In Batman and Robin, two new villains — the icy Mr. Freeze and sultry Poison Ivy — allow director Joel Schumacher and cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt, ASC to take their visual strategy to polar extremes.
Audiences the world over know that warm weather always precedes another visit to the Batcave, and it's a trip that few can resist. Batman, Batman Returns and Batman Forever have all proven that the Caped Crusader's appeal is magical and enduring, no matter who dons the cowl [see respective stories in AC Dec. 1989 (effects only), July '92, July '95]. In this summer's installment, Batman and Robin, rising star George Clooney (of television's popular ER series) will take the "Baton" from Val Kilmer, who succeeded Michael Keaton.
The new Batman once again fights crime with his faithful sidekick, Robin (Chris O'Donnell), but he is also joined by Batgirl, a.k.a. Barbara Gordon (Alicia Silverstone). Their mission? To save Gotham City from the nefarious schemes of two allied super-villains: the coldly calculating Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarze-negger) and the florid seductress Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman). Freeze, true to his name, threatens to turn Gotham City into a permanent snowscape, while Ivy distracts the local superheroes with her amatory allure.
Recognizing a successful team when he sees one, executive producer Peter MacGregor-Scott reassembled the same band of artists that led Batman Forever to the top of the box-office charts in 1995. This core group included director Joel Schumacher, cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt, ASC, production designer Barbara Ling and visual effects supervisor John Dykstra, ASC.
Asked to assess his feelings about tackling another Batman spectacular, Schumacher offers, "Just because you climb Mount Everest and come back alive doesn't mean that you won't fall off the next time you try it. I don't think you can ever be cocky, but you do have to have a certain amount of arrogance and confidence to even attempt the climb. Some part of you has to believe that you're going to get back alive, or you're not going to do it.
"Even though Batman Forever was the third Warner Bros. Batman movie, it was the first for all of us, and we changed the approach significantly; we did our version, never knowing that it would be so successful. We got an awful lot of approval from that film, so this time around, we thought, 'Well, if they liked that, let's go further.' I'd had a lot of fun on the first one, and I thought it would be exciting to try to do it bigger and better."
The picture's director of photography, Stephen Goldblatt (who earned both ASC and Academy Award nominations for his lush work on Batman Forever) responded enthusiastically to Schumacher's gung-ho, can-do attitude. "On this film, Joel encouraged me to go much further in the comic-book vein than we had before," says Goldblatt, whose credits also include Outland, The Hunger, The Cotton Club, Young Sherlock Holmes, Lethal Weapon 1 and 2, Joe Versus the Volcano, The Prince of Tides (which earned him both ASC and Academy Award nominations) and The Pelican Brief. "Creatively, this job was fantastic, because I was allowed to do a lot of new stuff. Because it was essentially the same creative team, our shorthand was better, and so was the integration between the digital effects [see sidebar] and the live action. It was like starting on day 101 of Batman Forever."
Schumacher says that his visual approach to Batman and Robin was influenced by the work of various D.C. Comics artists (particularly Frank Miller, Tim Sayle, Dave McKeon, Simon Bisley, Scott Hampton and Alex Ross), but also by the tongue-in-cheek, Sixties-era James Bond films. "The villains dictated a lot of this film's tone," he says. "Batman, Robin and Batgirl react to the evil that is at large. The best thing about the Batman villains is that they have no shame; they love being evil. Likewise, in the Bond films I really enjoy, the early ones, the villains are larger than life Dr. No, Goldfinger, Rosa Klebb. In some movies today, the villains are really oppressed by their own madness. But Batman villains are narcissistic exhibitionists about it. They have fantastic names that they give themselves, they wear these outrageous outfits, and they do outrageous things. They don't just sneak in and steal something, they sort of make The Rocky Horror Picture Show out of it.
"I thought Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy were the perfect pairing, because he's in this frozen world, and she's this seductress, this hothouse flower," Schumacher continues. "In the film, Mr. Freeze creates this scary winter wonderland in Gotham. The usual way ice and snow is done in movies is to be very gray and dark and gloomy. But I thought that would be less interesting than the approach we eventually took. In my discussions with Barbara Ling and Steve Goldblatt, I mentioned the way the aurora borealis works with the ice and snow at the poles, with this refracted light, this almost blinding effect. I didn't want Mr. Freeze to be dreary and somber, I wanted him to be more like Thor the Thunder God of the North dazzling and frightening.
"Poison Ivy, meanwhile, is a beautiful woman who exudes this irresistible pheromonal attraction. No man can resist her, but if you kiss her, you die, because she has poison on her lips. The character was created in the Sixties, but she's a very modern villainess she's an eco-terrorist, and she puts the ecology of plants and flowers above humanity. She doesn't care if everyone dies as long as the plants and flowers survive. She has plans. In the story, she takes over the old Gotham Turkish Baths, which is a defunct place that's occupied by a gang. There are all of these swooning Arabesque statues covered with all of her hothouse flowers, and limpid pools with water lilies you can walk on.
"These two different characters gave us two opposites to work with the sub-zero world, and the hothouse world," the director concludes. "It was a real challenge for Stephen, especially the scenes in which Freeze and Ivy are together in their shared hideout. One half had to be frozen and the other had to be warm, seductive and magenta-like. It involved quite a range of lighting."
To achieve that full spectrum, Goldblatt once again worked closely with lighting designer John Tedesco, who specializes in elaborate computerized rigs designed primarily to illuminate rock concerts and theatrical productions. Given that the duo's efforts together on Batman Forever produced some truly fantastic results, Goldblatt decided to use the technology even more extensively in the new film. The cinematographer reveals that the computerized rigs also helped to overcome logistical challenges posed by the stars' schedules. "George is on ER, so we had to work with him on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and we had a time limit of just over six weeks with Arnold," Goldblatt relates. "We had to work completely out of continuity, because we almost never had the two of them on the same set. Normally you go onto the same set once or twice, but our first unit never mind the second unit went onto some sets as many as 11 times, using doubles to shoot over-the-shoulders and stuff.
"The continuity problem was helped by the fact that we were using computerized lighting about 75 percent of the time, as opposed to 25 percent of the time on Batman Forever. I used every imaginable kind of unit, sometimes on sets where normally I never would have used them. I'd gained experience on the last film, so I brought that type of lighting into many more scenes. I played with my color temperatures quite a bit on this film. Because most of these theatrical-type lamps are daylight-balanced, we had to shoot daylight throughout even though we were on interior sets and correct it later in the lab. Eastman Kodak's Vision 5279 stock, which I used on most of the picture, worked very well for that. I used 5293 for greenscreen work or other effects applications."
Acknowledging the logistical difficulties inherent to a film of such an elaborate scale, Schumacher notes that close interaction between key crew members was crucial to the project's success. "The toughest thing on a movie this size is communication," he maintains. "Between the two Batman movies, I had done A Time to Kill [see AC August '96], which was filmed in a small town in Mississippi. It was still a Hollywood production with a large ensemble cast and a large crew, but we had one-tenth of what you have on a Batman picture. The Batman movies are the only ones I've ever directed where I didn't know every [cast and crew person's] name. There were days on the set when someone would walk up to me and say 'Good morning,' and I'd have to ask my assistant who it was and sometimes he didn't know!
"Because there are so many people on a picture like this, the communications process can be very fractured," Schumacher continues. "In order to create a sequence, Barbara has to go off and design an extraordinarily complicated set; Stephen has to figure out an extraordinarily complicated way to light that set; John Dykstra has to figure out where his special effects fit into the scheme; the costumes have to be designed to work in the frame; and so on. There are also storyboard artists, model-makers, and the second unit. You can literally say to someone, 'I want a bowl of apples in this scene,' and two months later you may see a whole wall of Snapple bottles. So you say, 'What is this?' And they reply, 'They told us you wanted a whole wall of Snapple.' 'No, I wanted a bowl of red apples!' But meanwhile, the shelves have been built with the Snapple, and you might just have to accept it and work with it."
To minimize snafus of this sort, Goldblatt says that he engaged in detailed preproduction planning sessions with Ling and Dykstra. "I was involved in the actual construction of all of the sets, which was a tremendous advantage," the cameraman says. "Barbara's work was great, because she always gave us glazed surfaces to catch ambient reflections. She also showed me everything so I could do tests.
"I was also assisted quite a bit by John and [visual effects co-supervisor] Andrew Adamson. One of our most elaborate sets on this film was the Gotham Observatory, a full-size space built in Long Beach. Prior to the actual shooting, John and Andrew created a 3-D computerized model of the set [see illustration p.40], which allowed me to previsualize where the camera could go. I could work out the look, then decide how high or low the camera would have to be. On that basis, we made certain sections of the observatory wall removable, so we could take them out and put them back in again. It really worked, and it allowed us to get all of the camera angles we needed.
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