Press
Last Update
- June 20th, 2004
Bat Out of Hell
Devin Gordon, Newsweek, June 21, 2004. Photo by David James (Warner
Bros).
Seven years ago, 'Batman' was on life support. Now a gifted
director is trying to resurrect the franchise. An exclusive visit
to the set.
The only major cast member on the set of the new "Batman" movie
who doesn't have his own private trailer with his name on the
door is Batman himself, actor Christian Bale. Michael Caine,
who plays Batman's trusted butler, Alfred, has one, as does Katie
Holmes, who plays love interest Rachel Dodson. But what about
Bale? If you're looking for him, try knocking on the trailer
door with a sign that reads BRUCE WAYNE. (That's Batman's alter
ego. But you knew that.) If it all sounds a bit Method-actor
fussy, well, it is. But Bale doesn't come across that way. Between
takes of a scene in the dank, monstrous Batcaveerected on a
soundstage at Shepperton Studios outside London and complete
with lagoon, waterfall and subterranean bachelor padHolmes tries
to engage Bale, 30, in a quick rehearsal. "Is Sergeant Gordon
your friend?" she asks, running one of her lines. "Yes," a
fully costumed Bale answers in his thick, icy baritone. "He's
very warm, very comforting. I like to be held." Later, Bale
hums as a makeup guy gives him a retouching. "The next one'll
be a musical?" the man asks. Bale grins. "Yeah, they'll
call it 'Batman!' with an exclamation point."
Let's just see how this new movie pans out first, shall we?
After all, the comic-book franchise does have a checkered past.
The new chapter, which will hit theaters in June 2005, is called "Batman
Begins"presumably because "Batman Sucked the Last
Time So We're Starting Over" was too clunky. After the
cultural phenomenon surrounding Tim Burton's operatic 1989
original, which rang up $251 million at the box office and
untold more in bicycle caps and Prince cassette singles, the
series plummeted over three sequels, bottoming out with 1997's
disastrous "Batman & Robin," featuring George
Clooney in a Batsuit studded with rubber nipples. But now there
is buzz once again around the Warner Brothers franchise, and
it's all because of the new film's 33-year-old director, England's
Christopher Nolan, the creator of "Memento." "Batman
is an absolutely iconic character, one of the great figures
in pop culture, really," says Nolan. "But there has
to be a reason for making this film as opposed to just renting
Tim Burton's version." The hiring of the Welsh indie actor
Bale ("American Psycho") was a healthy startespecially
given the crass, movie-star jamboree (Uma Thurman, Arnold Schwarzenegger)
that mucked up the later "Batman" sequels.
Warner Brothers might appear to be rolling the
dice by handing over a $150 million summer blockbuster to a
man who's never directed
an action movie before. But the real risk isn't Nolan. It's Batman.
Seven years ago, moviegoers' interest in the character had flatlined.
Even Nolan admits he's not certain enough time has passed for
audiences to get excited about a new "Batman" movie. "But
I know I am," he says, laughing. So was the studio. When
Alan Horn took over Warner Brothers four years ago, "one
of his mandates was to get 'Batman' back out there," says
president of production Jeff Rabinov. "But it took time
to find the right person to redefine the franchise." Nolan
won the job by vowing to strip away the later sequels' bombast
and return "Batman" to its roots in character drama.
As exhaustively as the "Batman" legend has been told
on film and TV, one chapter has never received comprehensive
treatment: the first one. As a boy, Bruce Wayne sees his parents
murdered before his eyes and dedicates his life to avenging them.
But how, and why, does he become Batman? Where do the suit and
cape come from? (Burton's film glossed over these questions.)
Or, as Nolan puts it, "How did this guy who has no superpowers
acquire all of these capabilities? He lives in the real worldit's
sort of New York on steroids, but it's our world." Nolan
pored over 65 years of comics and came up with this story: after
a long exile, Wayne, now a 25-year-old scion, returns to Gotham
City intent on kicking criminal butt. His family's military subcontracting
business, Wayne Enterprises, has been seized by shareholders,
who've relegated the company's most ambitious designsand their
inventor, Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman)to the scrapheap. Wayne
befriends Fox, using his designs to create an alter ego. And
not a moment too soon because, naturally, there's a villain on
the loose named the Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy of "28 Days
Later"), who's hellbent on poisoning all of Gotham.
It's a comic-book tale, but Nolan promises that "Batman
Begins," which also stars Liam Neeson and Gary Oldman, won't
look anything like a comic-book movie. In contrast to the gothic
fantasia of Burton's creation, Nolan has opted for gritty urban
realism. At a converted airplane hangar an hour north of London,
his crew has built a full city block of Gotham, much of it based
on the towering slums of Kowloon in Hong Kong, which were razed
in 1994. But the starting point for his vision, the director
says, was the new Batmobile. Last year Nolan holed up in his
garage in Los Angeles with production designer Nathan Crowley
and hammered out a design that would make sense for the story.
What they came up with is a drastic departure. The vehicle's
rear is stacked with four 44-inch Humvee tires, and the front
is covered in jagged plates of armor. It looks like something
Pablo Picasso might take to a monster-truck rallya muscle car
for a tortured soul. Perfect for Batman.
The Batmobile may have been step one, but on
the set, nothing gets more attention than the Batsuit. Whenever
Bale is in costume,
two people trail him to keep it smudge-free; another person is
charged with making sure his cape billows dramatically. On a
converted parking lot at Shepperton, the crew has built an entire
village of trailers, dubbed Cape Town, where chemists and costume
art-ists churn out neoprene-and-foam-latex Batsuits by the bushel.
In the movie, the suit is translucent at first: it's a futuristic
military design complete with body armor and muscle-recovery
devices. Wayne sprays it black to camouflage it. "Chris
wanted a serious, matte finishnot shiny or gloopy," says
costume designer Lindy Hemming. "We didn't want to depart
from the classic silhouette, but we also didn't want to go too
much in the homoerotic direction." Got it: no nipples.
On this particular day, Bale has been in the
Batsuit for nine hours, and his brain is starting to boil.
But he keeps up his
good humor. After one take, Nolan instructs him to try a line
again with more intensity, and Bale answers with a riff inspired
by "This Is Spinal Tap": "How much more Batman
can you get? The answer is: none. None more Batman." Later,
freed of his suit, Bale plugs his nose with a handkerchief soaked
in Olbas oil, a Swiss remedy for headaches. "This is obviously
the highest-profile movie I will probably ever do," Bale
says, taking a drag on his hand-rolled cigarette. "And sometimes
on a huge movie like this, every take becomes an event. You can
easily lose any kind of intimacy. But it feels as good as it
can here, because at the core of this huge production is Chris
Nolan." And if "Batman" is going to begin again,
it's all up to the man at the top.
Source - msnbc.msn.com