The Batsuit gets a makeover

WHEN "THE Dark Knight" director Christopher Nolan and Oscar-winning costume designer Lindy Hemming considered how they would retool Christian Bale's Batman armor for the new movie, one question leaped to mind immediately: "Why, in 2008, would a superhero put on a rubber suit?" Hemming asks. "Why would he wear something that made him less active and unbelievably, unpleasantly hot? He wouldn't. He'd use all the technology available to be as comfortable as possible."

So when audiences get a look at the new, heavily segmented Batsuit with its Kevlar pecs and abs and exposed titanium-mesh under layer, they should know that this was no George Clooney Batnipple exercise in impishly messing with tradition. Rather, the "Dark Knight" crew was adhering to the creative mandate that Nolan first set on "Batman Begins": Ground the proceedings as much as possible in real-world believability. As costume effects supervisor Graham Churchyard pointedly puts it, "You're supposed to be scuba diving in a neoprene body suit, not kickboxing."

The filmmakers admit they had originally discussed many of the same design ideas for "Begins." At the time, though, they found themselves steered back toward the established molded-latex look by budget considerations, as well as concerns that they were already redefining the character pretty radically. "In the first movie, we spent the money on the car, the Tumbler," Nolan says. "But for the second film, I was intent on spending on the costume." A good six months in the making, the new design was replicated for 25 suits, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"This time we made the suit that Chris really wanted," says Churchyard, who oversaw a team of 40 craftsmen, from sculptors to computerized milling machine operators, in the production's London fabrication workshop. "In 'Begins,' there's that pre-suit that Bruce Wayne gets from [ Morgan Freeman's] Lucius Fox and sprays black. The script tells us it contains Kevlar weave and various layers. But now, it actually does. We've taken the pre-suit to the next stage, really."