The design of the Batman vehicle for the purposes of the latest Batman movie Batman Begins is impressive and pioneering. According to Warner Bros. Studios, the newest Batmobile, The Tumbler, is the best design ever. The Tumbler has increased the number of enthusiastic admirers of the super hero. Here follows the interesting story of the Tumbler's designer, Crowley:
"I'd worked with Chris before, and he phoned me up and said he was in the early stages of co-writing a script with David Goyer for Batman, and he asked me to come in and design the Batmobile. So we set up an art department in Chris' garage. We set up a little machine shop and started making models of cars out of anything we could get our hands on. It was just myself and Chris, and he'd write his scripts and then come into the garage and I'd be there with my car concepts, covered in glue. We made about five or six versions of the Batmobile, over a period of about eight weeks."
"My initial contract was just to sort out the car, and then I didn't really stop. We decided that as Chris was writing, I would start designing key elements of the film that he knew would belong in the script, to help him as he wrote. It was a joy that I was allowed to work on designing while Chris wrote the script. Having that input and feedback was magical. I've never been on a project where I've gotten to do conceptual stuff so early on."
"As a production designer, you're working with armies of people, so you don't often get to do much yourself, which can be frustrating. You spend all your time organizing other people. So it was a joy to be left alone to model-make and to illustrate, and draft all the things that you usually only get to do a miniscule amount of because there's never enough time. Especially on these large films, you're usually on the fly because just to keep the machine rolling takes an enormous amount of effort. So it was very important to be able to take that time to create. We ended up with three months of that, which was fantastic. I certainly haven't known it before."
