Design On Decay
by Henry Sheehan, as featured in the July 1992 issue of St. Louis Post
Posted by drax1 on Mon, 5th October 2009 at 1:37pm
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PRODUCTION designer Bo Welch still laughs at the awe he felt in February 1991 when he was hired to design the sets and props for "Batman Returns."
"It's big. It's huge. It was tremendous," he recalls. "When we started it, we had the original start date - whatever it was, it was ridiculous. We said, OK, if we have to get this done, we have to work seven days a week, 12 or 14 hours a day.
"I hired my usual gang that I always work with, and then more, because it was a large project. We had four illustrators, 16 set designers, model makers, the whole thing. I would go to work in those early few weeks and I would be designing a million dollars worth of sets a day basically, to get the idea going. And we would go on from there. You start with the broad strokes, and once you get a good broad stroke, then it's easier to flesh in the rest.
"Eventually we had 250 carpenters working seven days a week. It reminded me of World War II aircraft plants. It was really impressive, all these people working, sometimes there'd be many as 10 to 12 condors working. A condor is a quarter-million-dollar piece of equipment - four wheels and an arm with a basket on the end and it can reach up real high. They looked like prehistoric monsters feeding off the perimeter walls of the set. It was invigorating."
The making of "Batman Returns" involved shooting on eight stages.
"We had the biggest stage at Warner Bros., Stage 16, which was Gotham Plaza, our caricature of Rockefeller Center," Welch says. "A little more decay. A small rink. A 40-foot Christmas tree in the center of the plaza that seems small in comparison to the building. And a heavy sprinkling of heroic, kind of fascist, world's-fair sculpture - that kind of chiseled, machine-age, Mussolini-fascist heroic sculptures that are intended to dwarf real people. It's about oppression."
If the words "decay" and "fascist" don't sound like the first "Batman" outing, there's a reason. Welch, who had worked with "Batman" director Tim Burton on "Beetlejuice" and "Edward Scissorhands," wondered why his colleague and friend, with his bent for the quirky, offbeat and original, would want to make a sequel in the first place.
"The guy can do any movie he wants. I wanted to make sure that we weren't really making a sequel as much as we had the opportunity here to take some unusual characters and develop them and the idea of Batman further. So we didn't really think of it as a sequel, just an opportunity to go places and explore some ideas. I was relieved to hear that.
"After that basically you have the same set of guidelines as the first one: a kind of dark, neurotic character who is wealthy and dons a rubber bat suit to go out and protect this decaying city. I'm not even sure decaying was in the first set of guidelines, but that was added. Because the first one wasn't decayed-looking. But it made sense to me that if a city is in desperate need of a hero and is rife with corruption, than it is decaying and it is decadent. So I try to physically manifest some of those ideas."
Production designers are responsible for the appearance of every non-living item that appears in front of a camera, and the notion of decay is one of those guidelines that both directs and frees an imagination. Welch, an architect by training, was able to unleash what he refers to as a nightmarish, urban fantasy.
"Buildings that are literally tilted," he says. "A lot of heavy, retro-fitted chains and steel and propping up. Retro-fitting to hold together a decaying city, but just barely doing it and always maintaining a tenuousness or tension, so it looks like it could collapse on you at any second. That's one of the ideas.
"Then it's basically creating a generic American city. And I think that in that area, the city is a little more profane, mixing doughnut shops with heroic architecture, which is more like America. The United States is not really pure, it's not really all Deco. So we mixed some period architecture with fascism, with decay and a little more kind of American wit. Not obvious nonsense, but the juxtaposition of a weight-loss clinic and a heroic building. There's that kind of mix that you see everywhere in our country."
However, Welch is careful to point out that the sets are not just there to overwhelm the audience. Even though, for instance, Wayne Manor is a huge, oversized palace of a house, that scale is supposed to tell you something.
"And since everything else in the movie is big," he says, "then Wayne Manor is real big. We have a fireplace in Wayne Manor that you could park three cars in. It would eat up the 'Citizen Kane' fireplace. And it reinforces the idea of lonely hero in this world."
One of the most famous examples of the pair's designs - both oddball and expressive - are the suburban houses in "Edward Scissorhands," which looked like gaily colored machine gun bunkers. Welch - who created the entire neighborhood from his own imagination ("It was all invented; when you read the script there was nothing there") - didn't begin his designs until he found a real housing development in Florida.
"We liked the streets, the way the houses stacked up: The geography was very bold and graphic and yet slightly disorienting," he says. "It offered us a chance to shoot the necessary number of scenes and not feel that you really could see the thing in one view, that it was so contained.
"It just had a real graphic quality, the way the houses were all pretty close but had token differences in them that the developer would have added. But we took those houses and I skinned them, in part to eliminate any extraneous texture and achieve a more matchbox-like appearance. Then, of course, the paint jobs, faded glory of optimistic suburbia, faded circus colors. And we took out all their shrubbery so we started with an empty palette and put just enough overgrown brush in there so that when Edward came back and did the topiary sculpture, you would believe that perhaps somehow he could have done this."
The sets in "Batman Returns," on the other hand, were entirely imaginary. One example, is the headquarters of one of the film's villains, the Penguin.
"The Penguin's lair," Welch says, "is in an abandoned zoo in a neglected corner of a park in the middle of Gotham; it could be an equivalent of Central Park. In this abandoned zoo is an old rotting, decaying ice floe with a big window sticking out of the ground called 'Arctic World.' Penguin, when he was abandoned by his parents as a baby, washed up in the sewers and was pulled out of the water by live penguins and raised by them. Thus, it became his headquarters. It was originally white, stylized and man-made, and over the years it has become green and decayed, kind of like a little diseased area under the city.
"We had to go to Universal to do that one," he explains, "because we used our one truly huge Warner Bros. stage for Gotham Plaza. So we went to Stage 12 at Universal, which has a 50-foot ceiling and a round hole in the middle of the floor that has a filtration system. We ended up flooding three-quarters of the stage, so we filled above the hole and then built a wall around the perimeter of the set. We had waist-deep water on almost the whole stage. We built it in five weeks, filled it with water, patched a few of the leaks, and it was ready to shoot.
"So you got water, you got air conditioning, and then your lighting crew comes in, your camera crew comes in, they all have hip-waders," Welch continues. "The animal wranglers come in; we had two species of live penguins plus puppet penguins. Fire. The whole venue of available effects. There's some explosions. The idea is that there's this little Penguin, and he's on his island in the middle of this display, surrounded by water and everything sort of visually focuses toward him. And the contrast of little Penguin and huge, majestic, deteriorated space was what we aimed for."
In the end, it's not plaster and plastic that concerns Welch, but feelings and atmosphere. "It's not ugly decay, it's poetry," he says of the Penguin's home. "We're romanticizing the lonely Penguin in his majestic, air-conditioned world. We don't go for camp or any kind of condescension. It's always a trap in that kind of design. We do it with the utmost sincerity.
"Because you want to feel for the Penguin. As horrible, as hideous as he is - and he's bad - you look at this guy and you sort of want to embrace him as well." |
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