Transcription
[Music] I'd wanted to rethink the Batmobile. It's a key component of Batman's arsenal. The Batmobile was so unbelievably well engineered. They've really come up with something absolutely unique. There hasn't ever been a car like this before. I was shocked. It was completely different to what I thought it would look like. You're watching it and thinking, "Yeah, I could believe that he could get a car like that." This car is so cool. I finally understood men's fascination with cars after I saw this thing. It's the Batmobile. It should be a car that every kid wants. What's that? Another tumbler. Oh, you wouldn't be interested in that.
[Music] I felt that it was very important to design the Batmobile first before we approached any of the other aspects of design of the film because I had a very specific idea in my head about um a contemporary approach to a Batmobile. And our approach to it would tell everybody who saw it a lot about what we're doing with the whole film, which is a more grounded reality in which we're trying to base the story. When we first started talking, Chris had this idea of crossing a Lamborghini and a Humvee. Chris was sort of making a little primitive model out of Play-Doh and said sort of like this. It was very, very crude. It looked more like a cross than a car. I felt very strongly that if we cracked that and showed it to people, they would either get it or they wouldn't. And if they didn't get it, then I'd know I was in trouble.
Then fairly early on in the process, Nathan Cwley, the production designer, came on. And while I was writing, this was crazy. He created a little model shop in Chris's garage. It was very much a film school atmosphere. That was part of the fun. We really decided to be private and just started what I call model bashing. We just started making models of cars. It's got bits of stealth bomber in it. It's got bits of Lamborghinis, bits of Hummers, and all different things put together in this marvelous combination. Chris write his script and then come into the garage and I'd be covered in glue with car concepts. The funny thing is the craftsmanship was really good, too. You could see in Chris a kid that had built little car models when he was younger cuz, you know, he he and Nathan really had this down. As an evolutionary process, Nathan was able to build one and I would look at it and make suggestions or actually change things on it myself and then we would move to the next step and then the next one. We made about five or six Batmobiles. The one is the finished Batmobile I actually I think is the Mark 5. So we took about 8 weeks to build. When the script was done, we sort of presented not only the script, but all these great Photoshop elements of what the world and the Batmobile would look like, so that Warner Brothers could get the whole picture. And that initial prototype is 90% what the finished Batmobile became. We took that model to England, found these great guys to produce the car full size.
Chris Nolan wanted the Batmobile to be a real car, not just a car that looked pretty and but didn't actually function. You know, his gem was, look, I want this to be a mean machine. I want it to perform. I want it to go through things. And and that was, you know, the how we went into developing this whole car. The challenge is first technically how to make something as complicated as that steer and work. Every piece of it has been made. You start with a clean jig, put the chassis on, start building the roll cage around the driver and the occupants in there and build it up from nothing. The front end of the car is what is so different. There is no front axle. There's nothing holding the wheels in the conventional way. The wheels have to be held from the outside. It was difficult, but we always knew it was possible. And 3, 2, 1, go. Chris had described a cockpit opening like the petals of a flower. We tried several times to talk him into an easier system which made our life a bit easier, but he was not going to have that. The mechanism ended up where the front windscreen had went up into the roof and then the whole roof slides back and then the two cockpit seats rise up. It was a nightmare trying to get that right. You've just got to have guys who've got technical knowledge of how to put all this together. They were so faithful to our original kit bashed model that the glue blobs that Nathan had put into the model had been reproduced full size. It was quite a strange thing to look at. It's 9'4 at its widest. Lengthwise is 15 ft and heightwise it's about 5 ft. I think weighs 2 and 1/2 tons. There's nearly half a ton of rear axle and wheels and tires. So, there's a big chunk of the weight sitting there. Everybody was surprised to find that the Batmobile was ready before we thought it was going to be. That's been very thrilling to watch a model that Nathan Crowley just built in my garage back in LA become a full size working vehicle. Here we have Andy and Jim going for the land speed record. It was about 2 weeks before we started filming that we got the first prototype without all the body work on just a working chassis with the engine in. So we were sneaking the car around and taking it out to sort of hidden tracks and things seeing what breaks, what doesn't break. Start off testing it slowly, just drive in a straight line, make sure it handles okay and progressively getting faster and faster.
[Music] And slowly through a development process, you arrive at a vehicle that can achieve all the shots on the page. You can get to play Batman, but unless you're the stunt man who's driving that car, you don't get to have the coolest job. Stunt side of it is we bring in one of the best drivers, George Cotle, who's young, but he's enthusiastic and extremely talented. The car has so much potential in one respect. I have the easy job cuz I know that if they say the car can do it, I know it'll do it. We will rehearse every single shot with measurements of the location on a runway prior to going to the location so that you're aware of any problems before you get to the location when you've got the expense of the film crew there. It's such a great car to drive, you know. It's it's it just screams at you literally. You know, the noise is like somebody screaming at you. And I called Chris and I said, "Does this mean I'm going to be able to keep a Batmobile?" He said, "You're crazy. Of course, you're not going to be able to keep a Batmobile." This here simulates the jump onto the freeway. The tape on the right hand side of frame is the barrier and the ramp is just behind it. We'd practice jumping the car so much we just testing how the car reacted in the air, making sure it was balanced, whether we needed to put kick ramps on the car. Woohoo. We went out to try and kill the car. You know, that's what we were trying to do. Push it to the limits. I was waiting for something not to work. It just landed and just took off straight away. Take one. 3, 2, 1, action. I got to get me one of those.
The car chase in Chicago. Chris from the beginning wanted to do something really extraordinary and fast. We wanted to be able to use a Batmobile as a real car and have a real car chase that looks back to, you know, the French connection and films like this, not the usual kind of studio-bound uh use of the Batmobile. It's very rare that you drive a vehicle in a stunt sequence more than 50 or 60 mph. We took this Batmobile and drove speeds up to up to 80, 90 miles an hour, I think. And then on the open road, we got up to 100 miles an hour. There's no trick photography. It's real time, real speed. You know, when the car's going 100, we're going 100. Our basic approach to tracking with the Batmobile is a device called the Ultimate Arm, which is a uh basically a Mercedes ML55 with a robotically controlled crane arm that gives you shots that you can't get any other way on moving vehicles. The first night of tracking, they were shouting out speeds of 86, 88 mph. I've never done speeds like that, only on helicopter tracking shots, but to do it from car to car tracking is that's fast. The directors in this Mercedes with the crane arm on it flying along at 100 miles an hour. The Batmobile's flying along at 100 miles an hour. And so really there's no room for error. I mean, one little thing goes wrong and and somebody's life is in danger. On this film, George has probably done some of the best driving I've ever seen in all the years I've been doing it. He was absolutely tremendous. There was a particular shot in Chicago to come down an exit ramp uh into this big bus depot and they wanted the car to come in and and slide sideways almost do like a complete 360 and then back out and get in between two cars. And at first I was always kind of like I don't know if it'll do it. And first time we did it, it did it so easily. There was not one stunt where the car didn't drive away from it. It always managed to drive away from it. We had to break this huge breakaway wall. No matter how breakaway it is, it's never going to be that breakaway. And I I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to put didn't want to put the car through it. We did it. She she got a few scratches, broke the glass, and but um apparently she's up and running again now. I'll ask if I can keep it, take it home the end of the film.
[Music] This evening, we're doing the final part of the car chase sequence. Batman loses the helicopter and the police cars that are chasing him and then um hits the jump, takes off, flies across a river and into his um Batcave. We're going to do the takeoff and we'll land the car into a box rig just to protect the car and then the entry into the Batcave will shoot later at Shepton on a stage where we'll actually jump the car through a waterfall and land it on the stage. 3, 2, 1, action. Okay, we good. Yeah, jaw's okay. We're good. The landing in the Batcave we're doing for real with our real two-ton car. Initially, we were going to build a long run-up outside and actually drive it in, but we had big limitations within the studio. How we could get through the door. It was very narrow. We only had like 3 or 4 in each side of the car. We actually decided in the end to stick a nitrogen cannon in it and fire it off of a ramp just the other side of the waterfall. The flip side is we had to stop it very quickly cuz it would have gone straight out the other side of the the set. So we had a restraining cable on it so we could stop it within 8, 10 ft. I'd like everyone to clear the set please and go to their position they're going to be for the shoot. Okay, stand by please.
[Music] Everything we did out there was done for real. None of the car turnovers or cannons or pipe ramps, none of it was CGI. And we really did, you know, really did do it. And that's what makes it so real. And you know, taking it back to the days of, you know, even back to, you know, Bullet or the French Connection or Ronin, everything was done for real. I think this is the best Batmobile for sure. Just worked great like clockwork. There's nothing I would change if we went back there and shot it again. We're pleased with the overall performance of the whole thing. The speed, the handling, everything. It's turned out better than expected.