Danny Cannon, the director of the pilot of Fox's upcoming Batman prequel series "Gotham," recently spoke with IGN about giving the show a very different look to the Christopher Nolan directed Batman trilogy.

The look they ultimately went for is both familiar and unique to the Bat universe - neither the glossy and contemporary world of the Nolan films nor the Gothic wonderland of the Tim Burton films and 'Arkham' games. Instead, we're dropped in rainy, dirty, gritty city with minimal use of modern tech (cell phones are barely used) and the feel isn't too far off the likes of "Serpico" or "The French Connection":

"It was daunting at first, because you're following three masterpieces. So I settled with the fact that -- what we talked about when we first pitched this was, '20 years before Batman.' A world that's starting to see a corrupt city rotting from the inside. It reminded us of New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That was our first meeting, and we kind of spring-boarded off of that. Luckily, that's uncharted territory. Hopefully in the atmospherics of Gotham we created a romantic, gothic, Dickensian kind of world."

Cannon was also asked about the comic book storylines and whether any of those story arcs were influences here or might even make it into the narrative down the line:

"You know, I read everything, and you reach that point where you have to make it your own. DC were very supportive in that too, because they know when they've done things badly and when they've done things well. So far, what they've done well has just far outweighed, but you have to make these things your own. At some point, you have to plunge in and go, 'All right, hate me or... hate me. [Laughs] I've got to make this my own.'"