| Articles about the Costumes of Batman |
Building the Bat-suit
by Jody Duncan Shannon, as featured in the August 1989 issue of Cinefex
Posted by raleagh on Thu, 22nd November 2007 at 7:01am
This article has been viewed 40 times
Bob Ringwood — who contributed extraordinary designs for Excalibur and Dune and earned an Academy Award nomination for Empire of the Sun — had just turned down the current James Bond film the day before Chris Kenny approached him regarding Batman. “The Bond film was going to be shooting in Mexico for a long time,” Ringwood explained, “and since my mother was ill at the time, I just did not feel I should leave England. So the Batman job was ideal for me — and it was really just by chance that I was available to do it. I thought it was a very interesting proposition because it was a chance to bring a two-dimensional character to life. In cartoons you can draw anything — you can increase the size of the cape for dramatic effect, for example, or change the shape or make it smaller. Dealing with the physical problems of doing that in three dimensions on a real person is a nightmare. But I was eager to do it because I thought it would be an interesting challenge to compete with the cartoons.”
In accepting the assignment, Ringwood was taking on the responsibility of helping to create the Batman aura, “Bob is a real artist,” Burton commented, “and he was able to hook into what Anton and I were doing right away. He got into the psychology of why a guy would put on a batsuit — the fact that it was partly for protection and partly for theatrical effect. The justification for the costume was extremely well thought out. He was also able to give it a certain kinky quality, too — the rubbery, leather kind of thing — that I really liked. He made the costume work — both for the film and for Michael.”
Though he had signed on to the project very early, Ringwood had been reluctant to even begin designing the bat costume until he knew for certain who was going to be playing the role. “I imagined it was going to be a big six-foot-four hunk with a dimpled chin. Michael Keaton is many things, but one thing he is not is a six-foot-four hunk. It was interesting casting: but because he is average height and a small-built guy, it was a surprise andjust a bit scary for me. I wasn’t sure how to interpret it. The whole essence of the Batman character in the comics is this huge guy — like all the superheroes. So the problem was to make somebody who was average-sized and ordinary looking into this bigger-than-life creature. Ultimately what we decided to do was to not make him bigger than life, but to make him as much visually like Batman as we could and not worry about the scale. Because Michael is not a real big guy, one of my concerns was that we not make a costume that was so big and so muscular that it would just swamp him. If we had done that, he would not have been able to give a performance — he just would have been lumbering around in sixteen tons of rubber. Ultimately, the thickest part of the costume was only about two-and-a- quarter inches, and that was around the shoulder area. All I really did with the costume was streamline Michael’s body — instead of having him go to a gym for two years. And I think we ended up with a more interesting costume than we would have had if there had been a muscular guy underneath. We were able to exaggerate muscles and stylize them, whereas on a real body we would have had just real muscles.”
Once the casting of the role was locked, Ringwood — who had not previously been a Batman fan — began doing extensive research. “I had seen one or two of the television episodes when I was a kid, but I had never even read a Batman comic. So I went out and bought about two hundred of them from all the different time periods — including the really early ones — and studied them thoroughly. From talking to Tim Burton, I knew that he wanted to make this Batman more the Dark Knight of the later comics and lose the camp TV elements and also lose the sort of gauche style of the early cartoons. So I looked at more of the recent comics than the others and based the look of the costume on those, hoping we could recreate the Dark Knight look in three dimensions. Then I closed the comics and started thinking about why a man would dress up as a bat — the whole idea is absurd — and I decided that to make it work I had to come up with a bat that was dark and mysterious and sexy. At that point, I forgot the comic and went my own way — although in the back of my mind always was the fact that it had to relate to the comic in some way.”
One of the things that troubled Ringwood about both the TV series and the comic strip drawings was the fact that Batman’s costume was in shades of blue. “I had decided from the begin- fling that this Batman was not going to be in blue knickers. I hated those. Bats are black, of course — not blue — and black is much more sinister and sexy. After talking to Bob Kane, we found out that he had always thought of Batman as being in black, but that it was very difficult to draw a black-on-black drawing for the comic strip. So he had drawn it in blue so that he could use different tones of the color for effect. In his mind, the blue was just a symbolic version of black. Our black costume was really nearer the original concept.”
After completing an airbrushed drawing of the costume, Ringwood sent an assistant to Canada — where Keaton was shooting a film at the time — to take head and body casts of the actor. From those molds, a positive cast of Keaton’s body was made in fiberglass. “It was like having Michael here in the studio — only in fiberglass. I spent a week with Lynne Burman — who is a wonderful sculptress — building up this fiberglass body with clay, trying to get a dynamic shape out of the body. We rejected several of them — some got far too big and looked almost like the Incredible Hulk — but finally we came down to a streamlined aerodynamic version of the muscular body.”
Using the finalized clay sculpture. molds were made and sections of the suit were cast in foam rubber. All of the separate sections were then attached to a cotton-lycra bodysuit that had been treated to give it a matching rubberized surface. “We used only the best quality foam rubber so that the costume could withstand the enormous wear and tear it would go through during filming. The bodysuit was very tight fitting and all of the musculature was glued onto it separately. So, even though it looked like it was one piece, it was actually made up of many separate parts — a chest piece, upper arm, lower arm, a crotch and side piece, kneecaps and the lower leg. It had a zipper in the back so that Michael could just step into it.” Because all of Batman’s appearances in the film would be at night, Ringwood and his crew polished the completed suit with silicone — a process that had to be repeated throughout filming — so that what little light was available would be picked up and reflected off the musculature. In all, twenty-eight of the bodysuits were constructed to accommodate not only Michael Keaton but also the various stunt performers employed in the film.
Satisfied with the bodysuit, Ringwood turned his attention to Batman’s headpiece. “I really had to go back to the comics for the head because that silhouette was the thing that really said ‘Batman’. And it turned out to be the most complicated part of it, really. For one thing, we found that in the drawings the head was cheated a little. They would draw him full-face or three- quarters or from the back — but those things put together did not really add up to a three-dimensional head. So if we tried to sculpt the front like it was in the drawing, then the sides and the back would not look very good. And if we sculpted the back of it right, then the front would change and it would not look correct. So we had to sculpt the head again and again and again, and what we ended up with was the best composite result.”
Keaton’s bone structure presented some difficulties in sculpting the headpiece, “Michael has a rather round face,” Ringwood commented, “yet the image of Batman is this very sculptured, chiseled creature. So we had to ‘chisel’ Michael’s features with the shape of the headpiece. We did that by putting aluminum cheek plates inside the mask each time he put it on, They were held fast to his face by the tight rubber and they helped to give him a chiseled look.
Another thing we did was make the ears as long and pointed as possible. The ears really have no function at all when you think about it. He doesn’t hear through them and he doesn’t fly with them — they are purely visual. So I figured they were a bit like the ‘go-faster’ fins on 1950s American cars — just nonsense really, to make him look mean and fast — and I tried to stylize them that way. It was a bit of a problem because the cockpit of the batmobile had to be high enough to accommodate them. But they had to look tall and elegant, as if they were aerodynamic. Otherwise they were just ludicrous things with no function — like in the TV program where he wore those silly little mouse ears.”
As drawn in the comic strip, Batman’s eyes are merely expressionless white slits. “We tried blanking out his eyes with screens to match the drawings, but that left Michael with only his mouth to act with. Since the eyes are the actor’s primary tools, we felt it was better to leave the eye sockets open. To minimize any problems he might have seeing out of the mask, we made the area around the eyes as thin as possible. The foam rubber was only about an eighth-of-an-inch thick in that area — close enough to his face to avoid any visual problems. His peripheral vision was a bit restricted, but that turned out to be kind of a good thing — it forced him to move in a rather butch sort of way because he had to turn his entire body in order to see to the side, It gave him a powerful, definite kind of movement. Instead ofjust his head moving, the whole body swings around with the cape sweeping out behind him.”
Ringwood had originally planned to make the headpiece and the cape as one unit, but reconsidered when it became apparent that the headpiece was particularly vulnerable to damage. To avoid having to replace the cape every time the headpiece was replaced — which was often — the two were made separately, then attached each time the suit was put on by gluing a scallop-shaped collar at the bottom of the headpiece onto the shoulder section of the cape.
The cape itself — though seemingly the least complicated part of the Batman costume — was actually the most problematic. “The cape was by far the most difficult thing to construct. We tried making a cape of pure rubber — to match the rubberized look of the rest of the costume — but we found that it moved in a very unattractive way, rippling rather than swinging. So then we did a variety of tests with different fabrics, trying to find something that would move in the way we wanted, What we came up with was a venetian wool that is very heavy and luxurious and expensive. To match it to the rest of the costume, we sprayed wet rubber onto glass and then vary carefully laid the woolen fabric down and smoothed it out with rollers. After the rubber set, we would peel the whole thing off the glass and the fabric would be bonded to the back of it. The only problem with it was that we could not sew it together. The cape had been constructed in segments like an orange — each piece going out from the center — but we could not sew those sections together without getting terribly heavy, clutzy-looking seams. So we got Paul Barrett Brown, who is a rubber specialist — he makes rubber fetish clothes for the sex market, so he knew an awful lot about rubber — and we put this problem to him. He suggested that we make an enormous table covered in highly polished vinyl. The table was fourteen feet in diameter and, like the cape, was constructed in orangelike segments. We sprayed the rubber on this enormous table and the fabric was cut to fit each segment exactly — without any overlap — so the seamsjust butted up together. So it was the rubber itself that bonded the cape. We then reinforced the seam areas just slightly with a very fine piece of silk gauze which was laid right into the rubber. That worked beautifully — we were able to construct this enormous cape without any sewing on it at all.”
Because of its weight, attaching the cape to the costume required extensive hardware. “Michael wore a body harness underneath the costume,” Ringwood explained. “The body harness had two bolts at the shoulders and the cape was literally screwed into those bolts on each side. The hardware was covered by the bat symbol which was bolted onto the chest. So there was a lot of understructure holding the cape in place — if there had not been, the weight of it when he swung around would have torn the entire costume right off of his body.”
Once the prototype was perfected, several capes of varying lengths were produced. “We made thirty-five or forty capes all together. Some of them were about five feet long, reaching from Michael’s neck to the ground. Others were a bit shorter so that he could get in and out of the batmobile easily. Then, for shots where he is flying up a wire or floating down into a scene, we made capes that were eight to ten feet long, just for the visual effect. We used a a lighter-weight material for those so that the cape would lift and flow nicely in flight. In some instances we even used a parachute material.”
Gloves and a pair of boots completed the costume. “The gloves had more ‘go-faster’ fins on them, which were made of rubber and flexible so that they would not harm him as he rolled around and did his stunts. We patterned them from a motorcycle glove which was made of leather and very butch looking. Those were simple, but I was very concerned about the boots. Very few men have thick ankles, and if you do not have a thick ankle and you have a very muscular body on top, you can look weak and out of proportion. The comic just has a simple boot — like a riding boot — but I did not think that would translate well on screen. The look I liked best was big training shoes. There were some Nike training shoes that were butch looking — big things with straps on them — so I contacted Nike in Oregon and they agreed to design a bat boot based on one of their training shoes. I did some drawings, sent them off to Nike and they did up a prototype. The boots were rubber and leather and there was a piece that went over the ankle — like a riding stirrup — to thicken up the ankle.”
Donning the complete costume was a complicated procedure that took up to two-and-a-half hours. “After some practice, we got it down to about twenty minutes. But there was quite a lot to it — the body harness had to be put on first, then the body-suit, then all of the bolts had to be screwed in. Finally the headpiece was put on. Obviously — because it was such an ordeal — once Michael was in the costume, he had to stay in it until they were through shooting for the day. I had thought perspiration would be a problem; but luckily, it was not Michael’s nature to perspire much. Also, we had left a few areas of the lycra suit ‘unrubberized’ so that air could flow through to make it a bit more comfortable. After he was finished for the day, we would get Michael out of the suit — which was another long process because the headpiece had to be unglued from the shoulder and cape — and then hang the costume up to air out.”
Though Ringwood had labored to make the costume as comfortable for Keaton as possible, there were inherent discomforts in the heavy rubberized suit. “I put the head on myself,” Tim Burton noted, “and it really was a bizarre feeling. I could not hear and my peripheral vision was affected. Michael is a bit claustrophobic, too, which made it worse for him. The costume put him in a dark, Batman-like mood though, so he was able to use it to his advantage.”
Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, Ringwood also devised the outrageously flashy costumes worn by the Joker. “I tried to be extremely conventional with the Joker costume designs — which sounds absurd when you consider what they look like. But they are really just very good Baglish tailoring done in the most bizarre colors. I did not want the costumes to be so extreme that there was nothing left for Jack to do — that he would walk on screen and the costume would give the performance for him. So (really tried to control it by using classically cut clothes in very unusual colors.” |
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