“The Batman” star Robert Pattinson imbues his shadowy crime fighter with an outsider’s emotionality that allows the viewer to read his performance as the costumed vigilante just as easily as his performance as the wealthy recluse Bruce Wayne. But that wouldn’t be possible without the work of David Crossman and Glyn Dillon, the costume designers behind the new Batsuit.
The artists credit new fabrication technologies unavailable to previous Batman designers that allow costumes to be made with a nuanced performances in mind, giving Pattinson a greater range of movement and expression. “We were just very, very aware from the beginning how flexible it all needed to be,” says Crossman.
One way in which their take on the iconic costume differentiates itself from other cinematic incarnations is that they give the Dark Knight’s cowl a “neutral” expression.
“In previous iterations of the upper cowl, it’s more like a face of a demon and he’s got a pointy nose and a built-in scowl,” says Dillon. “Knowing that with this script, it was going to be a lot of [Batman] standing around talking and doing detective work, it felt like that might have been a bit too over the top and it felt like it needed something that was a bit calmer.”
Reinventing one of the most well-known superhero costumes that has ever been seen on the big screen is no small undertaking, but viewers might be surprised to learn that director Matt Reeves looked to other famous movie icons with an off-kilter sense of justice for at least one of his Batman’s gadgets. “When Matt came to us, he wanted the harpoon gun to somehow be within the vambrace,” says Dillon. “He was always talking about the Robert De Niro film ‘Taxi Driver.’”
In that Martin Scorsese-directed movie, De Niro’s character Travis Bickle builds a contraption that conceals a firearm up his sleeve, allowing him to slide it out and fire the gun. In “The Batman,” Pattinson’s masked vigilante uses a similar device to store his grappling gun. The gadget is used memorably in the film to escape the Gotham police department and dispatch foes in one of his brutal fight scenes.
When it came to lighting their Batsuit, the designers reflect on their previous work with “The Batman” cinematographer Greig Fraser on “Rogue One.” “When we were doing Darth Vader, again, he’s an all-black character. But when you actually see the helmet in real life, you realize that large chunks of it are painted dark silver,” says Dillon.
Another one of Batman’s signature gadgets the artists put their spin on is the batarang, which functions more like a knife that sits on Batman’s chest in the shape of his insignia. The bat symbol “wasn’t just a leather, bat-shaped cut-out stuck on the chest,” says Dillon. “It had a proper purpose.”
That commitment to realism was one of their guiding principles. “We definitely were going for the feeling of everything being utilitarian.”