MAN 1: That's him right there. MAN 2: There he is, let's get a shot.
-MAN 3: Hey, Bruce! -Who's that?
You must be new.
(CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKING)
That is Bruce Wayne.
The process of developing this story
has been really fun for me, actually.
l really had a lot of strong ideas about what l wanted to see.
l was like, "l really want to see Batman,"
and just how we were to figure out how that would work.
It's funny, I never feel like you play Batman, you play Bruce Wayne.
There's definitely an aspect of Bruce Wayne
that's as much of a costume as Batman is, really.
lt's the same thing.
He's trying to fill this hole in himself through both identities.
Ben, he said to me, "Maybe we just need to be very austere about it."
You walk into his closet, and there's eight beautifully pressed white shirts,
12 incredible navy and black suits,
and there's this incredible austerity to his look.
And that, in fact, maybe to Bruce Wayne, that was the alter ego,
to pretend to be this playboy millionaire
when he had, in fact, more empathy with the character of Batman.
CHARLES ROVEN: He is more comfortabIe with the mask on and in the suit
because it allows him to actually live out his rage.
Ready and action!
(GRUNTING)
We had to come up with a new suit, a new Batmobile and a new Batwing.
ZACK: Yeah, there's all new stuff, new grappling gun.
lt goes without saying that, yeah, he's gonna have his gadgets.
I'm a fan, so I guess we just started to go nuts.
I loved all the tools and all the equipment and all of that.
And I liked the coffee machine, too.
There's a very nice coffee machine in the Batcave.
I think that some of the weapons that Batman uses are new and unusual.
We had designed one grappling gun with carbon fiber
and we tried to give it a little bit of a techy look.
It shoots that dart out.
There's a CG cable that goes out with it.
Zack was like, "l think that should be wood."
He thought, "l'd really like to add some more organic materials into the gun
"to make them feel as though they'd been in use for a while."
And he really was trying to ground some of Batman's props in this natural world.
These are some of the weapons that we've used throughout the movie.
This is his grenade launcher.
He uses this during the mech suit fight.
We fabricated this. It's supposed to be a carbon-fiber canister.
This is Batman's long-range rifle that shoots a tracking device.
This is the Batarang of choice for the movie.
We wanted some earlier generation, so we decided to make this as well.
Just to show that there is a transition.
He has evolved in terms of his technology.
Zack, he wanted our Batman to be a brutish kind of a brawler.
Batman, when he's fighting, he's in charge.
The odds may be against him,
he may be fighting five, six, seven, eight guys at one time,
but he's in charge.
He doesn't cower to anyone.
And although being very strong and very physically fit,
he can take you down in a number of ways.
And he's very technical,
and you see this guy's moves, and you see what he can do.
WILKINSON: His power wasn't through the armor
and the technical details of the suit,
but just the brute strength of the man inside the suit.
BEN: l got in the best shape that l'd ever been in,
and then l sort of got past that.
'Cause we were going for this idea of like a big, hulking,
thicker, bruiser physique,
which wasn't lithe and ripped, it was more like big and brawler.
Fifteen months ahead of time,
l was training four and then five, and then, ultimately, six days a week.
It's hard to add muscle to your body, especially at my age.
It's tough.
And that's what we did.
l ended up putting on about two-and-a-half pounds of muscle a month,
and really, really changing my body completely.
You could see there was muscle definition from head to toe.
He was incredibly ripped.
The suit, in fact, skims the body, you can see every muscle.
So, it's this incredibly intimidating figure
that looks a lot like the way he's drawn in the graphic novel.
Even through the boots, through the gloves
you get this impression of a tower of strength.
Zack really wanted it to pay homage to the batsuits
in the graphic novels and comic books over the last 75 years of his history.
GEOFF JOHNS: WeII, the greatest thing about the new costume,
l think, is that we have the gray back.
Just because we've been armored in black and it's cool, that they've done it.
And now the fact that we get to go back to this gray look
with the big black bat and the short ears.
WILKINSON: Zack reaIIy wanted the costume
to look like it'd been around for a long time,
that he'd fought in this costume over the decades.
He wanted the sense that there's a battle-worn quality to the costume.
So, from head to toe, there's wear and tear.
There's scratches, there's bullet holes.
There's all sorts of signs that he's been out there on the streets
for a long time now.
lt's interesting, 'cause the batsuit may at first appearances seem
quite simple and low-tech.
But the costume technologies
and the thinking that goes into achieving that look
are actually pretty cutting edge.
We create a mannequin of him, we do the muscle-sculpt on top of that.
And then, of course, you have to make the molds,
and make the positives and the negatives.
Pour the foam lateх, tint the lateх, paint the cowl.
lt's a huge achievement in costume engineering.
ZACK: The mech suit doesn't really make him stronger, necessarily.
We don't really show that.
But it does... There's more armor in case Superman hits him.
(GRUNTS)
WILKINSON: What Zack Iiked about it is this sense
that it's something that a guy has put together, welded,
prototyped in his workroom.
It's kind of unfinished and raw and oversized, and a little brutish.
And that worked for our idea
of him having to really put everything into this suit
in order to prepare to face Superman
and feel like he had some chance against this incredible superhero.
Henry'll come in and he'll do that, but then it's a right hook.
Okay.
Let me tell you, when you're in the rain, up on a rooftop, shooting IMAX,
it's not the most practical thing.
But we made a determination that we wanted to use the real mech suit.
lt definitely grounds the fight in reality.
And the way that Henry reacts to Ben when he's in that suit,
I think, is different than if it was just a mocap suit.
Of course there are scenes,
because some of the fighting is extremely difficult
and you can't move in that suit that much,
where we did use the motion capture suit
but we tried, whenever possible, to go with the real thing.
WILKINSON: lt's such a fascinating process,
designing these superhero costumes,
because it's all very well to make a beautiful rendering of a costume,
but to actually make that work on the actor,
do all the things that it has to do,
with all of the stunt requirements and the different technical requirements,
and to make it comfortable, to make it be able to move
through all this incredible choreography is quite a jigsaw.