The Batman Production Designer, James Chinlund

Automatically transcribed; may contain errors.

hi i'm allison with flic direct hello how are you sir i'm good allison nice to meet you nice to meet you too so as production designer you have to oversee pretty much everything and most of your work starts pre-production and into the actual filming so when you first get a script where do your ideas come from depending on the script or is it more director driven it's always different not to dodge the question but i think um sometimes you read a script and there's an obvious sort of intent in the narrative that that you can hook onto and and sort of see how your design may amplify or harmonize with with that intent and then there are other times for example where the script hasn't even been written yet and you're sort of working with the director on a few key ideas and sort of expanding from there and that's certainly the case in the batman i think you know i started um when there was nothing on the page really but it was just a conversation with um matt and with and based around his amazing take on bruce the idea that you know we were so early in his career and and that you know he was excited about bruce um sort of doing it all himself and so the design really expanded from there was it a conscious choice to have bruce wayne look kind of more 90s grunge than the slick businessman one of the things i'm most excited about our batman is that you know he's a he's not reliant on the the trappings of wayne industry to to do his thing that um that he's really doing it himself and so i think in the same way that the design of the car and the suit are generated from that ethos i think you see it in his character i mean he's just simply one guy who's trying to you know avenge the wrongs you know that he sees in the world and um and do his thing do his best to make the world a better place so i think it's really like it's a stripped down bruce and i'm so proud of that take and who he is less slick i want to say this film has always been said to be much darker than any other version of batman before did you intend and the director in tenford to be as dark as it is did you want it to be even darker and grittier than it it came across on screen i think we got a lot of grit on that screen um i don't know i don't know when you say dark you mean visually you mean like the the cinematography or just the intensity and and sort of the whole film everything's about it i think matt was really um really inspired by um some films of the 70s and certainly that period um of filmmaking has been hugely inspiring to him and so i think you know our take sort of the idea of doing like a noir um a noir thriller that would um that would fit in that ethos you know i think that was one of our guiding principles and so when you think back to um so yeah i think in the end i think i think we got as much grit as we possibly could onto that screen how much would you like to see different in the film or do you feel like it's perfect just the way it is in terms of production design um i'm i'm super proud of what we did i think um i think uh you know it was it was such a long journey i think you know hundreds and hun you know literally hundreds of amazing artists on my team that gave um all their blood and sweat into this project so i think at the end of the day i couldn't ask for more i think we're super proud of what we made yeah you