GOTHAM'S GOTHIC GLAMOUR

 Bruce Wayne only had to glance at what flew through his window to come up with the design for his outfit, but Bob Ringwood had to put considerably more effort into creating something a Caped Crusader could actually wear. As well as designing the costumes for Excalibur, Santa Claus, and Solarbabies,

Ringwood performed the same services for Dune. The rubber "stillsuits" he created for that movie prepared him well for designing Batman's costumes.

The process of creating the Darknight Detective's outfit began far away from the production base at England's Pinewood Studios. "Michael Keaton was away in Canada (filming The Dream Team), so we had to get a body cast," Ringwood notes, "because none of us here knew what size he was, or what shape.

We got a body cast, he was in reasonable shape and quite fit, but he wasn't like the comic." "So then, we sculpted heads and bodies on it, and kept showing them to Tim Burt on (the director), until we got something that was close to the comic and would be believable to Michael. You don't want to sculpt something that turns him into the incredible Hulk, so that he looks like he's wearing a pneumatic costume.  He had to be believable, so in fact the deepest place is only about an inch and a half; he hasn't got a vast great body suit on at all It was just streamlining his body to make it the right outlines, the right sort of proportion." "One of the things I tried to do is that when he was in the costume, he and it were one. I wanted it to be Batman, not to be a man dressed up in a costume although, of course, you know full well that it's Bruce Wayne in a costume." "It's as though the costume's surface was him and that he was his body and that was his head, and if you don't make that believable, it doesn't work. In the Adam West show, he was definitely in a costume, you know that was meant to be a costume. This, in a way, is meant to be him. When Bruce Wayne's dressed up, it's as though he becomes another animal." Made of very soft foam rubber glazed with silicone, the finished costume has one main body piece plus head, cloak (made of rubberized wool to facilitate movement), boots and gloves. The main body garment is based on a leotard, with rubber pieces glued on. "It's like a sculpted diving wet suit, "Ringwood said. "It's a prosthetic costume that isn't glued on. Mostly prosthetics (such as the Joker's makeup) are all glued on; they're pretending to be part of the skin. This one isn't pretending." In devising the costume, Ringwood's main guideline from Burton had been that "he wanted it black as opposed to (dark) blue and (light) blue.  "Interestingly, Bob Kane said that although he drew the costume blue and blue, he couldn't draw black and black because it doesn't work in comics. It was only two blues to define the different parts of the costume, and it was always black in his mind anyway, it was just colored blue. So, we went ahead and did it black. I don't know whether it looses something or gains something in black. It becomes more sinister and sexy being black, but I quite liked the blue, too. I think you could have done a version in blue that would have been good." One of the problems of a black costume is that it absorbs light and becomes less visible on film. "That's why we made it shiny, because at least the light then  reflects on all the contours," Ringwood notes. "If it was just dull black, it   would hardly show up." Part of the costume's challenge has been to facilitate the smooth transformation of Michael Keaton from Bruce Wayne into the Dark Knight. "Tim wanted to go with Michael whom he had worked with before, " Ringwood notes. "Michael isn't what you imagine casting for that part, but then, Tim wanted to play it in a stranger way, a more intellectual way. His rationale behind it was that in the man's fantasy life, at night, he was this big creature, and in the daytime, he was an ordinary guy." "The basis of (the outfit) was an extension of that idea, so, of course when he became the Batman at night, we had to give him a costume that would turn him into the shapes of the comic. Even if we didn't make him bigger - you can't suddenly make him 6'4", that would be silly - you could give him the outlines. So you had to give him the chiseled features and the musculature and everything." Prior to his work on the movie, Ringwood hadn't been particularly familiar with the character. "I had seen the TV show a bit when I was younger, but I hadn't really seen many of the Batman comics, and so I bought about 400 - from really  early ones through every period - and looked at them all. I thought it would be a mistake to do just the latest look: You have to get elements of all of it. We just tried to get the definitive Batman." With this end in mind, the moviemakers paid little attention to the TV show.  "It was wise not to look at it anymore," Ringwood says, "because the TV show was another thing, it was a camp series. The whole idea of it was that it was camp and he didn't need to be a sexy guy or anything - Adam West would probably kill me for saying this - but he was a slightly portly man in a thing. The whole point was to do with the jokes and have Eartha Kitt (a guest star as Catwoman) and all the rest of it." "This wasn't about that, so I didn't really want to have any image of that, and I didn't think Tim wanted to either. This is much more like The Dark Knight, although it has elements of the rest of it and, of course, the Joker is extremely funny."

Inside the costume, says Ringwood, "it gets quite hot, but it's not as hot as you would think." Although originally it took an hour to put on, that process was soon reduced to "a few minutes," according to the costume designer. "The head part has to be placed properly and then just glued in tiny places so it doesn't slide."

And how did Keaton like the costume? "I noticed that Michael didn't take it off to go to lunch, so it couldn't have been that uncomfortable," Bob Ringwood says.  "He quite liked wearing it. He said he hated wearing it, but in my experience, anyone who went to the canteen wearing their costume, didn't dislike it that much!"