Director Tim Burton, cast members Kim Basinger and Billy Dee Williams, producers Peter Guber and Chris Kenny, set decorator Peter Young, art director Terry Ackland-Snow, director of photography Roger Pratt, supervising art director Les Tomkins, art director Nigel Phelps, assistant costume designer Graham Churchyard discuss production designer Anton Furst's Academy Award-winning vision in this behind the scenes look at the creation of Gotham City for the 1989 classic Batman.
Batman is the 1989 live-action Warner Bros. feature film based on the DC Comics character of the same name. It is the first film in the Burton Batman film series.
The movie is a landmark in superhero cinema, sparking a new aesthetic for comic book movie adaptations. Director Tim Burton, took pains to capture the look of the comics in a way previous comic-based films had failed to.
The film put actor Michael Keaton in a prosthetic suit, giving him a chiseled physic of a superhero. With multiple versions of the suit, Burton could capture the hero an any angle without showing the audience any of the seams. Pull wires were employed to make the cape flare dramatically in every shot. While a bit artificial and stiff, this allowed Burton to depict a hero that looked closer to his comic-book counterpart than any spandex suit would ever allow.
Burton's Gotham was a dark, deco/Gothic place where characters like Batman and the Joker (Jack Nicholson) would seem right at home.
Between Keaton's simmering anger and Nicholson's mocking performance, the movie was a hit and the sculpted hero suit became the standard for the next decade.
The film cemented Batman's place as an iconic movie character. It was followed by Batman Returns.
