Fans of the Planet of the Apes franchise are looking forward to the reboot series’ upcoming third installment. And Batman fans are, too, because as soon as the Planet of the Apes movie hits theaters, director Matt Reeves will be freed up to begin work on The Batman.

The War for the Planet of the Apes release date is less than two weeks away, and Reeves is currently busy promoting the movie. But since he’s set to direct the highly-anticipated DC Extended Universe movie next, questions about his plans for that are inevitable. An interviewer from Fandango asked Reeves whether he saw a potential Batman trilogy on the horizon. His response:

I have ideas about an arc, but really, the important thing is just to start…you have to start with one. You know, you have to start with a story that begins something.

Reeves said that the Planet of the Apes arcs weren't planned in advance, and when he was brought in to direct Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, he wanted to tell a different story from the one provided. According to the director, the studio had some “broad ideas” for a potential trilogy at the time of the first reboot movie, but they hadn't explicitly outlined how they would pursue them:

And when Mark (Bomback, the screenwriter) and I began Dawn, we knew what our goals were, but we didn’t know how we were gonna get there, and I would say that more relates to the way that I see a Batman story as a kind of ambition for a series of stories. But really, the most important thing is gonna be to tell a vital first story.

Inspired by the work of Alfred Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense, Matt Reeves recently talked about his desire to make The Batman a noir-driven detective movie. In addition, he told Yahoo Movies that the approach of The Dark Knight Trilogy's Christopher Nolan was a source of inspiration:

What I love that [Nolan] did was that he took the genre seriously. What studios are willing to make at the moment is a very, very narrow band of films. What I discovered is that this genre has the potential to be about something more. You can use the metaphors of the genre to talk about [many topics]. [They] enable you to tell stories that have deep emotional resonance.

I think the other thing that I really admire in what [Nolan] did was knowing what it is to make a big studio film, which often can fall into that sense of committee filmmaking, where there's an anonymity to the point of view of the film.

The director admired Nolan for letting his perspective "come through", even as "a filmmaker in an enormous system", and said that he tries to operate in the same fashion. Warner Bros. is known for taking a "filmmaker-driven" approach, but the studio was accused of interfering in the creative process of last year's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad. So, unless they want to lose their director during production, as Disney and Lucasfilm did with the Han Solo movie, they’d be wise to avoid interfering with Reeves’ work.

Share your thoughts on these tidbits from Matt Reeves, and stay tuned for the latest updates!