Batman Begins (2005)

(For more information on the Batmobile chase, please see the BATMOBILE section on the preceding pages.) The bulk of the film’s Gotham City exterior sets were built at Cardington, a former airship hangar located approximately an hour north of London. (Batman Begins was the first feature film to utilize Cardington as a production soundstage.) Dwarfing the typical soundstage, Cardington’s sprawling Hangar No. 2 is 812 feet long and 180 feet high at its apex. (The average soundstage measures only 45 feet high.) The floor area is equivalent to the area of 16 Olympic-size swimming pools, and the sheer volume of the hangar is equal to 8,338 double-decker London buses.

“Filming at Cardington gave the film a level of realism and scope that would not have been possible if we had been limited to using a normal soundstage,” producer Emma Thomas says. “We also had more control over the environment, so we could do stunts involving fire and high falls without having to worry about winds and weather conditions. We were able to shoot a lot of what would have been night work in the day, because of this extraordinary facility.”

Cardington was home to Crowley’s set design for the Narrows, a decrepit and treacherous slum located on an island in the center of Gotham and connected to the city by a series of bridges. Inspired by New York’s Roosevelt Island, the freeways of Tokyo and the old Kowloon city in Hong Kong, Crowley worked to create a design that felt claustrophobic, as if the Narrows is penned inside the city and “freeways are running down Fifth Avenue.”

“I’m really pleased with what I was able to achieve from a lighting standpoint in the Narrows,” says director of photography Wally Pfister, who strived to create a dark, moody look for the film. “It really looks like the nighttime exterior of a real city, and yet we lit every inch of the set from scratch.”

The Narrows is home to Arkham Asylum, the ominous facility run by Dr. Jonathan Crane that houses Gotham’s criminally insane. “I was blown away,” Cillian Murphy says of his first impression of the Crowley’s evocative set. “When I walked in and saw the vastness of it, it was terrifying and exhilarating.”

The filmmakers supplemented Crowley’s Arkham set by filming at several practical locations around London that evoke “a marvelous neo-gothic feel, a wonderfully dark and complex form of architecture that fits Batman and his world,” says Nolan. Additionally, Chicago’s Franklin Street Bridge was used to depict the final bridge raised in a climactic sequence in which the Arkham inmates escape the facility and wreak havoc on the Narrows.

The interiors and exteriors of Wayne Manor were filmed primarily at Britain’s Mentmore Towers, an estate built by the Rothschilds in the 1850s that is located about an hour and a half north of London. The bedrooms and an interior corridor of Wayne Manor were constructed on stages at Shepperton Studios.

“In terms of Wayne Manor, we decided to try and really reinvent the way the audience sees the wealth of the Wayne family,” says Nolan. “We chose an approach to design that gets away from wood paneling and suits of armor, the kind of images that have become very familiar to audiences as a portrayal of money. There is a slightly different emphasis on the look and the feel of Wayne Manor than we have seen before.”

---

Pages: 1 2 [3] 4