[ANNOUNCER READING ON-SCREEN TEXT]
SNYDER: The mythology of the Court of Owls came about...
...because l knew that I really wanted to do a story that would involve the city's history.
And so one of the things that I've always loved about Batman...
...and the things that I've loved about the stories that have inspired me the most...
...like Dark Knight Returns or Year One or The Killing Joke, Gotham Central...
...so many of the Batman stories that kept me involved in comics over the years...
...really sort of focus on Gotham as a character.
Like Year One for example, or Dark Knight Returns...
...they made Batman real because the city that he was fighting in, Gotham...
...felt like an extension of New York City.
It was something that in Year One...
...had gangs and violence and drugs. It looked real to me.
Where in Dark Knight Returns, even though it's something that was futuristic...
...the problems that were suddenly larger-than-life, like the mutants...
...and this kind of bizarre, oppressive computer-Reagan Cold War mentality...
...all of those things were things you were afraid of as a kid in the city.
The sense of "What if there's nuclear war?" Or gang violence.
There's a humility that comes with living in a city that's as old as New York.
And a sense of "l'm here for a short time on the planet, in this city...
...and there will be people here after me as there were people here before me."
CAPULLO: What Scott did, which was great, is he didn't invent something new.
He invented something old.
This is now something that goes back hundreds of years.
So everything you thought you knew has been changed in your present day.
And that's the beauty of it.
SNYDER: Bruce Wayne, he knows the city back to front better than anybody.
He knows the neighborhoods, he knows the criminals...
...he knows the informants, he knows everything.
But the one thing, if you've grown up in a city or you've lived in a city...
...you know that is always gonna remain enigmatic to you is that sense of history.
One way to look at these great fantasy stories...
...is that they are reflections of our own inward life.
When you see the mythology arising out of the Court of Owls...
...beginning in the 1 600s...
...you see the emerging mythology of Batman in our time...
...what you're watching is a constant in the human imagination.
There's a constant of fear, terror, and a desire for revenge...
...on one hand with the Court of Owls.
On the other hand, there is the constant need for self-redemption and for justice.
Gotham is a completely unfolding, compelling mystery.
We never know the complete story.
And so my feeling was if we could create a villain...
...that would almost be a weaponized version of the city's history itself...
...we could really threaten Bruce.
ANNOUNCER: Secret societies go hand-in-hand with conspiracy theories.
From the Illuminati to the Freemasons...
...history has proven that these organizations shroud themselves in mystery.
The Court of Owls are anchored in this dark tradition.
From behind the thin veil, the Court is able to pull the strings...
...and manipulate a more direct agenda for Gotham.
The Court of Owls, for me, they weren't really based on any real people...
...so much as this sense of, I think, conspiracy.
COUSlNEAU: From the Middle Ages on we have secret societies...
...that are believed to exist...
...in castles, in monasteries, in the old churches.
There's a deepening, deepening belief in the cabals of political courts around the world.
TUCKER: They use people's own superstitions against them.
The Court is hiding amongst you, the Court is always around...
...because they're where you least expect them. They're right next to you.
So you could be working with someone who's part of the Court.
They could be hiding in your building, they could be running your company...
...they could be the minister of your church.
The concept of the Court is that they can be anywhere and anything...
...and hiding in plain sight.
COUSlNEAU: In modern times there's a real terror...
...of the loss of our individualism...
...the loss of the control of our own fate and destiny...
...with the increasing news, the increasing knowledge...
...of how our lives are being determined.
CAPULLO: I think we like to imagine that we're in control of our lives...
...and in reality we're not in control of anything.
And I think, for me, that plays upon the fears that I'm just a puppet on somebody's string...
...and I think to some degree we all are.
And so l think, you know, just because we all are aware of that...
...we all feel that, it's good writing material.
COUSlNEAU: There are malevolent forces that we can't see.
Secret forces that are actually determining our lives.
SNYDER: The Court of Owls was largely that...
...this sense of a city that's secretly behind the city.
This kind of invisible hand that's moving things in the city...
...without Batman really being aware of it.
ANNOUNCER: Another component to the secret society is the need for an icon.
Symbols have great power.
They can instill hope, fear or, in this case, a deeper sense of mystery.
The Freemason's use the symbol of God represented by the letter G...
...along with a square and compass indicating their connection...
...to the roots of building and development...
...both literally and in the spiritual sense.
The llluminati make use of the all-seeing eye in the center of the pyramid.
ln a similar tradition, the Court of Owls also maintains its own symbol...
...that of the owl.
A mythic beast that has great power and is symbolic of many things...
...depending upon the period of history or people from which it is represented.
COUSlNEAU: It's the animal of the night. It's the animal of the dark.
Sometimes it's called the eagle of the night.
It can see at night, watching us from a long, long distance away...
...maybe eternity. Watching us from the subterranean world.
SNYDER: The fascination with owls for me and Greg was really:
"Can we create something that's based on a kind of natural order...
...that is predatory, that would eat a bat in about five minutes...
...and that would snatch it out of the sky and tear it apart?"
And that became, "Yes, the owl would do that."
Looking up owls, the sort of natural behavior that they exhibit...
...is so scary so much of the time.
The fact that they're so hidden and so vicious and so invisible.
They just seemed perfect.
COUSlNEAU: It is both malevolent and benevolent.
It represents both wisdom and terror of death and doom.
To use this as the iconography in the Court...
...is triggering an archetypal truth.
And by that I mean the archetype is the symbol that needs no language.
It is immediately signifying something of great power.
You don't have to have italics and subtitles underneath an owl.
There is something deep within our DNA that immediately responds to it.
We wanted it to be freighted with a lot of different possibilities in the story.
One of the things that was exciting to me...
...was when l looked back at different sort of elements of how it's been interpreted...
...in different cultures and folklore.
One of the things that it seemed to stand for was a connection to death and the afterlife...
...to be a sort of shepherd into an underworld...
...which l felt was perfect for the sense of history...
...and the sense of the crushing weight of the dead.
COUSlNEAU: Mythologies in the Choctaw lndian mythology for example...
...the hooting of the owl presages a child dying in the night.
Now, that would strike terror in your heart, right?
In another lndian mythology, the hooting of the owl suggests...
...that the owl is going to swoop down and steal your children.
So there is a fear. There's a deep-seated fear here of this owl.
But also a sense of wealth and power.
Part of the fun of the story, at least in the comics...
...had to do with the idea of the owl being on the Athenian coin.
ANNOUNCER: We like to place our lives into a form of order.
We rely upon knowing that we can organize ourselves by class...
...or by culture...
...or by knowing that a particular group makes laws.
The secret society threatens that notion...
...as they manipulate the agenda from behind the scenes.
The Court of Owls emerges into the world of Batman...
...and challenges the known history of the city and how Bruce Wayne's family...
...may not have been the only ones involved in Gotham's founding and early construction.
It is a terrifying notion to think that a group obscured in the shadows...
...has controlled Gotham since its inception.
The rise of power, the rise of privilege...
...throughout history has exacted a price.
They have this kind of inertia to them throughout history...
...where all of the sort of wealthy and powerful families...
...have either involved themselves with the Court or paid the Court off...
...or, you know, paid some kind of tribute to the Court...
...so that the Court would leave them alone...
...and sort of allow them to be part of the machinations...
...of Gotham's socio-political history.
The Court has had a lot more impact on the city than Bruce ever suspected.
There's a moment in the story where he doubts himself.
He doubts everything he knew or thought about Gotham.
And I think that's one of the things that the Court of Owls depends on.
It does make people doubt because they are-- They're operating in secret.
So who actually comes out the winner, who controlled Gotham...
...is the enduring mystery.
CAPULLO: That's nothing that's been answered yet...
...and so it's anybody's guess.
I mean, they certainly have the power and the money and the influence.
TUCKER: It's very much like a lot of our political organizations...
...and certain things that influence our elections...
...and influence, you know, local politics and things like that.
They're involved in every facet of life in Gotham City.
COUSlNEAU: And the Court of Owls, then, is setting up a version...
...of their mythology of Gotham City, which they believe is superior...
...to that of those who are wealthy, those who have power and money.
TUCKER: They're people who you don't even know are a part of the Court...
...who are controlling things in Gotham.
So they're really a secret, Illuminati-type organization.
So for us, the scary thing was not just that they would look terrifying...
...or that their masks would be frightening or the Talons would be violent and scary...
...but that the real fear would come from...
...the sense of them having been active for decades and decades and decades.
ANNOUNCER: A secret society must hide, but this is no easy task.
How can an organization live in the shadows of a city...
...and be invisible over 400 years?
The Court of Owls was mindful of their need to be obscure.
The idea was to live among the inhabitants of the city without drawing attention.
Through alcoves, secret floors in buildings and hidden dwellings...
...the Court of Owls could effectively retreat to the shadows...
...while they watched and listened carefully to the city as it grew...
...and evolved.
SNYDER: The challenge writing The Court of Owls...
...was to create an organization...
...you would believe as a reader, as a viewer, really had had a hand in shaping Gotham...
...both architecturally and on a kind of socio-political level.
And so for us, it became about really trying to create a sense of the Court being present...
...in the visual representation of the city.
That they felt part of the dusty, limestone...
...you know, cement history of Gotham.
TUCKER: The fact that their hiding places are on the 1 3th floors...
...of all of the buildings throughout Gotham....
Well, the 1 3th floor is supposedly notoriously bad luck.
Like, buildings aren't supposed to have 1 3th floors because of that reason.
HARRAS: That they are putting strongholds in Wayne buildings...
...is a way of basically saying to the Wayne family:
"We're in control. You may not know it...
...but we are actually controlling every aspect of Gotham in the shadows."
As owls do.
SNYDER: An owl can remain invisible from human sight, you know, in a tree...
...by its own camouflage and its own stillness.
That is something that's kind of terrifying to Bruce, I think, in a real way...
...because everything that he prides himself on as Batman...
...has to do with this idea that nobody knows the city better than him.
There's no nook or cranny that he hasn't explored, no villain he doesn't know.
And so not only for there to be a villain that he doesn't know...
...but a villain that's been there for years and has such an extensive reach...
...that's something that we felt would be really terrifying for him.
ANNOUNCER: The actual physical Court of Owls...
...is another example of how deeply rooted the mythology is...
...to what we know from antiquity.
The location is mysterious and foreboding...
...and designed to torture and capture those that threatened its secret or existence.
The labyrinthine structure is the perfect trap...
...to inflict a manipulation of all the senses of mind and body.
Not even the greatest of detectives in Batman can escape the potency of the horror...
...that the Court of Owls can inflict.
COUSlNEAU: Once again we have a really tantalizing image of mirroring.
Bruce Wayne has secreted himself away...
...in a very gothic horror-like mansion.
And it's echoed, it's mirrored...
...in the hideaways of the Court of Owls.
HARRAS: The labyrinth and the actual Court of Owls is in a lot of ways--
It's very much akin to the Roman Forum or the Colosseum. It's a statement of power.
A statement to whoever stumbles in that they're in a different world...
...that there is a secret world that is actually controlling you.
CAPULLO: I mean, the labyrinth...
...most people who go in don't come out, they die there.
They lose their sanity before they're taken out by a Talon, murdered...
...and their face put up on a wall. You know what l mean?
So, uh, I think, because it's so difficult to navigate in that environment...
...you're being drugged and led around different corners...
...lights are on, lights are off, all this different kind of stuff.
It's a metaphor for them. I mean, they're elusive.
You can't find them, you can't touch them.
COUSlNEAU: The closest analogy that l can think of...
...are those marvelous and haunting sketches...
...by the 1 8th century artist and engraver, Piranesi.
His images of prisons and castles...
...helped spark the entire gothic revival.
HARRAS: That's one of the greatest scenes in the story...
...where Batman stumbles and sees the great Gotham statue.
Because it is this totem of power that he knew nothing about...
...and-- But, to the Court, it is very important.
It's, basically, a statement to anyone who finds themselves in that area: "We are in control."
Much akin to any empire, or any power base...
...they set a totem up that says, "You're nothing and we're everything."
And that moment, I think, was very key in the Batman story.
TUCKER: The evil of Gotham is actually part of Gotham...
...and part of what built Gotham.
Goes back to one of the more compelling aspects of the story...
...is that Batman doesn't know everything about Gotham.
CAPULLO: By that virtue, you know, l had things early back from, you know, World War I era...
...you know, all the way up to modern era. So all these little nests...
...or roosts, as you were, were all decked out in a different way.
SNYDER: The architecture sort of clashes with itself.
The buildings are representative of warring forces.
You know, that modernity and history and commercialism...
...and, you know, personal interest, the people that live in the building...
...there's always a sense of the haunted quality of those streets.
You know, that generations of people have lived there before you...
...and have gone through things that you're going through...
...and also things that you'll never go through.
TUCKER: Gotham itself is evil because the Owls helped create Gotham.
So it makes Batman question his whole mission...
...about what is he actually protecting when he's protecting Gotham.
If the Owls are a part of every building, who does he trust?
Because there could be Owls who are part of the police department.
Some of his closest allies could be Owls.
What's delicious about this emerging mythology of the Court of Owls...
...is that they are pretending to want to transform Gotham City into something good.
And that this will be good for the citizens of Gotham.
The minute you are in the mythology or pretending, you need a mask.
You need some kind of camouflage...
...because the true intention is actually about power and greed...
...and money and often destruction.
In order to signal that, then you change your costume.
You have to hide your true intentions.
That's what we see in a single image of the mask of the Owl.
ANNOUNCER: The inner nature of a man revealed through a mask upon his face...
...the Court of Owls hides behind their physical masks...
...to further conceal their deep secret as Gotham's mythic court of influence.
But there is a haunted angle to their mask...
...as they are emblematic of fear in the depth of man's darkest visions.
HARRAS: Everyone fears the unknown...
...and I think that's one of the things the Court of Owls really represents.
SNYDER: They're very anonymous, they need to be anonymous.
They need to be this sense of this kind of enigmatic, removed...
...almost singular force in the city.
Because Batman, if he knew who everybody was that was in the court...
...they'd become less scary.
TUCKER: They are, in essence, faceless. They all wear masks...
...even the children who are part of it wear masks.
So the idea is that there isn't one head.
COUSlNEAU: Very often in mythology, you have a twinning phenomenon going on.
Batman is famous not just for his courage and his anti-heroic behavior...
...he's famous for his mask.
He's a man who is masked, but for a benevolent reason.
But the malevolent side of the mask is that you are deliberately striking terror...
...in the hearts of the innocent.
So the mask is a very curious notion.
It can be numinous, it can be an echo of something divine...
...but it can also hide evil intentions.
And that's the difference between Batman and the Court of Owls.
SNYDER: There's this sense of communal anonymity...
...in a way that's supposed to be spooky...
...whereby they understand that they control the city...
...and that the people that don't know who they are...
...are the people that are subjected to their will. So it's almost a show of power.
They wear this mask to say:
"We are anonymous to the people that feel our influence...
...but, to each other, we are known."
Design of the mask itself, Greg-- It was funny.
I had an idea for one that was a little bit more elaborate.
And when Greg showed me this one that was more blank...
...and more, l think, almost sort of ghostly...
...it was perfect. l saw it and l was like, "You're right. Simpler is better."
HARRAS: They were owls, but they were actually something--
When you look at them, they were very frightening.
CAPULLO: Scott also comes from, like, a horror background...
...and he actually sent me a picture of a particular owl.
A very white-faced, plain owl that had a very long nose and a beak.
And I just made a mascot of that.
You know, I think those kind of things are very scary.
Like when you have Jason in Friday the 1 3th.
You know, just the hockey mask.
Or, you know, you have Halloween, which is a featureless mask.
You don't really see the eyes. That kind of gives you an uneasy feeling.
COUSlNEAU: There is one wonderful notion of the etymology of the word "mask"...
...that goes back to an old Spanish word that means "the second face"...
...or "the other face."
The word "persona" from the Greeks means mask, it means face, as well.
And it-- All this suggests that we can wear more than one face...
...we can offer more than one face to the world.
But there is a choice: to either use it malevolently or benevolently.
ANNOUNCER: The Wayne family was once known...
...as the architects of Gotham.
They are and have been the most influential family among the elite.
Much to the surprise of Bruce Wayne...
...is the fact that his family has never been alone in their decisions.
The conspiracy of the Court of Owls weighs upon the mind of Batman...
...as he comes to learn of the possibly...
...that the court may have been behind the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne...
...so many years ago.
The Waynes and their conflict with the Owls...
...is basically a philosophical one.
The Waynes have never towed the line.
They've been philanthropic, they've been altruistic.
They've been all these things. They truly want what's good for Gotham.
They always have, even before Bruce Wayne showed up.
Thomas Wayne was like that, Alan Wayne was like that.
And the schism is that the Court of Owls, again, wants things their way.
SNYDER: They've always had this kind of iron grip on the city...
...where children would recite this kind of poem about them...
...and adults pretended they weren't real, but, deep down, knew maybe they were.
So when Bruce comes along and becomes Batman...
...it really sort of startles them and, l think, throws them off.
They claim to want what's best for Gotham, but what they ultimately want is control.
And so, true humanitarians like the Waynes get in their way...
...and they have to be eliminated.
[GUNSHOTS]
HARRAS: Obviously, young Bruce Wayne thought the Court of Owls...
...if they did exist, had to be behind his parents' death.
And in the story, it's very clear in a way that...
...like many people who have survived a tragedy...
...Bruce, as a young kid, was trying to make logic out of a tragic situation.
TUCKER: There's this, you know, rich mythology of the Owls...
...starting with an owl being president when the Waynes are murdered.
That's the first thing Bruce Wayne sees after his parents are murdered.
And so it adds an element to the Batman mythology...
...that, wait a minute, there's something else going on here.
CAPULLO: I mean, anything's possible now that we're learning about their existence...
...and their power and their influence.
And Joe Chill, we haven't confirmed that he's the actual killer of Bruce's parents.
So let's just put that on record. It's not proven.
Joe Chill may or may not be the killer.
Whether the Court was behind it or not, I don't know.
It seems to be that Joe Chill was and that's something Batman has to deal with...
...that his parents' death may have just come out of left field.
And that is something that drives him every day...
...but the Court's existence now drives him in a different direction.
SNYDER: And so anything they can do to prove to Bruce or to Batman...
...that not only are they more powerful than him...
...but that their reach can extend right into his own household...
...and that they can pull anybody from his life that matters to him, into their own clutches...
...is something that they're gonna wanna do.
ANNOUNCER: There is a long tradition within secret societies...
...where the youth is targeted and brought in as the new recruits.
From the very ranks of the members...
...their children are often forced into becoming the new leadership.
The Court of Owls, in a sinister twist on this mythology...
...captures children and forces them into their ranks.
HARRAS: One of the more hideous aspects of what the Court did...
...and I think one of the most fascinating things in the story was that, for years...
...they would take children and train them to be actually Talons.
And generation by generation, the new Talon would kill...
...or defeat, the old Talons.
SNYDER: Gangs will go after people when they're young...
...the Mob goes after people when they're young.
They wanna indoctrinate people that are still susceptible...
...to a lot of things that they have to offer: the sense of power or empowerment...
...the sense of purpose.
And so, the Court, one of the things that speaks to how evil they are...
...is the fact that they'll go after children to be their assassins.
That they'll raise them to be their weapons.
TUCKER: After reading the Court of Owls story...
...we realized we could tie it into the story we're telling on our end with Damian.
Talon represents kind of a surrogate father figure to Damian...
...because, at the time that he meets Talon...
...Damian and Batman are at odds because Damian wants his rightful legacy.
He wants to be called Damian Wayne publicly.
Batman's holding at bay.
He's not quite, uh, letting the world know that Damian Wayne is Bruce Wayne's son.
So part of the fun of constructing the story and the comic...
...and some of the stuff that l think is adapted into the film...
...is this notion that the mystery around the Court of Owls...
...begins very far away from Bruce.
It begins with this notion that Batman doesn't really believe that they exist...
...and that they are part of the city's mythology.
And then he realizes, yes, they are a part of the city's mythology.
And then he realizes, not only are they part of the city's mythology...
...but "they're closer to me than I thought"...
...in the way that they involve-- You know, they're after Robin.
They had designs on Dick Grayson.
And so it's almost like a mystery that was right under his nose.
ANNOUNCER: The Court of Owls represents, on one side, a new enemy for Batman.
But on a deeper, malevolent perspective...
...the court is far more reaching as an enemy of all of Gotham.
Although mystery and conspiracy help give birth and sustenance to the Court of Owls...
...it is the notion of raw power that keeps their agenda hidden and immortal.
When a mythology is deeply connected...
...as the Court of Owls is to the myths of antiquity and the symbol of the owl...
...we get the longevity of one of Batman's most sinister forces to date.
And I think that's one of the things that Court of Owls really represents.
They were, in many ways, just a fairy tale.
And Batman clearly thought they were just a fairy tale.
And one of the things that happens when you find out a fairy tale...
...or you find out a nightmare, for instance, is real...
...that's very compelling. Your sense of reality somehow shifts.
COUSlNEAU: The Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung...
...said something very interesting along these lines years ago...
...where he said, "The repressed god becomes a demon."
The forces that aren't visible, that are repressed into the corridors of power...
...in the suspicion of modern government, becomes monstrous.
And this is what Bruce Wayne is up against.
SNYDER: For me, the greatest thrill was to get to create a new enemy for Batman.
I mean, growing up, those rogues: Joker, Penguin, Two-Face...
...they're my favorite characters, not just in comics, but in literature...
...because they're all extensions of Batman's fear.
So for us, the challenge really was to make something...
...that would speak to one of Bruce's deep-seated paranoias about his own failings.
And I think what all this is suggesting is a huge collision...
...between the myth of the individual that is starting to rise...
...and the myth of the collective.
And when we begin to hint at some interference...
...powers in government, powers in churches...
...powers in a castle, powers in a monastery...
...powers in the Court of Owls, we begin to become paranoid.
And this is what Bruce Wayne is up against.
He's up against the resentment, the powers of the Court of Owls...
...who have decided to slay him.
[OWL WAlLS]