The Creator of Gotham's urban Blight

by Adam Pirani

Even Batman couldn't stop the urban blight that producer designer Anton Furst has set into motion for the movies.

Without the right production designer, director Tim Burton knew there wouldn't be much of a Gotham City for his Batman to prowl. So he turned to one of the film world's fastest-rising stars: Anton Furst. As well as designing the supernatural comedy HighSpirits (Starlog #137) and the fantasy tale Company of Wolves for director Neil Jordan. Furst also spent two years working with Stanley Kubrick on Full Metal Jacket, creating the battleground of Hue, Vietnam out of London's disused docklands.

Sitting in his studio-style office at England's Pinewood Studios, while the crew films Michael Keaton on his Batcave set, Furst is surrounded by the products (and inspirations) of his imagination: sketches of sets, designs, a bookshelf filled with art books, models, photographs and in the center of it all, his angled drawing board. Furst's initial conversations with Burton helped determine the look for this cinematic interpretation of the Caped Crusader. "Batman has been going for 50 years, so the first thing was which [version]," the designer says, "because it has gone through so many different styles." Where are we going to pick it up from, and are we going to seriously look at any one of those particular styles?

"We were very interested in the Bob Kane one, the original. We decided to totally throw aside the TV program as a spoof on the whole thing, so we knew we were going for the original Batman, which has a strong, heavy, solid look. We were going back to the original DC comic and the look of Batman as Bob Kane originally did it. So, that's a period piece, if you like, by definition.

"But there was another one, The Killing Joke [illustrated by Brian Bolland], which had a very strong graphic look to it, and was based on the Joker. This Batman script that we're doing has the Joker as a major character. So, it was those two that really influenced us."

"Then, we realized that he's a knight of the dark, so we knew that much of the film was going to be done in the nighttime. That suggested a very broad stroke to it, so we didn't go into nitty gritty detail." "We thought, what style are we going for in terms of [period], and we decided to see what happens if we go for absolutely no period at all, not actually stating that it's any particular period, and see whether that will actually formulate its own style"

"We even took things like prison architecture and stretched it into skyscrapers, and then [we brought in] the buildings of Louis Sullivan [a Chicago-based innovator in skyscraper construction who lived from 1856-1924] and ziggurat structures going back and then cantilevering out, and fascism, and putting it all together into huge massive vent structures, so you're always expressing the underground. And just brutality, absolute brutality."

"Then," adds Furst, "we put in modern architecture, just to confuse the issue, and it doesn't look like a complete period piece. But if we put in modern architecture, we would also go for the brutalism, like Russian constructivist sort of building, along with this fascinating Japanese architect Shin Takamatsu who does, like, locomotive design and nut and bolts architecture."

"So, we've got an incredible anomaly of different styles. So we have Anton Gaudi [1852-1926, leading Spanish Art Nouveau architect who designed remarkable churches] stretched into a skyscraper, and we've got Otto Wagner [1841-1918, a leading Viennese architect] locked onto brownstone buildings with fascist fronts on it, and [Isambard Kingdom] Brunel-type Victorian bridges."

"In the end, you start developing your own style. It's just that this sheer potpourri, this almost Dadaesque juxtaposition of styles, ends up with its own style hopefully." "We really wanted to express the evil quality of Gotham City. The first line of the script that Tim was involved with was `Hell has erupted through the pavements and just carried on growing.'"

This vision of Gotham City also reflects the personalities of the story's two central characters. "Batman is, in fact, a tragic case," Furst says, "This is traditional in the story line: he inherits a fortune and the Wayne Foundation, because his parents were shot in front of him by hoodlums. because the whole town is based on crime and corruption, we wanted to express that in the city's look, so what we did was starve the whole city of color; Gotham City is just rust and brownstone and brick."

"But the Joker, who emerges as a result of an appalling accident, goes into this clown's costume, white face and red lips. His makeup goes on into his clothes, and so he just freaks out with color. We thought it was interesting to have this very starved-of-color look, and then have the Joker and all his Goons, his clothes, his cars, everything associated with him just leap out of the background."

"Batman is the opposite. He's black, wears a black outfit, and drives a black Batmobile. Everything to do with him is black, with that forbidding black knight look so there are two opposite situations to be played there." "And I know that Tim's interest is, you've got a psychology of somebody who has been severely disrupted by the most appalling thing of watching your parents being shot in front of you when you were a kid, inheriting this fortune - it's real nervous breakdown material, that could produce a psychotic sort of mind, and you've got the Joker who is a psychotic. In the end, you've really got two psychotics battling it out, the difference being one's good, the other's bad."

In terms of referring to the Batman comics, Furst has taken on only what he calls "that graphic broad stroke. You're looking at very strong, huge shapes. When you have framing shots, you've got these massive structural shapes within the frame." "for instance, the Batcave produces an interesting problem to me," Furst admits, "because I think caves are unbelievably amorphous and boring. How do you frame them? They all look the same. When you've got something as organically irregular as that, there's nothing ever to lock onto." "So, we decided not to make it just a cave in the ground, we decided to make it an underground world, rather like what's in "Phantom of the Opera, so instead of a cave, it has become a foundation to the city. You've got these great buttresses coming down through the frame and then, to make a concession to that, we've put the rock structures within it."

"With the car, we came up with just a brute force machine that didn't actually subscribe to any time period. What we did not want to do - because we knew that the Batmobile was something that people want to see and they don't want to see a bad one - was a concept car like you see at a motor show or something like that. We wanted it to become some extraordinary machine that you had never seen before."

To accomplish that, Furst and his team "took elements of all the heavies images that we could think of, like that Blackbird aircraft, and, we went back to the salt flat speed machines of the '40's, when they were doing all the speed trials, an d then took elements of all the vehicles that had that brutality built into them, like the Stingray car, and put them together. Also, we wanted to have that sense that it really goes fast, as though it was just an engine."

"And we came up with this," he says, pointing to a two-foot long, black model. "We wanted it to look very forbidding, and the most forbidding things that we had ever seen were some of those surveillance aircraft, so it had that stealth look to it. It's like a knight in armor, with that shrouded, helmeted feel to it, and then with a rocket engine right down it - so you end up with this piece of pure expressionism."

Furst originally met Tim Burton (CS #2, 3) when the director approached him for a previous project. {Funnily enough, Tim wanted me to do Beetlejuice," the production designer says, "and I couldn't do it, because it was still stuck with Stanley Kubrick." Nonetheless, when Batman came up, Furst was once again Burton's first  choice. "Tim had seen Company of Wolves and that subscribed very much to his philosophy of film design," Furst says, "of that believable unreality we work in, so that you formulate your reality, in terms of the scenario, and of the set pieces."

"Then, when I came out with the original design concepts for the film, he immediately locked straight into it and agreed, so it has been excellent. I find it very stimulating to discuss design with Tim because it's like part of the team." "Because Batman is a very big film, Tim hasn't got the time to come and design it, so he's relying on me to design it. But in terms of his input, it has always been that when I've come up with five or six ideas, he has always gone immediately for the one that I like most. So, there's a fairly symbiotic relationship there."

Furst also found another approving eye when Batman's creator, Bob Kane (see page 28), visited the set. "He came in when we had got most of it up, and seemed terribly enthusiastic," the designer notes. "He just said, `Fantastic! I really love what's going on. It looks great.'"

A production designer on a movie is not just someone who comes up with visually exciting concepts. "My job, basically," Furst says, "is to work out, from the script, what we require the camera to look at, apart from the actors. It is, to a certain extent, illustration, but you're obviously going into a totally different kind of reality with film work. The whole art, method, form of making something which is illustrational for film is a completely different technique. You're obviously talking on a much bigger scale for a start, and you're talking in a much more three-dimensional sense, So, you've got to know enough about filmmaking to know what not to build and what not to do.

"I don't think you qualify as a production designer unless you know all about architectural styles, because all your detailing is going to come unstuck. and obviously you're dealing with structure, and you're dealing with an implicit knowledge of engineering, with all those principles of cantilever and nuts and bolts and glue. Should you do it in steel or wood or plaster or cast it? If you're going to do many off of it, you're going to cast it and repeat them, and all of those same things apply there.

"But I think also what we have to know about as designers is all art, not just architecture. We've got to put into our sets the other later, like what's going to dress them and what's going to be in them and the fact that in the end it's turning up on the screen as a two-dimensional thing."

Additionally, Furst notes, "if you're doing this sort of movie, if you don't know all about effects, then you're going to totally screw up. You must know enough about it so that you're not building what you could do in other ways. Otherwise, you're just spending a fortune." "With your knowledge of how to put films together and whether that should be a model or traveling matte or whatever it should be built, you have to break it all down, and that you do with the storyboard artist. You break it down shot by shot - camera angles and everything else - until you actually develop what you know you're going to have to build, so you don't build anything higher. Then, you've got to orchestrate it with the script and discuss it with the director, so that you work out what they want and what you can give them. It's a lot of backwards and forwards."

Furst, now 44, hasn't come the traditional route into the movie business of working his way up through the ranks. "I trained at the Royal College of Art, which has a film and television school," he notes. "I studied environmental design, which is the only theater design course, and then did a sabbatical year at the film and television school. and I was very lucky; Tony Masters, who designed 2001, was looking for assistants at that time, and the production wrote to the Royal College asking if there were people who could visualize well. I as one of the people put forward, and I got the job, so I got a (union) ticket, which was very lucky. It was a film called Kyle, which didn't actually happen in the end, it folded.

"Then I went into special FX more, because I was always developing the special FX aspects with Tony, as his assistant. I had a company called Holoco, and we did a holography show at the Royal Academy (in London) called `Light Fantastic,' which was a success that none of us expected. As a result of which, The Who, who backed the show, bought a quarter of Shepperton Studios and set up a company with the money."

"Just at that time, there was this plethora of FX films, and we had all this laser equipment, so we were doing laser effects, and we then brought in model units, and we worked for four years." Furst's work was as an FX supervisor rather than a designer. "At one point, we were working on Outland, Flash Gordon, ALIEN and Moonraker all at the same time. We had crews all over. I was running a whole  operation. I wasn't near a drawing board; I was just trying to keep the crews working."

Then in 1984, came Company of Wolves, which in turn was followed by Full Metal Jacket. Now he's doing Batman. Admits Anton Furst, "It has been very quick."."