how does that even begin?
Always, the first thing for me is you have to sit down with the director
and get a sense of what movie he's making.
So I had a quick talk with Zack.
And then I went out and started to do a bunch of little doodles,
like this one.
So that's your first sketch.
-Which I'm keeping really safely. -(McCARTHY LAUGHS)
MASEKELA: Yeah, I think this might be worth money one day.
'Cause it looks a lot like what I'm seeing behind me.
-I love that it's on a napkin. -TATOPOULOS: Yeah.
Were you in a restaurant or something?
I was at a coffee shop.
-MASEKELA: No way. -Yes.
I mean, it's important to get somewhere very quickly.
The director looks at this and says, "You know, I get it. That's coo|."
Basically, my role in this was to take Patrick's original vision
and the original sketch,
and bring it to a realization.
I think, first and foremost, with any car, is to establish the stance,
which Patrick did from day one.
You could see how the rear end is really much higher than the front end.
And this gives it the aggressive and intimidating first impression.
HIURA: What I was able to do was extract Ed's 3D model
and bring it into my software.
And then start checking for any problems that might occur.
With some math and some science, you could actually predict
how it's going to work, somewhat.
Yeah. You could do a full compression on the shocks
and then turn the wheel and recognize that
there's gonna be an issue with the hood.
We actually took a little trip to the Warner Bros. Museum
to see the other Batmobiles,
just to see how ours would differ.
-We can do that. -Yeah, exactly.
McCARTHY: Some of the key elements are obviously power.
We want to have a bunch of horsepower. So there's about 550.
Placement was a big factor with this car.
You look at it, there's no room for an engine in the front.
You can't have the motor hanging out the back.
So the motor's actually behind the driver's compartment,
-mounted backwards. -The motor's flipped around?
Motor's flipped around, exactly.
We used what's basically a monster truck transfer case,
a gigantic, four-gear hunk of aluminum
that sits right behind the passenger seat
that redirects the power back to the rear end,
which is another task
because the ring gear has to rotate different directions.
So there's a lot involved in putting that thing together.
RISLEY: Mainly, we're just looking at how it handles,
how the shocks work, how the tires react to bumps.
One of the first things we learned watching with our suspension cam,
that it had some wheel hop.
MASEKELA: How do you figure out what's causing the wheel hop?
RISLEY: Well, it was a combination of things.
One, we had to add more valve into the shock.
There is some external adjustment to the shock
that we could do right there at the test.
There's basically bypass tubes where you can limit the oil flow.
That helped, so we knew that we were on the right path.
Then the other thing that was really fighting us
was just the sheer weight of these tires.
This is before we actually cut rubber off of 'em.
To give me some perspective, what do these tires weigh
-before you cut the rubber off? -About 500 pounds a corner?
MASEKELA: Five hundred pounds... RISLEY: Wheel and tire, yeah.
MASEKELA: ...a tire. RISLEY: Very heavy.
And it's unsprung weight, so...
McCARTHY: Yeah, it's massive amounts of unsprung weight.
I mean, the wheels are quarter-inch thick steel.
So when you cut that rubber off...
Yeah, we dropped 150 pounds or so from one of the rear tires.
And that made a huge difference. Adding about 60% more valving
to the shocks internally fixed the problem.
What did the day-two testing consist of?
McCARTHY: Well, this was a pretty big moment
'cause this is the primary body piece
that's basically been installed on this car.
So, you're starting to get a feel for what this thing's gonna look like.
HIURA: That was a big moment for me. McCARTHY: It really was, yeah.
You kinda start feeling the scale of it.
McCARTHY: This was really just such a plus for us all the way around,
was to be able to have this time
at the Chrysler Proving Grounds in Detroit.
This is when the car really just starts looking so cool, I mean...
This is Mike Justus behind the wheel coming through cones.
So this is basically mimicking roads in Detroit
that we'd be filming on later.
Tim would set him up. He would time him.
He'd come through those cones, and obviously,
if he hit a cone on the proving grounds,
he was hitting a wall somewhere in downtown Detroit.
Tim Rigby, he recorded all the data.
Every time we went out, he would record pressure in each air bag,
tire pressure, brake system pressure, temperatures, everything.
So there was a constant log.
You can see in a couple of those shots, how the car reacts, the suspension works,
you can see him doing a little S-turn and correcting.
I think that's what really made the whole project such a success.
(ADVENTUROUS MUSIC PLAYING)
When we talked with Zack, he said, "The machine gun, I want it to be out."
He wanted to see it all the time.
So we talked about a plate that would have been replaced.
- This is a typical... - So this is like a repairjob.
And I thought that was a great take from Zack.
Now, this particular detail in the hood,
it's a way of introducing the bat motif
without being so literal like the previous Batmobiles
and we're using negative space to create that.
Inspired by American muscle cars.
-Yeah? -Hemi Cuda. '66 GTO.
It's basically a one-off air bag over a bypass shock system.
So we can alter the ride height on the fly while the car's in motion.
The car weighs 8,500 pounds.
- We needed tremendous braking power. -(TIRES SCREECHING)
Brembo was kind enough to step up and build some eight-piston calipers for us,
some gigantic rotors, a ton of steering angle on the thing,
so you can recover from any situation you might get yourself into.
It has about two feet of front suspension travel.
MASEKELA: Two feet of travel?
McCARTHY: Two feet of travel, yeah. They're gigantic front "A" arms.
Like I said, it's all built with the same theory that you would build a race car.