AUTHOR: Paul J. Wares DATE: May 13, 2006 I need to preface this interview with an apology. Firstly to those regular readers, that have been waiting patiently for it’s publication, but also to Jett and of course to Chris who very kindly set aside time to do this. [EDITOR’S NOTE: No apology needed!] Unfortunately, computer problems, the day job any life in general got in the way of finishing the article, but now here it is for your reading pleasure. Chris Corbould had been a regular reader of BATMAN ON FILM throughout the production of BATMAN BEGINS, something that even now surprises and elates me in equal measure. One of the press chaperones for my set visit in September of 2004 told me how the crew loved the website and that one of the ongoing jokes in certain areas of the crew was to check BOF to see what they were doing that day instead of consulting the call sheets! While nice to hear, I thought it might have been an exaggeration until Mr. Corbould contacted BOF just prior to the release of BATMAN BEGINS last summer. At one point I was even invited to take a trip in the Batmobile around Rockingham racetrack, sadly I was unable to attend, something I’m still smarting over. Maybe for the sequel, right Chris? It seemed only logical then that BOF interview Mr. Corbould, so after getting authorisation from Chris (Nolan) and Emma (Thomas) and the good folks at Warner Bros., Chris and I sat down in his office at Pinewood Studios for a chat. This was at the tail end of last year, while Chris was preparing for CASINO ROYALE and mere weeks before shooting began. Even with the pressure of the next big film looming on the horizon, I found Chris to be laid back, kindly and a genuinely nice person. He was immensely proud of his teams’ work on BATMAN BEGINS and spoke of the project with genuine passion. I speak to so many jaded people on a day-to-day basis, that nothing makes me happier than to speak to someone who has a heartfelt love and enthusiasm for what they do. THE INTERVIEW EDITOR'S NOTE: CLICK HERE to read Mr. Corbould's IMDB.COM info. PJW: How did you come to be involved on BEGINS? CC: I got a call from Simon Lamont, who is the Supervising art Director on BATMAN and (who) I’d worked with several times in the past, on Bond’s mainly. He had just started on BATMAN and I think he’d been talking to Nathan Crowley, the production designer and he said “Nathan really wants to meet you.” So I went up and saw Nathan and we had a long chat and he said “I want you to meet Chris” and then we went in and saw Chris and Emma and we hit it off pretty instantly. Chris is very eager to do as much in camera and for real as possible and that’s always been a big thing of mine, I fight tooth and nail to show off our craft and do as much as we physically can within the safety realms and the financial restraints. And I think that’s why I got on so well with Chris. PJW: During the late 90s, there seemed to be an over-saturation of CGI in films. Are you finding more and more directors and bucking that trend now in favour of doing more things in camera? CC: I think what’s changed, is that where as up to a certain stage we were fighting for our own camps, now we’re finding that everybody’s working together a lot more. I had a great relationship with visual effects and the model unit on BATMN BEGINS and we all worked for a cause. It wasn’t just me just trying to the best special FX and Visual FX trying to do the best Visual FX. It was a real team unit and we all worked together carefully to get the best result. There are a lot of the audience that have seen so much CGI stuff now that they’re almost begging a little bit to see real stuff again, but it’s not getting rid of the CGI, but we’re working more in harmony and making the realistic stuff even better. PJW: With that in mind and given your heavy level of involvement in the film, were there any surprises when you came to see the movie? CC: I pretty much knew most of it, but I was pretty amazed at what they did with the monorail and it was pretty seamless. There was one great shot, that I didn’t realise was in, was where the train pulls into the top of the monorail station, stops and then it pans down into the Cardington Set. I knew we had the bottom sixty foot, but when I saw the top part put in, I thought that was really clever and seamlessly done. I believed that 100% and I’m pretty critical and can normally spot things a mile away. PJW: Have you always loved movies or does your craft interest you more? CC: I have more of a love for special FX than I do of movies and the sort of movies that I go and see are more theatrical based dramas than they are special FX movies. I must be the only person that hasn’t seen any of the other BATMAN movies. I didn’t want to be swayed, I wanted to keep a clear head and not be influenced, because sometimes you get influenced subconsciously. PJW: Batman Begins was restart to a very successful franchise that had pretty much seen it’s day. The Producers in charge of the Bond franchise seem to be taking a leaf out of Batman’s book concerning Casino Royale, which you’re currently prepping for. Is it really being looked upon as a reboot for Bond? CC: I don’t think it’s any secret that it’s an origin film really. It is going back to the dirty, realistic side of Bond, the darker edge of Bond. PJW: Understandably, you feature quite heavily in the Batman Begins DVD extras. Are you ever concerned that an audience knowing too much can spoil their enjoyment of a movie? CC: I have certain reservations about the showing the makings of films because I’ve always considered us to be sort of semi-magicians and as soon as you start telling every single person how you do things, to me a little bit of the magic is lost. When I first started BATMAN, I went to Chris and Emma and said “Do you mind if I don’t do publicity on this. I really want to keep this a bit mystical”. I held out until about ¾ of the way through and in the end the publicity guy, said “please, you’ve got to talk to me, I’m getting such grief from my bosses.” Most of that was after we finished the film. I thought they were pretty well done. PJW: Of all your work that is visible in the movie, the tumbler is probably the thing that has captured the audience imagination the most. Can you take us through the development of this wonderful piece of engineering? CC: Chris (Nolan) called Andy (Smith) and I in with Nathan. Chris presented this car to us and you have a preconceived idea of what this Batmobile is going to look like and he pulled the cover off and Andy and I just looked at each other. We talked about it and we both thought it could be done. It did have quite an unorthodox front steering axel and Chris said “if we have to, we can cheat and take it out digitally, but I’d rather not.” We went away and basically had three teams working on it. Andy dealing with the running gear, the engine and the steering. Then another guy, Richard Gregory, who did all the body work and produced all the moulds and then another guy Kevin Hurd who was responsible for the moving flaps and the guns, the mechanical gizmos on it. And with all those three we had teams working together to make it work. I really wanted this to be a gutty, bloody thing that actually did something. I hate all this under cranking on chases and I said to Andy “I really want to go for this and don’t care how much we test it, but I want to test jump it until we’re confident it can land (after) a big jump and then drive off. That’s one of the goals that I wanted to achieve, and we did it. PJW: Did you hit any bumps on the way? CC: Silly things held us up for a while, like the back wheels. Nathan (Crowley) built a full size polystyrene model and originally the back wheels were a pair of forty-inch wheels. So Andy and I spent the best part of three weeks scouring the net, trying to find wheels which were that big, eventually found them, flew them over from America at great cost (and) put them on the back of the polystyrene model. We got Chris down and he walked around the back (to the wheels) and I said “They’re not right are they?” and Chris said “Nearly right, but they should be four inches bigger. Eventually we found exactly what he wanted. He was absolutely specific about what he wanted. We tried cheating a few times, trying to make lives easier for ourselves, but gave up in the end. PJW: Can you give me an example? CC: Because there’s no mud guards on it, the first shot we did was down a muddy road in England, so we thought we were being crafty and put some brushes around the inside of the wheel so you couldn’t see them from above, but it actually stopped a lot of the muck coming up onto the windscreen. And he spotted them within five minutes. Because it was a night shot, he let us keep them on there, but you couldn’t get anything past him. PJW: Some of the most memorable scenes in the film involve the tumbler and it’s all the more impressive to think that it can actually do most of the stuff we see it doing on screen. CC: The master of it was George Cottle, the stunt driver he was just fantastic. He’s quite unique as a stunt guy, he’s quite low-key, he used to jump out and help change the wheels. He was almost like one of our crew really. The visibility isn’t great in it, you’ve seen it haven’t you? Well it’s even worse when you’re doing 80 mph, one time I went on a run with him when he was doing it. It was the most amazing ride you’ve ever been on in your life. PJW: Presumably the tumblers are currently locked in a warehouse somewhere awaiting the sequel? CC: We have two here and two were sent out to the states. Last time we went out to Rockingham we took two out on the track. We didn’t race them, there started to get a little bit of rivalry between to two drivers, so I had to have a word at one stage. The last thing I wanted to see was two Batmobiles piled up on a race track, that would have made the headlines. Chris just loved that car. In the original script, the car was going to blow up, Batman was going to detonate the car and it was the car that blew down the monorail. I was doing lots of explosion tests for it. Chris downplayed explosions all through the car chase, he wanted it French Connection, Ronin, cars hitting each other, dirty. I showed him a video (of the exploding Batmobile) and he said “Let’s have it bigger”. I said “You’re joking you never want anything bigger.” So I went away and did another one twice the size and said “what do you think?” he had a look at it and said “let me have a think”. Five minutes went by and he called me back over and said “I can’t blow that car up, it’s too much of a character in this film. I cannot blow it up, what shall we do?” So I said “He’s got rockets, why don’t you just blow the leg out.” Then there was a thing between Emma and Chris – does it blow/doesn’t it blow. Chris eventually got his way. PJW: What were the highlights of the SFX you and your team accomplished? CC: I love the stuff we did, where he’s hanging under the monorail train, whizzing along at, I think we got him up to 45 Mph with all the steam going up. We fitted huge steam generators into Cardington along a 200-300 yard run. We had three or four boilers the size of forty-foot trucks outside. It took us months to pipe it all in and I’ll never forget I said to Chris “did you see the test?” and Chris said “Yeah it needs to be faster, double the speed”. So we adapted the winches and he was motoring through there. The DVD doesn’t do it justice how fast he was going. With all that steam erupting as he was going. When we switched the steam off for about thirty seconds it would rain. It was our own little mini climate within Cardington. It was fantastic. PJW: One of the absolute highlights of the set visit was the tour of Gotham City. The Cardington set really was impressive, wasn’t it? CC: It is huge, but the greatest thing for us, was it’s very high so we could let explosions off in there. If you do it on a stage in Shepperton or Pinewood, you’ve got about forty foot. You’ve got to consider how high it’s going to go up. Whereas Cardington was a facility where they seriously tested huge fires and explosions, we had carte blanche to do exactly what we wanted, the freedom of that was fantastic. PJW: So the sets are still standing then? CC: Yeah it’s all there ready for II. TO BE CONTINUED... Paul J. Wares is the U.K. editor of BATMAN ON FILM and a contributor to ON-FILM.NET.