Earlier this week, I got a chance to speak with filmmaker Boaz Yakin (Remember the Titans) about his upcoming movie Max, and also asked him a few question about the live-action Batman Beyond movie -- a project he was briefly attached to direct before it died in development at Warner Bros. in the lead-up up to Batman Begins.

"I had just made Remember the Titans," he told me, "and my inclination is to always go off a trend: make an independent film after I make a studio film. I spoke to my agent, and he said, 'I think you need to do another studio movie before you do that.' I was just basically like, 'Well, if I'm going to do a studio movie, like, I want it to be Batman' -- which at the time I just meant, if I'm going to do a studio movie, I want it to be a big ol' thing."

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“ [I] very quickly got the feeling that I would be in the zone, the madness, and I didn't really have the heart for it at the time.

In a humorous twist, Yakin explained, his agent took him quite literally. "He came back to me and said, 'I have a meeting set up for you at Warner Bros. about Batman.' I was like, 'What!? [Laughs] Okay.' I guess at the time I think Darren Aronofsky was developing a Batman: Year One type of thing." (Year One, of course, would eventually go to Christopher Nolan, who turned it into Batman Begins.) "So I said, 'Okay, let me see what I can do,' and I came up with this pitch on Batman Beyond."But what exactly was the director's vision for the acclaimed animated series? "It was almost like Sam Raimi's Spider-Man but a little bit darker -- a teenage, kind of futuristic, cyberpunk Batman thing."He continued, "It might have really hurt my career. I went off and wrote the best script I ever wrote that never got made. But it was just one of those moments in time where you think you want to do something, and then you realize you don't really want to do it, and for some reason it's on your IMDb page for the rest of your life. [Laughs]"Regardless, Batman Beyond has stood the test time, thanks to its unique place in the Batman anthology. "Batman seems to be popular in any iteration," Yakin said. "I think [Batman Beyond] is apart enough from the regular Batman that people are allowed to play in that playground, without sort of f***ing with continuity and all this stuff that people are so concerned with. It's a different look at the character."Yakin's new movie Max hits theaters on June 26.

Max Nicholson is a writer for IGN, and he desperately seeks your approval. Show him some love by following @Max_Nicholson on Twitter or MaxNicholson on IGN.