Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan is a bit of a master at dishing the dirt without giving away anything specific, He's been doing just that during a chat with the LA Times, who got him to talk for the first time about his involvement overseeing a new Superman movie, as well as updating us on the status of Batman 3.
It seems with Superman, the whole thing came from the fact they were stalled for ideas for Batman 3. At that point, writer David S. Goyer pitched the idea for a Superman movie, of which Nolan says, "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…[it] is a way of approaching the story I’ve never seen before that makes it incredibly exciting. I wanted to get Emma and I involved in shepherding the project right away and getting it to the studio and getting it going in an exciting way."
Like I said, he's good at talking without giving the game away. However he also said that despite all the previous versions of Superman on screen, the new film will stand on its own. “A lot of people have approached Superman in a lot of different ways. I only know the way that has worked for us that’s what I know how to do," while adding that the movie will be kept completely separate from his Batman films, saying “Each serves to the internal logic of the story. They have nothing to do with each other.” He and producer/wife Emma Thomas are also being rather coy about the Internet reports the film will be called Man Of Steel and feature villains Brainiac and Lex Luthor, merely saying, “I don’t know where this stuff comes from.”
As for Batman 3, while Nolan won't even confirm he's directing it (he has a policy of not publicly revealing his next project until the previous one is in the can), he says "My brother [Jonathan] is writing a script for me and we’ll wait to see how it turns out.... He’s struggling to put it together into the epic story that you want it to be... Without getting into specifics, the key thing that 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 story.”
Hmm, so it seems a third Batman flick will be Nolan's last. However before all this we have his new movie Inception to enjoy, which is out this summer.