"♪ ♪" "There's something incredibly primal about the relationship between man and machine." "It's extraordinarily powerful." "It's almost like the myth becoming reality." "When you see it, you go, "that's so cool." "I wish I had one of those."" "Well, you look at the comics themselves and how much they've changed over the years." "We wanted to raise the bar and build the best Batmobile that ever was." "The origin of Batman is so primal and emotion-filled..." "When Bruce Wayne was a young boy, he saw his parents murdered before his eyes." "And at that moment, in the belief that one person can make a difference, he made a vow to get the bad guy who did this and to get all the bad guys, even if he had to spend the rest of his life" "walking through hell to honor that commitment." "One of the attractions of Batman as a superhero is that he doesn't have super powers." "He is an ordinary person doing extraordinary things to stop injustice." "The Batmobile is the way he gets there." "The very first Batman story was in Detective Comics number 27, May 1939." "And right from the get-go, Batman needed to get from place to place in this city." "So he drove Bruce Wayne's red sedan." "As multiple artists began to work on the book, each of them brought their own sense of mechanics and engineering to the batmobiles, and they modified, and they added the bat face to the front grill." "And then somebody put a fin on the roof." "The Batman!" "Come on!" "When the movie serial started, you had real cars." "Let's go." "The 1943 Batman movie serial was a 1939 Cadillac, which was the same car Bruce Wayne was driving, but it seemed like, if the top was up, it was the Batmobile." "If the top was down, it was Bruce Wayne's car." "Come along, fella, you're going with us to the Bat's cave." "It didn't have any bat symbology." "They didn't have any budget to build fins for it." "It was very simple." "When you hire a new artist for DC to work on Batman, one of the first things they wanna do is they want to invent a Batmobile." "What was happening around 1950 was an editorial decision to modernize Batman." "The existing Batmobile has a crash." "Batman breaks his leg, and as he's recuperating, he's sitting there drawing up plans for a brand-new Batmobile." "The Batmobile elongated, the bat face on it grew in size and was far more prominent." "And the various artists through the years of the 1950s continued to modify that." "It had different kinds of weapons and different kinds of devices from story to story, depending on what the writer needed to get him out of some kind of a fix." "I actually have seen a Batmobile in real life." "I've actually seen the '60s Adam West Batmobile." "Um, still one of my favorites, just because it's the first one." "The first iteration of the Batmobile I ever saw was the TV show." "I remember as a kid, that was a massively important part of what the appeal of Batman was." "The producer, William Dozier, called me from 20th Century Fox, says, "we're doing a Batman TV show,"" ""and we'd like to create a Batmobile." "Now, you got 15 days and $15,000."" "I said, "wait a minute-- 15 days?"" "But the challenge was worth it." "So I said, "let's go for it."" "And, of course, the big part is that Ford Motor Company has the basic car that we used." "I bought the concept car, the Futura, from Ford Motor Company for $1.00." "But this car had to be a star." "What I had to create was a fantasy, and, basically, we started wrong." "And we had it in a dull gray primer with a fading white stripe." "And we come out of the Batcave." "I says, "stop."" "It ain't gonna work."" "So immediately I run it back to the shop," "I painted it a gloss black, and then I took some red stripes because I wanted color." "Boom!" "I take that to the Batcave." "And out it comes, and Dozier said," ""Ah, that's more like it."" "I was a kid, and, you know, I remember racing home to see the, uh, the first episode of that, and it was a big deal." "The Batman show breaks bigger than anything anybody ever expected." "I drove the Batmobile most of the time." "And that's why Burt Ward as Robin was white-knuckled." "Because I did things with the Batmobile maybe that shouldn't have been done." "I would come toward camera, swing the around in a big splash of gravel, trying not to hit anyone, because the kids loved it." "Come on, Robin." "To the Batcave!" "We haven't one moment to lose!" "The Batmobile represents freedom, in a way, because, as a kid, you could completely lose yourself in the fantasy of being that character, getting to drive that car." "I was probably four or five when I got a die-cast of the toy that had the jet burner on the back, some orange flames." "I've got a couple of them." "I've got the matchbox one since I was a kid." "I still have it." "I've got a 16th scale and a 32nd scale." "My wife, when we were dating, she walked into my place, and she was-- she said, "you're one of those guys that,"" ""you know, you get nervous about when you walk in and see all the-- the toys on your shelves."" "We enjoyed driving it many times for fun." "Batchutes." "These are real parachutes." "The ones used for race cars." "And I'm coming down the 101 Freeway, and I pop my batchutes." "Going the other way was a highway patrolman." "The Batmobile itself that was in the TV show actually works its way into the comic books themselves because the books want to be more reflective of the success the show is getting." "Super Friends TV show started in the 1970s." "They also based their animated Batmobile after the Lincoln Futura model." "Throughout the 1970s, there had to have been about a dozen variations." "And that continued through the 1980s." "There was no set template for a Batmobile." "You turn to 1986." "Frank Miller deconstructs Batman in graphic novel." "He re-thought what Batman was." "It's a darker time." "It's a very dystopian world." "He needed something big and heavy, and that was this Batman assault tank." "It was like, "wow."" "It was the first time you'd really seen anything quite like that." "I think when I think of the Batmobile," "I always think of the classic Michael Keaton-- the first Tim Burton movie." "Really low to the ground." "I wasn't interested in making the TV show." "I was much more interested in making a darker version to the more--what the roots of the comic book was." "Just goes back to the psychology of what the guy is trying to do." "He's trying to scare people." "He's trying to make a mythic, almost supernatural persona." "Because he is a real person, and he's just, you know, he's trying to intimidate and frighten so, therefore, the intention with the Batmobile was to look as imposing as possible." " Get in the car." " Which one?" "It's everything that a young boy would just love to drive." "I just knew from the whole feel of the film that we would have sort of Medieval elements in it, and then go for sheer, brute force." "The design that we finally ended up with, which I love, is just sort of unexpected." "It made us kind of laugh, 'cause it was tough, but it was kind of perverse." "It had a weird quality to it that I can't quite put my finger on it." "But ti still had the bat kind of motif to it, but something else-- just an aggressive thing." "And also just the right sort of paint job and texture and kind of gunmetal quality to it to give it that sort of scary kind of aggressive persona." "That's a cool car." "'Cause, ultimately, I think that's what you want." "You wanna say, "hey, I'd love to have one of those."" "Remember when we shut the lid, first time out, and he got in with the costume, and the door shut, and his little ears were sticking out." "They were trapped in the door." "I did drive it for a second that day." "I don't think they wanted me to drive it, given my driving record." "I took it for, like, a-- 50 yards or something." "But I was used to, like, a Ford Fiesta, so I, you know..." "It's a little different in terms of feel." "I need a new car." "A little bit later on, after our '89 Batman movie," "Batman:" "The Animated Series began." "And they introduced their own version of the Batmobile, which for purposes of animation couldn't be so detailed and complex." "Everything about Batman:" "The Animated Series was a reflection of 40 years worth of Batman to kind of look at." "We were able to take those 40 years and sort of distill it all down into one thing." "And I think the Batmobile reflects that." "It was sort of lightning in a bottle." "For a long time, that too became a lot of people's true image of what the Batmobile would be." "My favorite Batmobile would have to be the Val Kilmer one." "I thought the first Batmobile was very beautiful." "And so I thought our job was just sort of refine it and make it our Batmobile." "We wanted this to feel sexy and mean at the same time." "The ribs came very much from what I've always loved about Giger." "The sensuality and anatomy of every machine." "One of the distinctive features is the bat symbol on the wheels." "They devised a Cid gear that goes about 6,000 rpm in there to keep that symbol vertical." "We used a hot air balloon motor for the flame." "How did we get the flame to extend?" "We used propane with nitrous oxide." "And the first time that got tested was in the shop on a bench top, and it was propped up at a 30-degree angle." "And we lit that thing up, and it set off the whole sprinkler system in the building, 'cause the flame shot out so far." "When you're building a car like that, you can't fit it on the normal car chassis." "We actually built from scratch." "Half the body's behind the rear axle, so when you turn the corner, you gotta think twice, because, as the front's going to the right, the rear's going to the left." "Joel still doesn't know this to this day, but I f-- that car up, man." "Like, two days before we were shooting it." "Because I was the first one to test drive it." "I took it out on the street in front of the shop and tested the braking system to make sure that we could get it to spin around." "I kept going down the street at about 40, and then hit the brakes and swung it around, and I got it almost all the way around, then I felt it chatter." "That wing was so long, it just, "ghrrrck!"" "Two feet of it got mashed on a chain link fence behind me." "I was not everyone's favorite person in the shop that day." "I want a car!" "Chicks dig the car." "In Batman  Robin, I said," ""I'd love to make this twice as big."" "It was a totally new design." "This was gonna be very long." "I've never made a longer Fender in my life, to this day." "I think, overall, it was 28 feet." "And in the script, it was written that it was a single seater, open for the first time." "We went with a cockpit." "And it has the feeling of a jet fighter." "You can see the rocket inside of its mouth, so to speak." "And you also wanted it to look a little like it's the bat logo, but it could also be fangs." "That fin kept growing and growing." "You could actually see that as almost like it was a flying bat at the moment." "You know, it had this incredible silhouette." "We had these clean tires, and they were blanks." "So I thought, "well, I have to have"" ""some sort of tire tread in there." "Let's try another bat logo."" "I would say I would just watch my back if I saw that coming." "The Tumbler?" "It's just..." "It represents, I guess, vengeance." "Justice." "You know?" "Like, if that's coming, and you're doing something wrong, it's over for you." "I liked how the Tumbler would actually-- when it's on top of the buildings would have that boost and jump." "You've got fans who were kids now becoming the artists." "And what they're doing is they're reinterpreting the Batmobile in a way that they want to see it." "If you took on board the idea that you were going to have to design this icon that you grew up with," "I think you'd be paralyzed, in a creative sense." "We actually very much addressed it from a story point of view." "Like, "Okay, we have to have this vehicle."" ""It has to be able to do certain things in the story," ""And we have to have a credible design to it." "And an explanation, visually, of where it's come from."" "What's that?" "What, the Tumbler?" "Oh, you wouldn't be interested in that." "I had this idea of really having something that had the profile of a Lamborghini, but was combined with the weight and feel of like a Humvee." "I did some really awful little plasticine models, you know, just to show Nathan kind of the size" "I was talking about." "I was just looking for a shape." "And you have to keep on turning it, fixing it, and changing it." "So we bought a lot of model kits of Lamborghinis and Hummers and all the rest, and started putting them together in different configurations." "Taking panels off Stealth aircraft to get those angles and things." "You know, it was a lot of models that we used." "It was a lot of glued fingertips." "And I've never been presented a project that way before." "It would normally be concepts, drawings, and... no, no, that's totally unique." "Andy and his team, the first thing they noticed was there's no front axle." "How's that steering gonna work?" "How we gonna--where's the steering rack gonna go?" "How's it gonna handle?" "And he asked me," ""Can you make that?" And the answer was, "yeah."" "And then your mind starts racing." "You go, "I just said yes."" "And now I've gotta back that up."" "It was just a roll cage, just to basically get everything running and just get used to it." "What are you thinking?" "I think that's excellent." "Better stop before I start having too much fun." "We went away after and said," ""you know what, we can run with this." ""Let's make a 100-mile-an-hour beast that can jump through the air, land, carry on driving."" "When you jump the car, you would think you'd want to land it on the back wheels." "You don't." "That's catastrophic." "It slaps the front of the car down." "You actually want to bring it in just on the front wheels." "We broke a lot of stuff that ended in a shower of springs and shock absorbers and parts rolling down the road that should really not be rolling down the road, yeah." "They wanted to have a vehicle that, no matter what Chris Nolan thought of, it could do it." "What was it like to drive it?" "Uh, very noisy." "You know, it's like having ozzy Osbourne screaming in your ear." "I did drive the Tumbler on airstrips, which was a helluva lot of fun." "'Cause that thing can get up to really pretty good speeds." "But you can hardly see anything." "So thank God there are stunt guys doing that because I would have been very dangerous had I been actually the person in there." "I drive really, really close to the steering wheel." "I always have done." "I just feel more comfortable because of the small window that I had to look out of." "We had lipstick cameras that we placed on the outside of the car with two monitors." "If I couldn't see what was directly in front of me," "I'd look to the monitors to make sure everything was clear." "How cool is that?" "We smashed it through everything I could think of." "We drove it over the top of cars." "Through walls." "Down steps, up steps." "We jumped it." "'Cause Chris then had it in his mind that, "Oh, this car can jump." "Okay, right."" "Where can I take that?"" "The best stunt for me in the Batmobile was the jumping over the moving car." "We built a ramp that we could tow behind the car." "And we'd get on the move, and we'd practice and practice." "Then we'd have to take that on set and do it in a tunnel." "I was worried I'd get too much height and hit the ceiling." "This is at night as well, so I could barely see the ramp." "And they'd say, "oh, there's gonna be an explosion"" ""in the back." "Would you be happy in the explosion yourself?"" "And I was like, "oh, absolutely."" "I said, "but only if you give me"" "the biggest button you have."" "As I hit the ramp and as I was jumping" "I had to wait until it was at the top of the arc." "Just as I felt it come down I'd hit that button." "One of the guys that worked for me once said," ""You've got the coolest job in the world."" "And, yeah, it is." "You're building Batman's car." "That's every-- every kid's dream." "The car has changed not only my life, but my family's life." "I've been a fortunate kid." "And there was not one day that I didn't want to get up and go to work." "You know, it was like a dream come true for a designer." "I'm just dreamin' I was driving that thing." "I feel privileged that, as filmmakers, we're all fans, or we wouldn't be doing it." "And then we get to pass that on." "I see its effect." "I see it when we take the make a wish kids out and you see that joy that it can bring." "I think they're all iconic." "It just depends what age you were when you saw it." "It's your Batmobile that was the first one you saw." "For me as for a lot of people my age you can't really remember a time before the Batmobile." "You've always been aware of it." "That name "Batmobile"" "transcends through all the batmobiles." "They sort of become one entity." "The Batmobile's become the mythic kind of character in itself." "It is our modern-day mythology." "The Batmobile is extraordinarily powerful and exotic, but you can imagine yourself driving it." "I gotta get me one of those."