I actually wrote a treatment for the next Batman. I woke up in the middle of the night and it came to me. You do the movie cheap, in film noir style. Make Batman the dark knight, something Tim Burton didn't even do.

You start at Alfred's burial, with a Sam Spade film noir narrator, talking to this death figure standing there that only he sees. Go into the first big action set with Robin and he gets killed. Now you're sitting there with Batman in this chair. He's like [he is] in the original cartoon, a guy who, everyday, has to decide whether to do right or [do] wrong. Now he's operating not out of [a sense of] justice, but out of hatred. Hatred for evil, but hatred enough for himself.

The bat signal goes off and he pulls the shade; he won't go in. Slowly, a kid brings him out of it. He ends up not only fighting the Mad Hatter, or whoever, but he ends up fighting death. He fights this death character in order to save this kid. And he beats him. The two of them end up going off this cliff, and they die. Both of them. Go black.

Come up and you see a bright white ceiling. All of the sudden you see Kim Basinger in a nurse's outfit, looking right into the camera, down on top of the gurney. She comes back with Jack Nicholson in a doctor's outfit. He's going, "Well, hello. How are you?" On TV there's Jim Carrey as a gameshow host, Chris ODonnell as the patient next to him.

What you have is that since he was eight years old and his parents were killed, he's been comatose. He has lived his entire life--all of this hatred--in this room. He hasn't been able to face life until he faced death and beat it. But even then, he's in absolute denial. You still have that Sam Spade dialogue and he's saying, "Am I to believe that my life, everything, all these people, lived in my imagination, in this room? No. I will not accept it." The camera slowly pans the room, it comes around and you hear him saying, "I am Batman. I am Batman. I am Batman." Then you see him, Michael Keaton, whoever you want. White hair, sitting up, just totally crazy, out of his fucking mind.

Do it for $30 million. You reinvent the franchise. What they want to do instead is this Batman Beyond, and just like with Anthony Hopkins in Mask of Zorro, you have this guy create the whole thing all over again with someone new. I think they are going to do Batman Beyond but they should use my ending to start the movie.

Look for the complete interview with George Clooney in the October issue of Movieline magazine.