The Creator of Gotham's Urban Blight Part II

Adam Pirani

Last issue we examined how Anton Furst had developed his perception of what type of world Batman would inhabit in the movies. This issue we continue as he relates his vision to Batman's arsenal...

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."   But the filmmakers have hardly felt constrained to incorporate the     specific designs of the Batmobile or the Batcave from the comics.  "We've never really observed the comic," Furst notes, "we've wanted to have a totally fresh approach; to get the feel that we've liked most from the original DC comics and then just not look at the details." "There were certain images that immediately just banged out that we knew we wanted to get into it, and then it didn't go any further.  For the Batmobile, the Batwing, and all that, we knew we had to come up with something else that people hadn't seen, but within character, just maintain the character, that's all. It's much better just to free your mind.  It's a different medium, and it has to do different things.  In fact, the story requires certain things that aren't in any comics."

"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 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, 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, then 44, hadn'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 and later Batman.