Twenty-five years ago, Batman returned.
Director Tim Burton and star Michael Keaton upped the ante with the follow-up to 1989's
Batman, the smash hit that single-handedly made the Dark Knight cool for a new generation and jump-started the superhero movie genre that had stalled years earlier with a
disastrous string of Superman sequels.
Batman Returns, released June 19, 1992, featured less kid-friendly characters than its predecessor. Gone was Jack Nicholson's The Joker, and in his place were the grotesque Penguin (Danny DeVito) and a sexy Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer), whose costume bore a striking resemblance to something that could be purchased at a BDSM shop.
These bold characters helped make the movie a classic, but also alienated corporations such as McDonald's that had a newfound interest in the movie franchise business via promotional tie-ins — and complained loudly about the film's darker tone.
Here, the film's key players — Burton, Keaton, Pfeiffer, DeVito, Christopher Walken, composer Danny Elfman and screenwriter Daniel Waters — look back on the insane sets (complete with temperamental penguins), script changes (Batman shouldn't talk so much) and a costume so hard to fit into that it was vacuum-sealed.
Michelle Pfeiffer was crushed when another star was cast as Catwoman.
Pfeiffer may be the definitive big-screen Catwoman, but it was a role she almost missed out on.
"As a young girl, I was completely obsessed with Catwoman. When I heard that Tim was making the film and Catwoman had already been cast, I was devastated," says Pfeiffer. “At the time, it was Annette Bening. Then she became pregnant. The rest is history. I remember telling Tim halfway through the script that I'd do the film, that's how excited I was."
Determined to make the most out of her time as Catwoman, Pfeiffer threw herself into mastering the whip and kickboxing.
"I trained for months with the whip master. On our first day together, I caught his face with the whip and it drew blood. It completely shattered me," she says.
Pfeiffer would go on to perform all of her own stunts with the whip, but found performing on set was infinitely more challenging than at practice.
“I was very nervous on my first day of shooting. I'd gotten pretty good with the whip, but when you show up…you don't anticipate all the lights everywhere," she says. "They were set up in places that prevented me from hitting my marks with the whip. So we had to rework the lighting again and again.”
Michael Keaton cut more than half of his Batman lines from the script.
Screenwriter Daniel Waters envisioned a chattier Batman. Keaton had other ideas.
"My version of the script had more a lot more Batman and Bruce Wayne speeches. Michael Keaton would go through the script and say, 'Hey, that's a great line, but you gotta cut it. This is a good speech, but you gotta take it out.' He wanted to have very minimal dialogue, especially in the Batsuit. When I saw the final film, I realized he was exactly right."
Keaton preferred to let the suit do most of the talking.
"Once I realized how powerful the suit was in terms of an image on screen, I just used it," says Keaton.
Keaton’s Batsuit wasn’t without its faults. His trademark full- body turns were born out of necessity, mainly the fact that he couldn’t turn his head.
“It was a practical move early on to move in a certain way because they hadn't refined the suit and it wouldn't function properly, " says Keaton. "I got around that by making bigger, bolder and stronger moves from the torso up, and it worked."
Batman Returns was a victim of franchise-mania.
When Burton made his first
Batman movie, he wasn't thinking about corporate synergy or selling toys. That all changed with
Returns.
"At the time with the first
Batman, you'd never heard the word franchise. On the second one, you started to hear that word," says Burton. "On the second one, we started to get comments from McDonald's like, 'What's all that black stuff coming out of the Penguin's mouth?' So, people were just starting to think of these films in terms of marketing. That's the new world order."
Speaking of that black Penguin saliva, McDonald's had DeVito to thank for that.
"The black saliva was a concoction that I came up with after working with the makeup and the special effects people. Basically, it's kind of like mild mouthwash with food coloring in it. We had it in a jar with a nozzle on it. Before every scene, I'd squirt it into my mouth," says DeVito. "Luckily the taste wasn't that bad."
The Catwoman suit was unspeakably hard to work in.
"It was the most uncomfortable costume I've ever been in. They had to powder me down, help me inside and then vacuum-pack the suit," says Pfeiffer. "They'd paint it with a silicon-based finish to give it its trademark shine. I had those claws, and I was always catching them in things. The face mask was smashing my face and choking me…we had a lot of bugs to work out."
One of those bugs?
"Originally, they didn't leave me a way to use the restroom in the suit, so that also had to be remedied as well," says Pfeiffer.
DeVito didn't have it much better as he transformed into the Penguin.
"It was four-and-a-half hours of makeup and getting into the costume. We got it down to three hours by the end of the shoot," says DeVito. "I had pounds and pounds of face prosthetics and body padding, and the prosthetic hands, which were hard to use. I kept them on about half the time."
The real-life penguins had their own dressing rooms.
Working with penguins is harder than it looked, and required those sets be kept much too cold for human comfort.
"I'm the kind of guy that loves being on set, but it was cold as shyt because we had real penguins and they had to keep the water really cold. They had these massive air conditioners," says DeVito. "I was the only one really comfortable, because I had pounds and pounds of face prosthetics and the body padding, not to mention the heavy coat."
But animal lovers need not worry for the well-being of DeVito's adorable co-stars.
"They had their own area on the studio lot with a swimming pool and refrigerated dressing rooms. They were very well taken care of," recalls Walken, who played sinister industrialist Max Shreck.
And like human actors, some penguins were more approachable than others.
"There were three different kinds of Penguins. There were the big ones, the Emperors. They were very docile and sweet. They would walk up to you and you could pet them like a cat. Then there was a middle size, who were a little more active. The smallest ones were very busy and aggressive, they'd give you a peck," Walken says.
DeVito was so committed to the role that he didn't break character on set.
“Once he was in that costume, he was the Penguin. He was always in character, using the menacing voice. I saw Danny after the movie, never during production," says Walken.
For DeVito, the Penguin role is something he carries with him today — quite literally.
"When I met with Tim, he gave me a painting of this little creature on a yellow ball with red and white stripes," says the star. "The caption is 'My name is Jimmy, but my friends call me the hideous penguin boy.' I'm staring at it right now. I carry it around with me wherever I go."
There was nothing fake about that memorable bird-in-mouth scene.
Viewers still speculate that movie magic aided in
Catwoman holding a live bird in her mouth. Was the bird sedated? Was it CGI? Nope.
"I don't think I've ever been so impressed. She had a live bird in her mouth while the camera was rolling," says Burton. "It was four or five seconds, and then she let it fly out. It was before CG, it was before digital. It was so quick, it seems like it was an effect."
Pfeiffer says she didn't stop to ponder potential danger.
"I look back and say, 'What was I thinking? I could've gotten a disease or something from having a live bird in my mouth,'" says Pfeiffer. "It seemed fine at the time. I don't think the bird was drugged or anything. We did that scene in one take. I think Tim likes to torture me a bit, it's like a little brother [or] brat kind of thing."
Burton says part of what made her performance great was the unexpected physicality to it.
"Michelle is a great actress, but she also does these funny physical things. Almost fluttering her eyes in the scene where she comes back to life. Her eyes look like a special effects, but that was all done by her," says Burton.
Another larger-than-life aspect of Catwoman — her nine lives — is something one of the film's screenwriters says he never intended.
"To me, the whole nine lives thing was just a piece of dialogue and vague artistic license. It was never something I considered literally. In my script, and even in the movie, Selina Kyle dies at the end. She's completely dead after the electric kiss with Walken," says Waters. "The final shot of her head coming into foreground, that was literally done two weeks before the movie came out. Test screenings showed that people responded positively to the Catwoman character, so the studio wanted a more concrete glimpse that she was still alive.”
Today it turns 25
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