David Goyer is a screenwriter, director, and producer best known for his role in films like Blade, Batman Begins, and The Dark Knight trilogy, in which he redefined superhero storytelling. Goyer has also brought Isaac Asimov’s iconic Foundation novels to television and introduced science-infused, thought-provoking narratives to the big screen. With decades of experience in Hollywood, he continues to push the boundaries of storytelling. Goyer joins the podcast to discuss the fine line between being a hero and being a villain. 

Through books and film, we hear the stories of fascinating characters whose lives take many twists and turns. But if you were the subject of a film, how would you narrate your life? To find out more, check out our essay: “Your Hero’s Journey: The Key to Unlocking Meaning in Your Life”

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

Ben Carlson: I want to start where we usually do, which is with personal background. You’ve written about many kinds of heroes, superheroes among them, and they all have origin stories.

So, I’d like to hear, how would you begin the origin story of David Goyer?

David Goyer: Grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, lower middle class, single mom, was into monster movies and comic books as a kid. And I was certain that I was going to become a homicide detective and get a degree at Michigan State University in police administration.

I won a national writing award while I was in high school. And some of my teachers found the screenwriting program at USC. And I remember they had coffee with my mom and said, we don’t think he should become, we think he should become a writer. I applied to USC film school, and I got a scholarship that changed the trajectory of my life.

And I got an agent while I was still in college and I sold a screenplay when I was 21, about four months after I graduated that got made and that’s my origin story. In those early years, what stories most shaped you? I had a, not the happiest childhood. My father left at a very early age, but he did instill in me a love for reading and genre reading.

One of my few good memories of him is him reading aloud the John Carter books by Burroughs, the Tarzan books to me, uh, Lord of the Rings, things like that. And I just love the idea of Escaping into another world or opening a portal or there being a secret level to something and that’s also I suppose why Initially Marvel Comics appealed to me more because they’re not gods They’re teenagers like you or average people having adventures.

Ben Carlson: You have written so many stories about heroes I want you to comment a little bit on how superheroes help us to understand real human heroism

David Goyer: Look, I am not the first person to make this analogy, but I liken modern day superheroes to the equivalent of the Greek myths, for instance. These are morality tales, largely.

So many of them are about doing what’s right, even if no one ever knows that you’ve done it, or taking responsibility for your actions or, or wrestling with. our inner humanity and our inner demons. What would you define as a great hero? What makes a hero great in your mind? Someone who is willing to put their own livelihood on the line.

Someone who is willing to do what’s right and putting the welfare of others. in front of the welfare of yourself. And in my mind, that’s what makes a great hero.

Ben Carlson: How do you think that the stories that are told about heroes and superheroes among them have shaped society? What do you see as the effects, good or ill, for the entertainment’s influence on public morality?

David Goyer: Well, I think with early comic book adaptations there was a much clearer division between good and evil. And I would cite writers like Alan Moore and Frank Miller and others who in the late 80s and early 90s with The Dark Knight and Watchmen and other books like that, where they started doing a revisionist take on these superheroes and started exploring the shades of gray.

You know, the negative sides of being Batman, the pros and cons, and not just what it meant for Bruce Wayne, but what it meant for Gotham City, what it meant for the world at large. It’s a double-edged sword, and in some cases, as it is in real life, the line between a hero and villain is quite blurry. It’s interesting, after that, A lot of the movies and comic books for a good decade become very, very dark as well.

And now I think we’re starting to see the pendulum swing back the other way because people are saying, Oh my God, enough already.

Ben Carlson: How intentional was that with The Dark Knight? The way in which the morality became more ambiguous or at least open to discussion. When you’re developing that kind of story, how deliberately are you wrestling with questions of good and evil?

David Goyer: Well, in the case of Batman Begins the Dark Knight with Chris, in those early days, it was very intentional. The conceit that we arrived on was that for the first time, we were going to treat Batman as if he were real. And apply the real-world rules of not just physics, but everything. You know, there had to be a reason for the utility belt.

There had to be a reason for How the cape would work, and so by extension that led to everything. Well, how would people react on social media? How would the police react? It seems obvious now, but that was a very revolutionary and risky approach at the time. That was not. how comic book movies were made or perceived.

Ben Carlson: You’ve written some brilliant villains, and since we’re on the Dark Knight, the Joker is obviously one of the most charismatic villains of the last half century or more. And I’m curious, what makes a good villain in your mind? And then we can explore what, what I mean by good, but what makes a good villain from a writer’s point of view?

David Goyer: I think a good villain, first, has to really believe in what they’re doing. Most villains, even in the real world, are the heroes of their own story. Let’s not talk about the fact that they’re villains. What do they want, and how is that in conflict with the protagonist? I think there was a, a feeling beforehand that, well, if we sketch out these villains, if we go into some of their biographical detail, if we understand why they became what they became, then we’ll start to feel for them, and that was thought of as something bad.

And I said, no, that’s interesting. That makes it more tragic. And the line in the real world is very blurry between heroes and villains.

Ben Carlson: So, as you may know, we talk a lot about virtues at the John Templeton Foundation, the qualities that make somebody prosper and are seen generally as good. There’s one character you’ve written, probably others, but certainly in the case of Superman who has basically all of them to the extreme.

So, talk to us about what are the challenges of writing that perfect person, and then I’m curious if that sheds any light on what we’re looking for from, uh, these moral entertainments.

David Goyer: I was once quoted, I think, sometime after the Dark Knight, someone said, would you ever want to write Superman? And I said, no, I don’t feel an affinity for Superman. I always liked Batman. Superman’s quote, boring. And for a long time, I felt that way because Writing purely virtuous characters is hard because you have to find out what the conflict was.

In my case, my first son is not a biological son of mine. He’s, my stepson. I came into his life when he was about two years old. I am His dad, he has another dad too, but he spends a lot of time with us. And, and I started thinking about Superman and I thought, Oh, that’s interesting. Superman has two fathers as well.

He’s got a Krypton Ian father, a birth father, and then he has an earth father, Jonathan Kent. And so that led into all these questions of nature versus nurture. And that made Superman relatable to me. And so then I started to think, well, can I take the fact that he’s a looking for a new homeland and the fact that He’s an orphan, effectively looking for a new father, and can I tie that into the plot so that what the bad guys want, in this case Zod and the other Krypton Ans, happens to dovetail with his own personal issues and his own personal conflict, and then the fate of Earth rests upon, effectively, E.

Am I going to go with my birth home and my birth family, or am I going to go with my adopted country or my adopted home? And I was like, okay, that’s interesting. I can relate to that. And some of those scenes with Jonathan Ken, in some case, some of the dialogue is verbatim from conversations that I have with my stepson.

It’s always about the inn, right? How do we take these crazy, bigger than life characters and make them human, right? And so, the case of the clone emperors in Foundation, you know, they’re kind of a family and these clones, they’re just desperate to individuate. Desperate. Can you just break them down real fast for the audience?

Foundation is a story that takes place over thousands of years, and in Asimov’s original, the Empire is faceless. And we knew that we needed to give the Empire a face and some kind of continuity so that we weren’t just jumping forward 100, 150 years and then you had an entirely new cast. And so, Josh Friedman and I, we came up with this idea of if our heroes are trying to change, they represent change, and the empire represents the opposite of that.

They’re ossified. They don’t want to change. What if it’s a genetic dynasty and they’re just cloning the same person repeatedly? And then they’re imposing that person upon the entire galaxy. So, we’re like, oh, that’s really interesting. And then we said, okay, what if there are three ages of them?

Dawn, day, and dusk at the same time. So, they’re all the same men and they’re told that. To preserve the empire, they need to be the same. And yet all these guys desperately want to break out of that. We just thought that is fascinating and dangerous because all these individual guys constantly want to make a name for themselves.

And so, they’re going to do impulsive and destructive things. When I’m dealing with science fiction or fantasy or superhero. Films, I often find that if you can boil all of the fantastical elements away and latch onto just real world and relatable quandaries, no matter how crazy the story is, that’s what’s going to move the audience.

Ben Carlson: What does it mean to make somebody human, right? You have a character. It could be a classical Greek character, it could be a comic book character, but they’re larger than life. And you must have a very keen and nuanced understanding of what makes somebody either not quite human in the way that we would relate to them, and how would we make them actually relatable?

What does that mean to make a character human?

David Goyer: In its most basic form, it’s okay, what are the issues and conflicts that we as humans, or if we’re me as a writer, or if I found a team of writers, what are we personally facing? And then what’s happening in the world today, because I think if you’re dealing with mass market media, and by and large, that’s what I deal with, it’s impossible to not acknowledge what’s happening to society at large.

I’m not saying we should be standing on a soapbox, but when Chris and I were working on the Dark Knight films, We were in Iraq, there was all sorts of upheaval, 9 11 had happened, and then later on we were in Afghanistan. There’s a collective global anxiety, right? All of these things are just in the ether, so I think it works best if these things are subtext, but it’s important to talk about because people can relate to it, even if they don’t.

realize that this is what they’re relating to. Does that make sense?

Ben Carlson: I was going to try and summarize and tell me if this makes sense to you, to say that humans have problems.

David Goyer: Yeah. So you need to have, you need to find the right problem for every great character. And that’s a combination of social problem, personal problem, interpersonal problems.

But if there’s no problems, it’s not human. It’s not a story. It’s boring.

Audiences want to relate. Look, I’m really curious to see what Chris Nolan is going to do with the Odyssey. How is he going to make that relatable? He will, I have no doubt, but I’m really fascinated to see how that’s going to work.

And a similar thing, you know, he took what could have been dry material and Oppenheimer and I think made a lot of that relatable as well.

Ben Carlson: Are there any philosophical or questions? Because we’ve touched on a number already, but I want to ask if You have any overriding interests, questions, concerns, principles that you feel you’ve been pursuing throughout your work?

David Goyer: A personal theme, as opposed to larger overriding philosophy, and then I’ll get to that, is I, I noticed if I took like the first 15 years of my writing and filmmaking and sort of boiled a lot of it away, a lot of it was stories about fathers or trying to reconcile. With a missing father or a dark father.

At first it was unconscious. And then I became aware that it was conscious and I started playing around with that. And in terms of larger ideas, I suppose I’m really interested in the pros and cons of trying to make a better society of how. Someone with good intentions tries to push or impose those intentions on a society.

And what are the ways that works and what are the ways that it doesn’t work? I’m also interested in stories about can I do X, Y, and Z and may my efforts not be rewarded or see a positive effect for generations. That’s what really intrigued me about Foundation. The idea of the foundation is the people that are trying to save the galaxy, they are not going to see their efforts rewarded for a thousand years, potentially.

I’m really interested in that tension. There are obvious parallels to global warming and the efforts that we’re trying to do. I think as you become a parent, hopefully, you start to wonder, well, what is the world going to be like? When my children are adults, or my grandchildren are adults, and hopefully you want to become a better steward of that world. So these are kind of things that really interest me now, or have interested me in the last decade.

Ben Carlson: So we’ve touched on foundation for the series and to the extent that you think Asimov’s books are wrestling with similar questions. What is the philosophical ethical heart of that world?

David Goyer: The philosophical ethical question fundamentally that Asimov was wrestling with is if we study history, he believed that human behavior is fundamentally the same and that we’ll see patterns in history.

And if we study history with a close enough eye, we can begin to predict those patterns and possibly for stall or prevent some of the societal collapses that have happened throughout our own. Planet and then throughout the fictional galaxy of foundation. So that’s the basic premises. If we study the past Can we on a large scale predict the future and prevent?

the bad things from happening

Ben Carlson: Is there a virtue you care about particularly across the stories that you tell that if you are, let’s just say you are trying to influence the culture quite intentionally to promote a certain good quality, a certain virtue, is there one that you think you’ve consistently been trying to cultivate or showcase in a positive light?

David Goyer: I suppose the one that I care about the most in my personal life is compassion. Trying to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. So that I can at least understand, most people aren’t. Doing things just to be evil right and that doesn’t mean you have to excuse their actions But I think it does help in Understanding and it might lower the temperature a little

Ben Carlson: I want to transition to the topic of awe How does that play a role in your approach to making films and how is it evoked in?

David Goyer: Well, very specifically, that was why I was attracted to the challenge of adapting Foundation was because I love space and science and sort of all these big unanswered questions.

And I viewed Foundation the show as a way to kind of revel in awe. Often, whether it’s a black hole or sunrise on an alien planet or meteor showers or all of the above,

we are so small and our understanding of the galaxy and the universe is so tiny and we’re dealing with things that are so beyond our comprehension and I just thought, wow, what an opportunity it is to really revel in all of these things, even if you’re not religious, to become spiritual and to think about whether it’s, you know, the butter Fly effect on, on the cosmic scale.

This new thing I’m involved in. Emergence also deals with white holes, which are the theoretical inverse of black holes and instead of ingesting matter and energy, the expel matter and energy, that really intrigues me because then I started to ask, where does that matter and energy come from? Does it come from another universe?

I love the fact that there are these giant questions that we may never answer.

Ben Carlson: Can you tell me how you instructed the team, the visual team working on Foundation, to try and represent mathematics?

David Goyer: Oh, yeah. Well, the first thing I said is in most people’s, the mainstream audience conception of science fiction is either informed by Star Wars or Star Trek, or maybe to a lesser extent, Alien.

And so, the first thing I said is, I said, we, we, as much as humanly possible, we must avoid that. Now, two things. First, when we’re depicting, quote, holograms. I want to do something different. And so most people have holograms projecting light. And so, I developed with my VFX team, what we call sonagrams.

So instead of projecting light, they reflect light, they cast shadows. Uh, they refract light, and so that’s just something I’ve never seen before, and that just came out of our desire to do something different, and then it led to the idea of Sands of Time, which led to the title sequence for my show, Foundation.

Harry Selden, who creates Psychohistory, is also dealing with this theoretical advanced mathematics, and I said, I don’t want to do Dangerous Mind. I want to depict mathematics in a different way. I was thinking of, like, the Kabbalah. And sort of early Jewish mysticism, and I said, I want. The mathematics to look like the language of angels.

And my team said, what in the world is that? And then I said, I don’t know, figured out, iterate it on it, come back to me. I want it to be beautiful and intuitive. So, we send it out to, I don’t know, three or four different design firms and played around with it. And, and one. Design firm called Tendril came up with what that became, our depiction of math and the manipulation of the prime radiant, which is the physical model of these mathematics and the way that it evolves out of that.

Ben Carlson: It is stunning and very, very distinctive. And I would say intuitive, but I’m not a math person, so it makes me feel like I understand math, which

David Goyer: that’s all supposed to do it. So, I say that’s a success. Yeah, it’s supposed to feel like it works. I’m going to bring us home with the last couple questions. You described earlier the Emperor Cleon who’s a clone in three ages, and I’m curious if you haven’t already thought of it Take a second now and think about the David Goyer clones and how that triumvirate of young Middle aged and elderly you how would they see the world?

In a consistent way and different ways, at least up to your life experience now and how you imagine it at all ages. I was always fascinated by the big questions. I loved asking questions. I loved people that were passionate about what they did. You know, even if I didn’t understand it, I don’t care of whether that’s your pen maker.

It doesn’t matter. You can be a plumber and you’re passionate about it. I just love talking to people who are passionate about their craft. And I love asking questions. And I think my younger self was much angrier. I think a lot of people become more cynical when they get older, and I’ve become less cynical.

Ben Carlson: I can relate. Was it parenthood? Was it fatherhood? One of my peers, the first friend of mine that became a father, I said, what’s it like? And he said, well, for the first time in my life, even when I was married, it’s the first time in my life where I’ve been forced to make some truly unselfish decisions.

David Goyer: Right? Because I think you can be married to someone or, you know, you know, lifelong relationship with someone and kind of glide along and still be. Pretty selfish. But when you have kids, you, and if you care at all, you really can’t. Last question. We’re in the third act or a second act, wherever we are in the, uh, structure of, of the narrative of your life.

Ben Carlson: What are the challenges now? Where are you in this story?

David Goyer: Well, for me, it will be what happens when my wife and I are anti nesters. I don’t want to be doing film and television in my 80s. So, what will I be doing with my life for the last 20 years or 30 years? How do I reinvent myself? And that’s both daunting and terrifying.

I want to keep growing and changing. So how can I be deliberate about that? And make meaning out of the last act of my life. Well, as a writer, you’ve written so many transformations for your characters. I think there are a few people who know better how it can happen, at least on screen. And I’m sure you’ll come up with something amazing for your own life.

Thank you so much, David, for spending this time with us. Thanks for having me.