BATMAN RETURNS Director and Cast Share Some Great and Interesting Stories For The 25th Anniversary
Can you believe it's been 25 years since Tim Burton's Batman Returns was released!? I loved those Batman movies that Burton and Michael Keaton made. It's a shame they didn't get to make any more of them together.
For the 25th anniversary of the film Burton, Keaton, Michelle Pfeiffer and Danny DeVito talked to THR and shared some fun and interesting stories about their time working on Batman Returns. Here are a few things that they reveal.
Michael Keaton ended up cutting out more than half of his Batman lines from the script:
Screenwriter Daniel Waters explained that he had more dialogue for Batman in his script for the film but Keaton kept cutting out his dialogue. Waters said:
"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 wanted to let the suit do most of the talking because he thought the suit was a powerful image onscreen and he embraced that.
Michelle Pfeiffer wasn't originally cast as Catwoman and it crushed Her:
Pfeiffer was a huge fan of Catwoman and she wanted the role so bad. Ultimately, Annette Bening was originally cast in the role. Luckily for Pfeiffer, Bening got pregnant and she ended up landing the role!
"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. 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."
The actress ended up going through months of whip and kickboxing training and she ended up doing all of her own stunts in the movie involving the whip.
Michelle Pfeiffer had to be vacuum-packed in the Catwoman suit:
The actress said that it was the most uncomfortable costume to wear and they had to vacuum-pack her in the suit!
"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. 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 was that the first version of the costume didn't have a way to let her use the bathroom!
Michelle Pfeiffer really held a bird in her mouth. That was not faked:
Remember that scene where Catwoman had a live bird in her mouth? That wasn't faked. That wasn't CGI. Pfeiffer really had a real bird in her mouth! Burton Said:
"I don't think I've ever been so impressed. She had a live bird in her mouth while the camera was rolling. 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 added that she never really thought about the ponder potential danger of holding a live bird in her mouth when she did it:
"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. 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."
The screenwriter wasn't thrilled that Batman killed someone in the movie:
The original script that Daniel Waters wrote didn't include Batman killing anyone. That was included in the film after the fact and Waters wasn't happy with it.
"Batman killing the clown by throwing his bomb back at him, that wasn't in my draft. I know how uptight people are about Batman killing people in the first place. To me, if he's going to kill somebody, it better be worth it. It should mean something. So, when he's killing people in a devil-may-care way, it's a little grating."
Burton went on to share his thoughts on the violence in the film saying, "At the time, it felt like we were exploring new territory and it's probably quite tame compared to now." The studio never pushed back and said they couldn't do it so they went with it.
Danny Elfman wrote the majority of the musical score in an airplane bathroom:
After visiting the set of the film, Elfman was inspired and on his flight home he ended up writing the majority of the score on an airplane in the bathroom.
"I was hearing the whole theme in my head, the A section, B section, French horns, first strings, second strings.… I was really breaking it all down on this incredibly loud 747. Since I was sitting next to somebody, I didn't want to yell into my tape recorder. So I kept running into the restroom, which was even noisier. I guess the bathrooms were close to the engines or something. It was getting weirder and weirder, because I kept going back every 10 minutes with new ideas. Every time I came out, there were more and more concerned flight attendants asking me if everything was OK. This was 'pre-heavy terrorism,' otherwise I'm sure I would've ended up in some type of handcuffs or restraints. Everyone was like, 'What the f— is this guy doing every 10 minutes?!'
Tim Burton says the studio pushed him out of the franchise:
Even though Batman Returns did well, the studio wanted to push the franchise in a more toy-friendly direction, so they wanted to push Burton out and get Joel Schumacher in, which was the biggest mistake ever. Apparently, the studio received thousands of letters from angry parents saying that the Batman films scared their kids. Burton talked about his first meeting with the studio regarding the third film:
"I don't know if any ideas made it in. I realized halfway through my meeting with Warner Bros. that they didn't really want me to do the movie. They kept saying, ‘Don't you wanna go back and do a movie like Edward Scissorhands? Something smaller?' I said, 'You don't want me to do the movie, do you?'
That's a shame. Keaton then ended up dropping out and that was the end of Burton and Keaton's Batman.
There's a lot of other things that I didn't include in this post that was revealed in the interview, which you can read here. These were just a few of the more interesting things mentioned.