Thanks to the LA Times, Christopher Nolan has been doing the rare thing he never does: talking about his ideas in public.

Naturally, these aren't plot-spoiling detail-heavy announcements we're dealing with, but anything more substantial than a denial from Nolan is always big news. It's been a few weeks since he stepped in as mentor for the next Man of Steel movie, and he's now willing to talk about how it all came about. Apparently we can thank David Goyer:

“He basically told me, ‘I have this thought about how you would approach Superman'... I immediately got it, loved it and thought: that is a way of approaching the story I’ve never seen before that makes it incredibly exciting."

A fresh take on that same old stale superhero icon? Singer's retro-tribute was great stuff (Brandon Routh was wonderful too), but if a new perspective is possible at all, Nolan is the guy to manage it: "It’s very exciting, we have a fantastic story. And we feel we can do it right. We know the milieu, if you will, we know the genre and how to get it done right.” Hell yes, they do. They even have a taste for big name actors in supporting roles, a la Richard Donner's original.

It's still a long way off - say, 2012 - but for now, Christopher is content to carry on with getting Inception out there in cinemas. Then, it's the next Batman film, which his brother Jonathan is feverishly working away on at the moment. “He’s struggling to put it together into the epic story that you want it to be,” Nolan comments, then adding a key piece of information: "What makes the third film a great possibility for us is that we want to finish our story. And in viewing it as the finishing of a story rather than infinitely blowing up the balloon and expanding the stor

So is this the last outing for the Caped Crusader? It certainly seems so - under Nolan at least. It's a rather good sign; you can imagine an elegant and creatively satisfying conclusion from Nolan, before the franchise runs the risk of returning to the Joel Schumacher days of blockbusting Bat Nipples and Arnold Schwarzenegger. On that front, he admits one thing: “[The villain] won’t be Mr. Freeze.”

For more cryptic comments from Christopher Nolan, check out the full write-up in the LA Times. It's a rather good read.