Billion Dollar Batman

by Bruce Scivally

  Bruce Wayne’s wardrobe was more upscale, in keeping with the style and image of a millionaire playboy. For his outfits, Hemming collaborated with legendary fashion designer Giorgio Armani, who suggested clothing Christian Bale in his newest line, Giorgio Armani Hand Made-to-Measure. Each suit carried Armani’s traditional customized owner’s label: Giorgio Armani for Bruce Wayne. “Chris Nolan and I wanted Bruce Wayne to have an elegantly tailored appearance,” said Hemming. “We felt that the Giorgio Armani brand was emblematic of the contemporary classic look we were going for. We chose the fabrics and then worked directly with Mr. Armani and his people to tailor an entire wardrobe of suits, custom-made for the character.”71

  Harvey Dent’s wardrobe was less expensive than Bruce Wayne’s, but Hemming still wanted the character to have an air of authority and confidence. “We dressed him simply, but impeccably in suits by [Ermenegildo] Zegna,” said Hemming.72

  The next challenge the filmmakers faced in creating Batman’s new villains was the make-up. The look of the Joker was far more creepy and sinister than previous incarnations. “Clearly, there was a perception in the audience’s mind of what the Joker would look like,” said make-up and hair designer Peter Robb-King, “but we wanted to get under the skin, so to speak, of what this character represents in this story. He is someone who has been damaged in every sense of the word, so it was important that we create a look that was not, forgive the pun, ‘jokey.’”73

  In The Dark Knight, the Joker’s white pancake make-up is cracked, the black shadowing his eyes is runny, and the red grin is painted on sloppily over noticeable scars. His hair is still green, but it’s longer, stringier and more unkempt. This is no funhouse Joker; it’s a madhouse Joker.74

  John Caglione, Jr., who applied the make-up to Heath Ledger, called the process “a dance,” saying, “Heath would scrunch up his face in specific expressions, raising his forehead and squinting his eyes, and I would paint on the white over his facial contortions. This technique created textures and expressions that just painting the face a flat white would not. Then I used black make-up around Heath’s eyes while he held them closed very tight, which created consistent facial textures. After the black was on, I sprayed water over his eyes, and he would squeeze his eyes and shake his head, and all that black drippy, smudgy stuff would happen.”75

  The Joker’s scars were created with a newly-developed silicone-based prosthetic created and applied by prosthetic supervisor Conor O’Sullivan and prosthetic make-up artist Robert Trenton. “It took us about two years to develop the technology, but after a few glitches, we hit on it,” said O’Sullivan. “We are now able to produce silicone pieces that are applied directly to the skin. And it blends with the skin perfectly; if you didn’t know it was there, you would have a hard time seeing anything.”76 One of the greatest advantages of the new process was that whereas it might have taken three to four hours to apply traditional latex prosthetics, the silicone prosthetics went on in about 25 minutes.77

  Two-Face’s make-up was also achieved in a cutting-edge way. Instead of creating Harvey Dent’s burnt visage entirely through prosthetics, actor Aaron Eckhart wore a skull cap and partial prosthetics, with motion capture markers on half of his face. The look of burnt skin and exposed bone and muscle was then created digitally by visual effects house Framestore. “It was interesting for me in that, because of the technology, I didn’t have to spend hours in make- up every day,” said Ekhart. “The whole process was effortless...at least for me.”78 As repulsive as Two-Face’s visage was, Nolan admitted that some of the earlier concepts were even worse, but he pulled back from those because he didn’t want people looking away from the screen so much that they missed the film.79

  HOT WHEELS

  Just as Christopher Nolan urged production designer Nathan Crowley to begin designing and building the Batmobile while Batman Begins was in pre-production, he now asked Crowley to design a new vehicle, the Bat-Pod, while the script for The Dark Knight was taking shape. Nolan conceived of a motorcycle-type transport that would eject from the front of the Batmobile, using the Batmobile’s huge front tires. “Of course we were going to have the Batmobile back,” states Nolan, “but we wanted to give Batman something new: a fresh means of transportation, something very exotic and very powerful looking. It’s a two-wheeled vehicle, but it’s definitively not a motorcycle. In essence, the Bat-Pod is to the world of motorcycles what the Tumbler is to the world of cars.”80

  To design the vehicle, Nolan and production designer Nathan Crowley once again set to work in Nolan’s garage. “We figured, ‘Let’s just go for it; let’s build it full-size,’” said Crowley. “So we did. We got some tools and put together a full-size model out of anything we could find that might fit.”81

  The two came up with an all-terrain vehicle that would be fast and maneuverable on the streets of Gotham City. It used the same 508 millimeter monster truck tires as the Batmobile. The tires were so wide that the Bat-Pod did not need a kickstand; it stood upright on its own. To ready it for battle against the city’s criminals, the vehicle was equipped with weapons on both sides: 40mm blast cannons, 50-caliber machine guns, and grappling hook launchers.82

  Once the appearance of the Bat-Pod was determined, the next problem was to actually make it work. Since neither Nolan nor Crowley were mechanically inclined, they turned to special effects wizard Chris Corbould. When he got the call, Corbould was skeptical. “First of all, I remember when Chris Nolan first showed me his idea for the Batmobile. I had no idea how we were going to make it work even though it ended up being very successful,” said Corbould. “So when I got his call asking me to come have a look at something he called ‘the Bat-Pod,’ I thought, ‘Uh-oh, what have you dreamt up this time?’”83

  The effects man flew to Los Angeles, went to Nolan’s garage, and took a hard look at the strange contraption. “I think he was almost in tears,” said Crowley. “He looked horrified that he might have to actually mechanize that thing. We kept bringing him cups of tea, and he was just sitting there staring at it, looking like, ‘Oh my God, what time is the next flight out?’ It was the usual clash of design versus engineering.”84

  “I was flabbergasted,” admitted Corbould. “I stood there silently, pretending I was mulling it over, but the thought going through my head was that they both had to be off their nut. Where was I going to put a power train? And with those massive wheels, would this thing actually steer? There were so many issues...The funny thing is, I don’t think Chris or Nathan had ever ridden a motorcycle in their lives, so they were completely unaware of the mechanics needed to get that thing moving. In a way it was beneficial because they weren’t steered towards a more orthodox bike, even subconsciously. The fact that they had no knowledge of the mechanics helped them create this weird, wonderful vehicle.”85

  After returning to London, Corbould and his special effects crew began brainstorming. After much trial and error, they finally came up with a working vehicle that was amazingly close to the original model constructed by Nolan and Crowley. “It really shouldn’t work,” said Nolan, “but somehow Chris and his team found a way to do it.” Making it work was only the beginning of the challenge, however. Driving it was something else altogether. “The finished product that Chris and his team came up with was very striking, very effective and worked very well, but it’s incredibly difficult to ride and to steer,” said Nolan.86

  Maneuvering the Bat-Pod required the driver to lean his upper body forward, almost horizontally, and steer from his elbows, rather than his wrists. Corbould could think of only one person who might be able to master it—French stunt rider Jean-Pierre Goy, with whom Corbould had worked on the 1997 James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies. “He is one of the best bike riders in the world, if not the best,” said Corbould. “Right away, he totally got in the mindset of learning that machine. He said, ‘I’m not riding another bike until I finish this sequence,’ because he had to concentrate on the Bat-Pod’s unique handling qualities. I’d be lying
if I said it was easy for even him to ride, but it looked spectacular when he did, so it was worth the effort.”87 Goy spent a few months practicing with the vehicle, and Corbould built five more, so there would be back-ups, if necessary, for shooting the film’s chase scenes.88

  After designing the Bat-Pod, Crowley turned his production designer’s eye to the rest of Bruce Wayne’s and Batman’s world. Unlike Batman Begins, which showed a dark, shadowy city, the characters in The Dark Knight would inhabit brighter, sleeker, more modern environs. “It became clear that with our Joker character’s chaos and anarchism we could delve deeper into realism,” said Crowley, “and try to make the city feel really familiar for the audience—creating boundaries for Batman in the modern world.”89

  Crowley decided to focus on the modernist buildings erected in Chicago in the 1960s and ‘70s. “Wouldn’t that give us a colder, sharper feel?” he asked. “Instead of sweeping Gothic halls, we wanted something raw: big, hard-hitting spaces.” With Wayne Manor destroyed in the previous film, Bruce Wayne would now reside in a downtown penthouse. “If we put him into a big, powerful building and use modernism, how lonely would that feel?” said Crowley. “We realized that if he lived downtown we could play up the coldness of an unhappy man—a reluctant hero. It was very intentional to stick with clean lines and squares, empty spaces, blank walls and big, low ceilings.”90

  “At the end of Batman Begins, Bruce says he’s going to rebuild Wayne Manor brick by brick,” said Nolan. “That would take a long time, so it would be pretty unrealistic for him to be already moved back in. And there was also a period in the comic books where Bruce Wayne did live downtown in a penthouse, so we took that as a jumping-off point. We wanted to have him in the city because this is very much a story of a city and we felt it was important to put Bruce in the middle of that.”91

  With a new home downtown, Bruce Wayne also needed a new headquarters for all of his Batgear. “He can’t go to his Batcave, so we came up with the idea of a bunker that ties back to the architectural theme of the penthouse in that it’s vast but very plain,” said Crowley. “It is essentially a large concrete box where everything comes out of the walls and then goes back. But it still had to be visually interesting. It was all about proportion and perspective, which was actually great fun to do.”92

  Contrasting with the cavernous spaces of official Gotham was the cramped underground world of the criminals, such as the institutional kitchen where the Joker confronts the city’s crime bosses. “The film starts with the claustrophobia of the Joker—the way he stands under the low ceilings, hunched, all repression, about to explode,” said Crowley.93 A similarly cramped space was the police interrogation room where Batman attempted to extract information from the Joker. “You’ve got a messed-up Joker, with blood and makeup, purple and green, against a stark white wall—that’s very powerful,” said Crowley. “My big epiphany was to try to bring this huge simplicity into it.”94

  With filming scheduled to begin in March 2007, Christian Bale began getting back into shape for the role, including more training in the Keysi Fighting Method, or KFM. “It’s a fascinating fighting method,” said Bale, “because it uses the adrenaline that everyone feels entering into a threatening or violent situation. It really comes from the gut. Rather than the kind of Zen calm that some martial arts call on, KFM is based on animal instinct and honing those instincts to be lethal, so it’s perfect for Batman.”95

  Every day, Bale spent two or three hours sparring with Keysi fight coordinators Andy Norman and Justo Diéguez Serrano. “In KFM, you learn to develop every part of your body as a weapon, and it’s not easy,” said Norman. “We worked Christian extremely hard, and it was fantastic how quickly he absorbed everything. There was a definite progression in his training since the first film. He understands KFM a lot better, so he was more powerful and his movement was incredible.”96

  KNIGHT, CAMERA, ACTION

  Christopher Nolan decided to use The Dark Knight to realize a long-held desire: shooting in Imax. The 70mm format uses a film frame twice the size of a normal 35mm frame, and when projected on the larger Imax screens, it almost fills up a viewer’s entire field of vision. “Chris has wanted to work in Imax for years,” said Emma Thomas. “He’s been waiting to find the right project that he could do it on. Right at the beginning when we first started developing this project, he came to us and said ‘This is the way I want to do this. This is one of the ways I want to expand this movie and make it the biggest film-going experience it can be.’”

  “I’ve always had an interest in shooting in Imax,” said Nolan. “I’ve seen Imax presentations at museums and such and found the format to be completely overwhelming. The clarity and crispness of the images are unparalleled, so I thought if you could shoot a dramatic feature with Imax cameras—not just blow up a 35mm film to show on an Imax screen—it would really bring the audience into the action.”97

  To get used to filming with the heavier Imax cameras, Nolan and his director of photography, Wally Pfister, spent some time shooting tests with one of the large- format cameras in Los Angeles, on Sunset Boulevard and on Hollywood Boulevard.98 Once he felt confident that he could do it, Nolan mapped out six scenes that he wanted to shoot in the Imax format, including the opening scene, showing a bank heist coordinated by the Joker. “In continuing Batman’s story, the challenge was to make things bigger and better—to expand the world we established in the first film, both through the story and in the way we presented it,” said Nolan. “I was thrilled with the way the Imax photography turned out. It throws the audience right into the action in a way no other film format could. It takes me back to when I was a kid going to the movies and experiencing the scope, the scale and the grandeur that great cinema can offer. As a filmmaker, I think you’re always trying to get back to that, and expanding the canvas of our story with Imax seemed a great way to do it.”99

  The bank heist scene was filmed at the Old Post Office on Congress Parkway in Chicago in December 2006, a month before the crew was due to begin shooting in England.100 In order to use the heavier Imax equipment, special camera mounts had to be made for Steadicam rigs and camera vehicles. During one shot, the weight of the camera collapsed one of the Steadicam rigs, but Nolan was undeterred. Recalling the hardships faced by David Lean in filming Lawrence of Arabia on location in Morocco, Nolan said, “If David Lean could carry a 65-millimeter camera through the desert, why shouldn’t we be able to do this?”101 Emma Thomas echoed Nolan’s opinion, saying, “When you think about some of the Imax films we remember, they’ve taken these cameras up Mount Everest, they’ve taken them under the ocean, astronauts have had them in space... So if they can do that, then surely we can shoot on the streets of Chicago with an Imax camera.”102

  Cinematographer Wally Pfister assumed that the incredible size and weight of the Imax cameras would preclude him from doing any handheld shots, but the director had other ideas. “Early in pre-production, Chris said to me, ‘You’ve got to try to handhold one of the Imax cameras at some point just to say you did it.’ And I said, ‘No way! I am not putting that thing on my shoulder.’ But he kept nudging me and bugging me to try it, and finally I broke down and decided I had to give it a go. I actually did one handheld shot with the Imax camera, running in front of a S.W.A.T. team into a building. More than getting the shot, I think Chris was really proud of himself that he was able to get me to do that.”103

  Besides the cumbersomeness of the cameras, there were other factors the filmmakers had to take into account—the clarity of the Imax image, the amount of space the lenses take in, and the short focal lengths. “The composition of shots is entirely different because the frame is so much bigger, so you need to center things more to pull your attention to the action. And focus is much more critical because it is a shallower depth of field,” said Pfister. “One of the most challenging things about filming in Imax is trying to hide the lights. With the expanded frame, you’re seeing so much more from side to side and top to bottom s
o you can’t place lights where you normally would. You have to put them behind objects and anywhere else you can hide them.”104

  The clarity of the Imax format also posed a challenge for production designer Nathan Crowley, who said, “Filming in Imax is a great bonus to a production designer because you notice things you ordinarily wouldn’t even see. The perspective is huge. I mean, we purposely had a lot of low ceilings and beautiful shiny floors because they stay in frame. Then again, we also had to make sure the finishes were superb because you’ll also see every speck of dust on the floor.”105

  “The cameras are enormous and much heavier than a 35mm camera,” said Pfister. “It required an entirely different approach, but like any challenge in moviemaking, you can’t be so intimidated that you shy away from it. You just bite off one piece at a time until you’ve tackled it...The week that we spent shooting the bank heist sequence was like Imax school for all of us.”106

  The Dark Knight marked the first time that a major narrative feature film was shot using the large-format cameras.107 Besides the bank heist, Nolan used them for the Hong Kong scene, the Bat-Pod chase scene, the final fight in the skyscraper, the ending scene, and various helicopter shots of Gotham City. “Using Imax technology to shoot some of the action scenes gave us the greatest possible canvas on which to tell the story,” said Nolan, “and the result is an incredibly immersive experience.”108

  By January, the cast and crew were congregating at the Cardington airship sheds, where many of them had worked on Batman Begins just a couple of years earlier. Filming officially began on January 11, 2007, with a budget of $180 million. Among the new sets constructed at Cardington was the Bat-Bunker, Bruce Wayne’s temporary replacement for the Batcave. The ceiling of solid florescent lights made it appear “like a giant light box,” said Pfister, “which obviously made it simple for me from a lighting standpoint.”109 There was also an interior skyscraper set, which would be the setting for the climactic showdown between Batman and the Joker.110