MORGAN FREEMAN: HOW I MENTORED BATMAN

AS Lucius Fox, CEO of Wayne Enterprises and Batman’s gadget guru in “The Dark Knight,” Morgan Freeman plays the designer of some of the coolest toys this side of James Bond as well as the Caped Crusader’s conscience. Freeman, who auctioning off a trove of Bat-related goodies at CharityFolks.com, spoke to The Post about the creation of this bat-tacular blockbuster.

You’RE Bruce Wayne’s MENTOR, which is a typical role for you lately – mentors, presidents, God. will you ever play a jerk?

Nobody wants me to. If such a role came along with an interesting story I’d leap at it, but it’s hard to do now. You have an audience who adores you. People come up to you and say, “You died in that movie. I didn’t like that.”

What’s the secret to making a superhero movie?

You gotta make the superhero believable. Batman is not super. He has extensive training in order to be able to do what he’s doing. What made “Batman Begins” work is that you saw how he begins. He’s not bitten by a spider or bathed in atomic rays or anything. The guy was trained in a certain art. That’s very believable.

Part of that believability is also that Batman is disturbed.

He is. This is one of the things the new movie brings out. He sees his path, and he knows the price he pays for it. His mentors, the people watching over him, are saying, “You’re getting into dangerous territory here.”

To play a disturbed character, do you need a certain core of that in your own personality?

You have to know where that is, yeah. You have to be able to locate it. I think everything you do, you pull from yourself. Words have to sit around something you recognize.

ncG1vNJzZmimqaW8tMCNnKamZ2JlfXl7j3Bmamtforyzs8CnZJ%2BqlZq6orqMoaawZZliuqa606ipnpxdl661ucCnZg%3D%3D