen to music,” he reported, “and as I was writing the first act, I put on Nirvana's ‘Something In The Way’… That's when it came to me that, rather than make Bruce Wayne the playboy version we've seen before, there's another version who had gone through a great tragedy and become a recluse. So I started making this connection to Gus Van Sant's 'Last Days,' and the idea of this fictionalized version of Kurt Cobain being in this kind of decaying manor.”

The 2005 movie Last Days explores the closing chapter of a rock star’s life, and was based loosely on Cobain. When Reeves saw Pattinson in the 2017 film Good Time, he decided to approach the actor about portraying his Batman. “In that movie you could really feel his vulnerability and desperation, but you could also feel his power,” Reeves said. “I thought that was a great mix. He's also got that Kurt Cobain thing, where he looks like a rock star, but you also feel like he could be a recluse.”

Pattinson noted: “Bruce has been hiding away. He's not really a socialite at all. He's building all these little contraptions and things, just with Alfred. And even Alfred thinks he's gone insane!” He added that, when first seen in the new movie, Batman has been “out every single night for two years, getting beaten up and shot and stabbed and burnt, and it shows. There's a bullet graze on the cowl, right at the beginning. I don't think that's been done before.”

Watch the First ‘The Batman’ Trailer

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