The Worst Idea Of All Time - DirCom: Batman and Robin

Episode Date: April 9, 2018

Originally recorded and released for the Patreon supporters in Jan 2017.Join the film's director Joel Schumacher and screen writer Akiva Goldsman for this bluetooth audio commentary track to  accompany your watch of 1997's Batman and Robin. If you want to attempt to sync up your tracks, kick that movie off when you hear these filmmakers start talking. Enjoy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My name is Freeze. Learn it well. For it's the chilling sound of your doom. This is the way the world could end. Please show some mercy. With ice. With a kiss. Please, show some mercy. with ice, with a kiss,

with venom. I probably should have mentioned this. I'm poison. Poison Ivy. and the only man who can stop them Hi, Freeze. I'm Batman. can't do it alone. Hello, my name is Joel Schumacher, director of the 1997 film Batman and Robin.

I'd like to introduce you to my friend, Avika Goldsman. How you doing? How is everyone? How are you, Guy? My name's Joel. Yeah, I know. I call everyone Guy. Ah, sorry.

I forget that. I forget your colloquialisms. Yeah. I'm good, thank you. It's been a long time since I've revisited this time in our lives, so I'm very interested to see how it holds up. How are you going, Avika? Akiva? Very good. I'm very interested to see how it holds up. How are you going, Avika? Akiva?

Very good. Very, very good. It's great to be back in a little boothy studio with you, a hot little voice box here. The fans demanded it. We're coming up to the 20-year anniversary of this film. That's right. And so we're putting out a special Bluetooth release of the movie

that you can download on your phone. Via Bluetooth. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's certainly going to be an interesting time dredging up a lot of good memories, but also a lot of bad memories for mine and Akiva. Obviously, we started working together on this in 94, 95, when you brought me the script

and said you got an idea for another Batman sequel. Yeah, absolutely. So as you can see in the intro here, because this was written with very specific screen directions from yours truly, I want butts, I want groins, I want leather, I want too many of these close-up shots on bits of equipment being put on

to the point of kind of absurdity and humor because, you know, I get what's funny. That's what people have always said about my writing. I get it. You do get what's funny. I find you and you sort of stuck with it through a lot of the script. The explicit direction you gave me didn't really leave a lot of room for my own creative license.

I mean, I felt like I had you set every for the good reason that you were also on set every day i i wouldn't say that you certainly put your mark on this film let's not uh put this all in boat akiva the ss akiva goldsman uh no yeah certainly we were we were co-captains all i'm saying is i find your script writing style uh you know both quite lively and exciting, but very controlling. That's fine. Look, the visual style that you've decided to choose here 20 years ago, Joel, if I can call you that.

Do you think it's aged well? I do. Thank you. Yeah, I do. I think there's a lot of, obviously, LEDs really got a lot of play in this and dry ice did as well. We did think that LEDs and dry ice did as well. Well, we did think that LEDs and dry ice were the future.

Yeah. And I think until details of our production leaked out, they were looking quite promising. I certainly bought a lot of stock in both LEDs and dry ice. Of course, there was a huge accident on the last day of filming which sent stocks plummeting

and that was certainly regrettable. But I'm glad you think it's age well because you don't see a lot of dry ice and leds not anymore not enough not like not like we had him uh not to blow my own trumpet too much but uh the opening line which we we just had moments ago from robin uh i want a car yeah i thought that'd be a nice touch the first bit of dialogue that you get from one of the characters is a bit of frivolous fun you know set this script off on a good humorous note it's a line for the everyman yeah isn't it everyone can you know everyone can uh relate identify with wanting a car completely

and so if you imbue robin with that then you you sort of relatability joel this is what i told you and this was our central mission in making this film, was putting two great minds together. Akiva Goldsmith, yours truly. And myself, Joel Schumacher. Putting those two brains together to create a vision which everyone could relate to. And it was grounded just in reality

from opening to closing credits. We wanted to create a grittier Batman. Kind of a hyper real reboot in the wake of the sort of... Adam West, that series had certainly put its mark on the franchise. The animated series was out around this time. People had a little bit of a taste of a slightly darker feel. And we thought, you know what would be great? We'll do a real gritty version of it. being you know one of the operative words there we wanted to feel as

realistic as possible so we did a lot of research into ice beams uh the science behind them and also you spent a lot of time with super villains in different hospitals yes i did and uh sort of penitentiaries and sort of, you know, the mannerisms, the text, the way they speak. Learning from them and teaching them as well. Arnold Schwarzenegger's disgraced the screen with his opening line there, the ice man cometh. I can't remember what that was in reference to in particular,

but I do remember it being a very clever line. I think it might have been biblical from memory. You really threw a lot of your best stuff And your worst stuff at Arnold in this film I thought You gave him the full range of options In this one what I particularly like I was reading a brief history of the universe at the time And just sort of learning about the physics of the universe

That's why I sort of threw that knowledge off at Arnie The one constant in the universe that's why i sort of threw that knowledge off at arnie the one constant universe that every everything gets cold yeah uh that's uh that's i mean it's science is what that is your research shines through shines like a diamond you could say diamonds a huge theme in this film uh mr freeze arne schwarzenegger's character is powered by diamonds, and what that was was a real message to Wall Street that I was trying to send through the script of having a villain that was basically powered by pure money, and he just did nothing but evil.

He was a corrupted entity that originally just wanted to save his wife. I'm getting ahead of the script. You are. Let's rediscover it together, obviously. Now, this scene was an absolute nightmare to shoot uh we got to describe what we're seeing on screen here as well well in your own words joel pretty much what we wanted to choreograph was um a lot of henchmen on ice skates uh you had just been to the ice capades yeah i had just been to the ice capades

with my wife and kid uh and also i've been spending a lot of time with my high school drama teacher who uh was telling me about sort of different physical dance pieces that uh he'd put on since i'd left the school and so i got him on as a choreographer and that's why a lot of this you know you could call it high school theatrics but um george does have that feel to it doesn't it the set designers did a great job of recreating that feel of seeing a high school production of something that they uh maybe their ambitions got a little bit larger than the parameters they were dealing with yeah the restrictions that they were under their eyes got a little bigger than their stomachs and that really

is coming across in this uh i've got to say extended action scene i wrote the words action scene in this uh which i've found a little bit of wiggle room in there and i really uh i took it and i ran with it now we had a huge amount of trouble with this scene because we made the bat suit out of cast iron which means it weighed roughly 650 kilograms right um or i suppose I suppose, around 900 pounds, maybe more. What was the decision around that? It doesn't seem like a smart thing to do. No, we thought it would be a laugh. We know that Clooney, George, obviously playing the role of Batman,

is a bit of a prankster. He likes to joke around on set. Danny Ocean, as I call him. Yeah. And you were calling him that on set. I didn't really understand it. There was a lot in the works at the time. Yeah.

So we thought it would be a very funny prank. On the first day, he comes into work, he puts on the Batsuit, and he can't physically move. I suppose there was a lack of foresight on our end in that we spent the entire costume budget on this prank, and I'm using inverted commas here. So we were sort of anchored to it. Quite literally, we couldn't get George out for the duration of production.

Right. So did you say titanium that is no no that's that's cast steel steel what killed the dinosaurs the ice age one of my favorite lines that i think yeah i i uh didn't really want that to go in the film because it was an it was an asteroid uh i understand that killed the dinosaurs but you insisted it was the the Age and said, who's done the research here? Was it the Ice Age? Was it the asteroid? Were dinosaurs ever really real? Is the Earth 6,000 years old?

These are all questions that historians continue to debate to this day. So, you know, it's just like anything, this is one man's interpretation. You proffered to offer a definitive answer to the question, what killed the dinosaurs? I was putting forward my thesis on it, and my thesis is it's the Ice Age. There's no explanation. It's just a line. There you go.

It's all you need to know. And Arnie did a great job on these skates. I remember being on set that day, watching you work. My stuff was done. We'd done a couple of rewrites because George wasn't happy with a couple of the lines, which we'll get to later. But mainly I was just there to see this real dog and pony show on ice, to mix a few metaphors. And I'll tell you what, it seemed dangerous. It seemed reckless.

And it was very, very hot in there, which is strange when you're dealing with that amount of ice. It's ironic, isn't it? I didn't really understand how you were doing it. Well, we made that choice. It's not real ice is the first thing I've got to tell you. We just put a lot of KY jelly on the floor. They were slip sliding all over the place. A lot of people lost a lot of good toes out there.

Real ice skates. Because there's blades. There's a lot of blades there. Real KY jelly. Right. It was, yeah, as I said, far from ideal. But everyone, they bought their a-game it's amazing these little tricks of the cinema that you learn if you hang around in the craft long enough yeah and I didn't

get to direct again for a long time after this film but I certainly I left no stone unturned in terms of what you can do with the production you lay it all out there there was nothing left out in the field in terms of you directing this film. You directed this film. I did. The KY Jelly and the Blades, not to take all the credit, was also inspired by my drama teacher who was on set that day and for the entirety of this scene that you're watching play out on screen right now. So this, funnily enough, wasn't shot in a real rocket okay so for those of you who are visually impaired because we are partially doing the audio track for you on bluetooth is we've got a rocket being driven by arnold schwarzenegger's mr freeze who is engaged in the same action sequence that we opened the movie on with batman we've we've been living in it for a while now feels like forever

and he's taking our cape crusader careening up through the stratospheres into outer space where of course his heart will freeze and stop beating yeah uh mr freeze of course or schwarzenegger depending uh if he was in character or not he'll be fine uh high in space because he's gonna suit his temperatures regulated to stay cool that's right the whole time he's powered by diamonds, you see, which once again was a clever analogy for me. He was Wall Street once again. He's the big banks.

I feel like maybe because they say don't read your own reviews, but we did. We read all of them. We read all of them. They were scathing, and watching it back now and trying to make a realistic, family-friendly, yet gritty Gotham. And also trying to communicate to Wall Street that we see you and we don't respect or like what you're doing. You can see how people might have thought the message was a little muddied, a little muddled.

Well, I won't apologize for being ambitious. I won't apologize for trying to execute a few messages and audiences in my script and neither will I Chris O'Donnell I keep calling him Chris Donald on set I shouldn't have been talking to him full stop but really takes him off if you miss the O in there

I kept asking him what he was from because I hadn't seen him in anything it wasn't just the O you'd miss and that's very unprofessional because he did star in batman forever before this but um his last name's o'donnell and you would call him donald yeah i wasn't just missing the oh it was i mean it was like also his first name yeah i just say hey donnie yeah don what's happening yeah he didn't take kindly to me created quite a hostile environment for the first few days until he sort of learnt to tolerate your taunts. I mean, between George being sort of immobile in the suit.

And Donnie, as I called him, not being too happy with me, which kind of set a bad tone of the whole production. It did. This bit, I feel like I may be to blame for some of the bad press a little bit it did and this but i really i feel like i may be to blame for some of the bad press we got on this sequence uh we've got batman and robin surfing on surfboards uh just through the sky once they've managed to escape off of the rocket ship cowabunga of course in reference to my favorite franchise yeah we had a lot of legal trouble about that line i got robin to say it out loud there was a dispute whether or or not Cowabunga could be copywritten.

And as it turns out, if anyone's wondering, it's not a registered trademark nor will it ever be. It's impossible to trademark Cowabunga. We did have to edit out an entire scene which we just spliced in from a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode that is available in the Director's Cut, of course. Which is also available on bluetooth um if you can track it down but yeah speaking to uh donnie as you would call him uh i thought that the way he took

the bait and responded was really juvenile and really petty and i was very disappointed in him and that certainly soured uh the first few days i spent on set with him so you know i resent you for it but also i think i learned a little something about him that he's got some growing up to do so on the other hand I do appreciate it and with time I've learned to well Joel you know me I have ambitions beyond that initial station of screenwriter I've gone on to produce several films

I won't bore you with all the credits please don't I won't but they're very good films now we didn't use any special effects on that. Yeah, we froze Donnie that day. I say we. More you than I. More you than I.

It was more the crew than me as well. But yeah, we literally froze him. You went on set this day, were you, Joel? No. I had a sore toe. Yeah. And so I took the morning off and then, you know, before you know it, 11.30 a.m. becomes 11.30 p.m.,

and you're two bottles of whiskey deep. But I think the team did a really good job, and they made a real point of telling me the next morning I wasn't missed, which I thought was great. It was good that everyone could bandy together and really... Well, I think what brought them together was the fact that they froze Chris O'Donnell, who at the time was a pretty big star once again i wasn't sure myself what he what that's right he was for did you say he was in

general hospital or something uh he went on to be in gray's anatomy oh yeah um and he actually entirely out of spite as i remember he didn't deliver any of the lines that were written in the script on that show and said he he would keep looking down the camera and addressing death threats at you, Akiva Goldsman. I'm surprised you didn't see that. It was all over the news. I don't read the news. Do you know who reads the news? Suckers.

Anyway. I read the reviews. So after really freezing Donnie, we had to really unfreeze him, and we caught that we told him this was for a behind the scenes part of the movie but eventually just put it in the actual film now at this point i remember you saying to me we haven't got enough shit going on yet we need more shit going on balls in the air please we've only introduced a few characters so far we're in about minute i'd say sort of 12 12 or so. Hard to tell when you're in this voice booth.

But this is Uma Thurman's debut on screen for the flick. A character that was very close to my heart, Poison Ivy. Patricia. Yeah, and you say debut in this film, but this was actually, as I recall, Uma's first film. We had an open casting for the role of Poison Ivy. And an open casket. Yeah. So you had to lie in a coffin

and just have Joel Schumer and the casting director inspect your lifeless body. That's right. You had to lie prostrate. And Uma really brought it that day. And so we cast her. Ironically, her role is quite mobile. It involves a lot of moving around, a lot of lines. And lucky for us, she brought it that day and so we cast her ironically her role is quite mobile involves a lot of moving around a lot of lines and lucky for us um she brought it she brought it every day

but so she's a sort of uh much like uh mr freeze who who had a good intention and becomes corrupted by it um uma's character of poison ivy or Professor... I can't even remember. What was the character name? Patricia. Patricia. Patricia whatever. Her heart's in the right place. She is an environmentalist who wants to protect planet Earth. But we didn't want another positive character in the film.

We wanted more... Or you wanted, sorry. Too many. I mean, we had Alicia Silverstone in the mix. It's coming up later. We had Chris O'Donnell. We've got George Clooney. We've got the gentleman who was playing Alfred.

Too many goodies for mine. I already packed the script full of goodies. We need a few more pure baddies. And interestingly, I mean, Chris Nolan gets a lot of credit for introducing Bane to the cinematic Batman universe. I put him in the script. I put him in the Batman cinematic universe Bane's in this one Poison Ivy's pet, people tend to forget

that he was in this film people tend to forget this film was made in actual fact but it was and I can't stress that enough this film was made for two arduous years through pre-, pro-, and post-production. The film was certainly made.

And I'll tell you what, while we're on the topic, Chris fucking Nolan, if you're listening, what you did is sick. You tarnished a franchise. Those aren't movies. Those are not movies. They're poems. The cinema is no place for poetry why don't you sit down and watch youtube for a few hours you fucking nerd i'm sorry i'm sorry

so bane uh for those of you following this along for the auditory clues for the visually impaired bane has just been imbued with the power of poison, which apparently if you combine it with a lot of steroids, makes you strong. I say apparently. This is in the constructed universe that Bob Kane, the original conceiver of these characters, dreamed up. The late, great Bob Kane.

Funnily enough, he actually passed away in 98, at least in a year after this film was released. So this was the last piece of the Batman output that he wound up seeing. Well, now that's not necessarily true. It was the most recent part of the Batman catalogue that he saw. But after seeing it, to cleanse his palate, he wrote a letter to me. He actually watched every single other batman related piece of content and read all of the books right uh so as to try and wipe his memory

clean of this which i thought was i mean you you don't want a positive or negative reaction you just want a reaction and uh i took that as a huge huge compliment it's so true. It's what they say, isn't it? You know, any reaction is a good reaction. That's right. So Patricia Isley, at this part in the film, the professor who becomes Poison Ivy, has just seen, I can't remember the name of this character, but he is... I don't think I even named him, but I called him Skunk

whenever I referred to him in the script. I'm not sure if it's said aloud. So Skunk has created Bane as the ultimate military soldier, and he has the plans to auction him off to the Ununited Nations, which was a very fun piece of wordplay you used. I thought that was very funny. I laughed about that for a week when I first read the script. Those of you who aren't watching the film currently

and hearing it along with us, you might miss some of the sensational exposition which i think i've just peppered very gingerly throughout the film just to keep you up to speed with what's going on never too much though never too much exposition i pride myself on that and i came over to your house for dinner the first night i read the script and you peppered ginger through that meal as well and and i said to you then and I said to you now, ginger is a very strong flavor, both in terms of the meals you cook and also the film. I thought it was a little heavy-handed.

A lot of the, like, I would argue 50% or more of the dialogue is pure exposition. Absolutely, a light touch. Keep it under 50, keep it under half. So what we've got is our mad scientist, Skunk, who has actually been working alongside Dr. Patricia, who's a botanist of sorts. And she has a real soft spot for the environment and for Mother Nature.

That's right. And she wants to give the plants a fighting chance. So she's been experimenting with how to crossbreed them and genetically mutate them to give them defenses. He's been stealing her research. He's been research stealing her research they were working together on site he's been taking it and weaponizing it putting it into a super soldier who becomes bane to sell off to the the ununited nations so it's a very straightforward grounded in reality it's like we keep saying this is a movie for the common man and after that discovery of course uh they have a fight he pours a shelf full of

poison and venom on top of her she collapses through the floor and re-emerges imbued with superpowers as poison ivy yeah which we will see in real life every day it was a good film it's probably one of my best and what i like is you you sort of it was like at one point you remembered you need to provide origin stories because right after that you just you've got bam bane bam poison ivy and you also explain how dr freeze came to be how he is that do you know what only the eagle-eyed who went on to make this movie vis-a-vis one man joel schumer schumacher you can call me what you want i like to shorten names. You know this about me. He did pick that up because what had happened is I'd written the majority of the script on a cocaine binge.

I won't lie to you. Statute of limitations has expired now. Free to talk about it. And then, quite rightly, I sobered up eventually. Because there's basically two ways that you can stop a cocaine binge. You can die or you can sober up. I came to, and I reread the script that I'd come up with, and I thought, holy heck, these people aren't going to understand

where these characters are from. So I better give everyone's backstory now. So I just went and wrote them all kind of at the same time. I was intending to tenderize those stories and paper them around i see is it clear that i've been doing a lot of cooking in kind of recent years i don't know if that's sort of coming through in the language i'm adopting but uh it's become my new passion i i read probably one too many reviews and i've decided to become a master chef now oh wow I did not know that you've retired from screenwriting

outright? I dabble still dabble a little bit but you know just smaller independent projects. It is hard to put the tools down. You heard of Ratatouille? Yeah I have yeah I helped write that. That's wonderful how do you help?

you know just sort of a guiding hand there at Pixar. That's incredible. I had no idea. Now, I certainly, the way I read it on the page and the way I directed it in the film, as you can see here in front of you, we have a scene between Alfred and Bruce Wayne, was there's a lot of sexual tension between these two

a lot of chemistry now between those two actors I didn't ask you which I regret to this day I just had such a strong feeling I didn't feel I needed to the sexual chemistry

I put in this film palpable is that how you wrote it absolutely absolutely my intention for too long this relationship between

two powerful men one the brave lifelong servant of bruce wayne and the wayne family and the other the cape crusader the world's greatest detective batman it was a love story for the ages and i had become so frustrated that this was never explored in earnest during any of the previous properties. So I just tenderly tenderized some ginger. That was the love story. And just lightly peppered it around in this film. Put it in there, a light touch, a few moments,

a look here and there, a lingering gaze. Let me tell you, that was one flavor i was only too happy to taste uh it was a real pleasure to direct them both george of course still immobile at this point and alfred uh they were they they were having a lot of fun with it and that means so was i which made for a pleasant change from the hostility of all the scenes involving donnie who was a real juvenile little shit for a lot of the film little arsehole really wasn't he yeah it was a real juvenile little shit for a lot of the film. Little arsehole, really, wasn't he? Yeah, he was a real piece of work. So now we've got the entry of the newly invigorated, powerful Poison Ivy.

This is her sexual awakening, which I've hidden in a metaphor, which is her emergence as a villain. It's fantastic. But make no mistake, this is the story of a virgin deflowering, get it, plants. Very good. And then becoming powerful with her sexuality. Throwing it around, kissing the boys, and killing them with poison. Also, some more very efficient and outstanding exposition that you've sort of just gingerly peppered throughout the dialogue. So at this point, Poison Ivy explicitly explains

exactly how the loose collection of chemicals and vials of venom have been absorbed into her body through a body that we do not see and imbued her with these superpowers. Well, Joel, it's important that everyone knows what's going on. This is how you do it. You keep telling them out loud. There's a saying which you might recognize from old Hollywood,

particularly popular with screenwriters. Tell them, don't show them. That is the secret to good storytelling. And it really is one of the principles that I had written up on the wall that I kept looking to when I was working on the script. My specialty has always been directing, so you can stop me if I'm wrong, but I've always understood that.

And with all the writers and all the meetings and all the producers and execs I've met, they seem to have misinterpreted that saying as show, don't tell. Well, maybe we were getting told different things you know for different roles it's the writer's job to tell them and it's your job to show them it certainly goes some ways as to explaining why this movie has such a unique and distinct feel very gingery very gingery we're back to arnie i remember the editors were getting a bit bored of the poison ivy storyline because there were a bunch of misogynists who couldn't handle a woman being on screen

for more than 15 seconds at a time. So we've got to go back to a symbol of masculineism. That's right. That's even a word. I tend to do it. I'm like Shakespeare in that way. I wouldn't say that. Get a word, mix it with another word, add a few syllables.

Guess what? Guess what, baby? You got a new word. This was another scene that I got the help of my high school drama, much to the disappointment of Warner Brothers and the entire studio, my drama teacher, Mr. Lidstone, to help out with. He was the set designer, wasn't he? He was the set designer and the choreographer,

and you can see his fingerprints all over the set. We could not get them off. He was always eating wings. We're in Mr. Freeze's lair right now. I hope I'm saying that right. I always see it written and I always write it but I need to say it out loud. You are correct and if you look in the background all over the walls of the set, all

over all the props are Mr. Lidstone's greasy fingerprints. He'd been eating a lot of chicken, smacking his lips very loudly on set during these scenes. He was very distracting. He thought that the work was done but we hadn't shot the scenes yet. So look out for those.

A little bit of bonus content. A little Easter egg for you. Yeah, I don't know how your DOPs missed that. That's director of photography, by the way, if you're not in show business, the business that Joel and I are in. He got his greasy mitts all over these giant diamonds, which is sort of,

nothing's going to show up a fingerprint like a big old diamond. That's right. As they say. We later had to spend the entire budget for the two planned sequels to this film scrubbing out those fingerprints in post. So those are all digitally removed. But if you look carefully, we left

a few in just as a little treat. Arnold Schwarzenegger potentially giving the performance of a lifetime. It's really hard to tell underneath all of that makeup. We did. I mean, I did write a lot of direction that it required layers and layers of paint. Specifically on him.

Which I'm glad you didn't mess with. Because there were some things that you sort of railed against in this screenplay. I did make a movie or a public appearance for three years after this. The paint we used was highly toxic and he had to regenerate an entire, like his entire body was stripped of skin. So he had to regenerate all of those cells. Interesting.

So as I recall having an affair with his housekeeper at the time while we were sort of sorting out the finer details of the films right um and unfortunately for her she also lost you know he was just in so much pain he couldn't get it all off so she lost all of the skin on her fingers which put in the difficult situation sorry why did she lose from the sexual relations most of the paint we put on Arnie's torso. And so during the coitus that they were having during the production, she used her hands to rake across his torso and lost all the skin on her fingers,

which sadly meant she also lost her job. It's hot. It is hot. Alicia Silverstone's entrance now is the For To Become Batgirl, a concept that we played with. Of course name was was developed by bob kane himself the godfather the granddaddy the bat father as we call him but we thought in this modern era of 1997 it was time to um question that poking prod at that title a little bit, should it not be Batwoman, Batperson? Batlady. I put that in the script much later,

but it was one of the many political points that I just wanted to paper through the film. And a point poorly raised, but well made. Thank you. It's my pleasure. So now we have them walking through the grounds of Bruce Wayne. Now, we didn't actually think to build a set for this, so we had to break into a botanical gardens after hours

and shoot the scene at dawn, which is why all of the actors look so tired. Pretty much what we've got is a little bit more exposition, your specialty. Oh, yeah. Revealing where exactly Alicia Silverstonestone came from what's her backstory what's she doing there now she is the niece of alfred as i recall that's correct and i set myself a little writing task which i did several times in this film and my challenge for the introduction of alicia silverstone's character was can we establish where she's from

what's happened to her parents what her major is and what she's doing here within the first 60 words she says from her mouth and you pulled it off I've always found it very jarring that one of the first lines she has is my parents died five years ago in a car crash

it's important you gotta not bury the lead well no you certainly didn't you wore that one on your sleeve five years ago in a car crash. That's important. You've got to not bury the lead. Well, no, you certainly didn't. You wore that one on your sleeve. Joel, again, I can't thank you enough for picking up on the romantic thread that I've left between Bruce Wayne and Alfred and just any opportunity where you could get an...

As I said, my pleasure to direct. Now, this is a little sexual red herring you put in. Romantic. Where you just threw a touch of ginger and a little bit of pepper between Alicia Silverstone and her uncle, her elderly uncle, Alfred. Yeah. And while the scenes with George and Alfred were a real joy to direct, this was a very uncomfortable

environment on set well i mean for one we've got an age delta of conservatively 50 years yeah between the two the younger alicia silverstone i think uh being about 19 years of age at the time when we shot it a lot of explaining that had to had to go to her but But do you know what I am, Joel? I'm an artist. And do you know what an artist does? An artist asks questions. Here are some questions. What's the sexual chemistry like between Batman and his servant Alfred? What is the sexual chemistry potentially like

between Batgirl and her elderly uncle, who is also Alfred? I think it's good to... Here's another question I would like to ask in a forthcoming Batman movie. What is the sexual chemistry like between Alfred and Robin? Well... I did put that in the script,

and I noticed that didn't make it to the cinematic release of this. If you bought the Blu-ray, the R18 version, you can check that out. It is hidden in the extra features. Let's just say, what is the sexual chemistry like between alfred and robin it's intense uh it's intense and it's visceral that was the the first time we experimented with 4d cinema uh so it's got a little bit of smell and a little bit of touch in it and uh well uh, Warner Bros. were none too happy with us for that. Artists.

Alicia Silverstone's character now has been presenting herself up until now as the somewhat disempowered young woman, ditzy blonde, turns up at the house, but now she's sneaking out and grabbing Donnie's motorcycle to go on an adventure of her very own. In a lot of ways,

we were doing what Dora the Explorer did years later, or to an even more modern extent, Moana. That's right. A film I've not seen but did co-write. Yeah. You didn't get a writer's credit on that, so I don't know what led you to believe that you did help write it.

I did the work. I did the work, Joel. What I think i really enjoy about your style of uh script writing and the way you tell a story is you go exposition exposition exposition you reveal everything uh as efficiently as possible up top and then sort of as though to mislead the audience you throw a lot of convoluted plot a lot of stuff that doesn't make any sense and you really sit in it

so for as efficient as you like to be at the beginning of a story or the introduction of a character you like to be equally inefficient in the development of their story from there here's an artistic question what if we mix it up some what if we put our foot on the pedal?

That's a pedal. Once again, my Shakespearean tendencies tend to come out in the strangest of places. It's portmanteaus, what that is. You put your pedal down on the exposition, and then you take your foot, you pedal up. You pedal up off the exposition. Pedal down, pedal up. Yeah. Pedal down, pedal up. That's what I like the exposition. Fiddle down, fiddle up. Yeah. Fiddle down, fiddle up.

That's what I like to do in a movie. Or a film. You spent the entire paycheck you got on the back end of this movie on a very large LED sign, I remember, saying exactly that. Fiddle up, fiddle down. Yeah, and you were furious because you told the people at the LED factory that it was fiddle down, fiddle up. so there were a lot of confused people on set we've got you walking around uh yelling out fiddle up fiddle down no fiddle down fiddle up we got a big sign

right behind you saying exactly the opposite i mean even now i'm confused it's madness tell her what i did like elmick ferson. What a cool lady, eh? She was lovely. It was great to get to meet her. Usually a screenwriter doesn't get to meet quite so many members of the cast. Usually a screenwriter doesn't sort of manage to hold off so many security guards day after day after day. Well, that's what leg day is for, Joel. Nothing if not unique Akiva.

But yeah, Elle Macpherson certainly She brought a lot of energy She also brought that hot pink Pantsuit that we're dealing with From memory brought that herself That was part of her contract And once again can't stress this enough Generally speaking screenwriters not involved in those talks

Yeah and again You really force your way into those conversations Well that's the Goldman guarantee I'll be part of every department. You can't spell department without part. And you can't spell Goldsman without me. No, you definitely can't. And so here we see, of course, you will notice that the scenes where Batman is Batman,

George Clooney's in the 650 kilogram cast iron bat suit and where he's bruce wayne he's not wearing the suit now half the scenes we had to shoot after the after we'd finished all of the batman scenes and the other half we shot with him in the suit and we had to digitally edit that out so this is one of the scenes where we digitally edit out the suit and i've got to for 97, these special effects hold up remarkably well. That is slovenly filmmaking. So you were shooting stuff that was in Bruce Wayne in the Batman costume, which was in itself not so much a costume as it was a practical joke.

Yeah. Well, George Clooney said he loved to challenge. You gave him one, huh? Yeah, he was really humoring us at that point. God, you must have been working that special effects department pretty hard as well yeah we lost a lot of good workers um a lot of good workers on that one not by to death or anything that they just walked out we weren't paying them much and they were working three times as hard as anyone else on the film save for george of course who who was trying to move in the cast iron bat suit you know in

saying a lot of the stuff out loud after the fact i realized that you know a lot of the reports that were leaked from the production calling me uh a dictator inept was the word they got thrown around a lot in the media uh not entirely fair but also maybe not as unfair as I interpreted them at the time. This is what 20-year anniversary reunion Bluetooth edition of movies are for. Revisiting, re-exploring, and re-examining the decisions that we've made. And remembering. So what we just saw was the opportunity for Bruce Wayne to maintain Poison Ivy slash Professor Patricia Isley as a goodie.

This was a real fiddled down moment for me. We introduced a network of satellites that Wayne Enterprises was launching into the sky to assist with a telescope, which he had also gifted to the observatory in Gotham City. Which is built and sits atop a tremendous statue. You remember. Held high a la Atlas supporting the globe. Correct. We have a bursting in of Uma Thurman's character, Pamela.

And she starts throwing around a lot of environmental babble, which was very popular at the time. We were really capturing the zeitgeist of the moment. Society was talking about global warming. They were talking about greenhouse gases. I wanted to seize on that opportunity for this film. And I'm just so glad that now in the year 2017 we've solved all of those problems

and it's not an issue anymore. And you deserve all the credit you get for that. Yes, I do. Now, one of the main complaints we've had about the movie is about this exact scene where Mr. Freeze is reviewing footage

of him and his wife presumably on their wedding day. He watches it across five monitors frozen into a rock face. And we got, but this is before the internet, mind you, so the people who saw this

must have been really upset. We got a lot of letters saying if you you freeze a TV, it stops working. And it's interesting to see where the buttons on people are, what agitates them more than others. The other scene we got a lot of complaints about was, of course, when Batman is rewiring the satellites on a keyboard. And we were ridiculed mercilessly for that. The Yucani keyboard. We'll get to that in a moment, but that was a little creative flourish that i wanted to express not unlike this moment we're seeing play out on screen now uh what i introduced when my fetal was down on the

storytelling aspects and the scene just earlier an invitation was extended by bruce wayne gotham's dark knight to uma thurman's character of Poison Ivy while she was in her human facade and it was to this fundraiser from memory. The Rainforest fundraiser. That's right. That Batman and Robin attended because not a lot of people

know that. Batman and Robin, a lot of very public facing charity work a lot of auctions that they were present at. This of course was partially a ploy to draw out Mr. Freeze. Sorry about that. I apologise. That's your phone going off, isn't it? Yeah.

That's really... So that's your message stone, huh? Yeah. Adam Sandler. It's Little Nickyy my favorite film okay you're the winner okay probably just turn your phone off if you don't mind joel i mean we're doing a taping here i apologize uh but yeah so this also while serving as an auction to save the rainforest was a plot device you used to tempt Mr. Freeze into finding the last remaining diamonds necessary to...

Common misconception. All I wanted to do is have another lavish, open framework for you to paint some bright colors, some big costumes, some big bits of jewelry, people in outlandish suits and dresses i was pleased for the opportunity and i'll tell you who was especially pleased is that my old high school drama teacher mr lidstone who uh we brought back on set after the legal problems with the fingerprints from previous scenes uh and he he directed all of this stuff and you might say his fingerprints were all over this scene too sort of least literal yeah well more figurative he was very insistent that he had um more beautiful

hands than uma thurman he was very critical of her hands and so the hands you see being revealed from the gorilla costume are actually mr lidstone yeah and again if you're not watching at home uh we did put uma thurman in a gorilla costume this didn't really serve the story so much as color the tone of what we were trying to achieve here joel and i connected in one vision of a grounded gritty reality-based batman for the everyman in fact the project name was every batman when we were in development yeah uh that was nixed by warner brothers as were a lot of our other ideas that we created together uh i'll tell you what wasn't though was the tremendous sexual overtones that we put all over uma thurman in her on-screen debut they went down

very well with the execs you know what i've got tattooed on my butt, Joel? You gotta sell tickets. Yeah. You got to sell tickets. That's right. Tattooed right next to Fiddle Up, Fiddle Down, which they also got wrong in addition to the neon sign. I can't believe you got the same people to do that. That was their first time tattooing.

I believe in second chances. Not third, though. You got blood poisoning from that. Yes, I did. Took me out of the Hollywood game for a good couple of years Blood poisoning as it turns out A little more severe than it sounds But a few transfusions later and I am Lickety split

Good to go, tip top, never better Thank you very much for asking I didn't Donnie's suit was causing a lot of problems On set because of course Both our Caped Crusader And Robin have very explicit nipples didn't donnie's suit was causing a lot of problems on set because of course both our cape crusader and robin have very explicit nipples in the film but i just feel like george clooney can get away with more stuff robin on the other hand oh donnie he was such a little arsehole to everyone that

people really started pointing them out flucking them they taunted him um as a counterpoint to the prank that we pulled on george on the first day of shooting we actually filled donnie's suit uh with helium so there's a quite a thick one inch layer between the aluminum facade of his suit and the actual part that is pressed against his flesh which is helium so he's constantly uh trying to stay grounded so it's it, I mean, these little details, I imagine, is why people listen to director's commentary. So if you can imagine on set, obviously the camera's telling a different story, but right off camera right now,

you've got George Clooney barely able to stand up and Donnie barely able to stay on the ground. And it made for a very amusing first few minutes on set, but really disruptive, really... Hard to shoot. So hard to shoot. I can't believe you took a note that I had written in the character formats, which I'd given to you with the other documentation,

that said Robin finds it hard to stay grounded and sort of taken it in that direction. It's a very literal read of yeah what was a bit of background well the fault lies at your feet with regards to clarity if you don't express expressly right uh grounded yeah emotionally not physically i mean how else am i meant to interpret that well i guess some things should just maybe be a little implicit some unspoken law for example you don't fuck the wife of a colleague who you're working together with on a movie 20 years ago so sometimes you don't need to say these things aloud you just feel like you can kind of trust that people are going to know those if you'd written it down maybe we

wouldn't have wound up in the situation we did. But I'd rather not get into that right now as we've just introduced Mr. Freeze, who is freezing up a storm, as is his want. When you say introduced, you mean introduced to this scene. He's back from outer space. He's just arrived in this room

with that cold look upon his face. He's got all this love to give and a big old gun. Yeah, which he uses to freeze people. He points it at them and fires it, and they become cry-gently frozen. And also a very good detail. Now, I have been meaning to ask, since we recorded this film, was it a scientific fact that you have 11 minutes to unfreeze someone after they're completely frozen solid?

Oh, look, a lot of people have asked about this. I put in this script quite a few times. People needed to remind the audience that if you get frozen by Mr. Freeze, you've got 11 minutes to get out, to get thawed, before your body will actually shut down and you won't be able to be brought back again. What was it in reference to? I wish you'd say let's just say i was aware of a future event that was going to happen go on wanted to send a warning out there to everyone. That's why it appears so much in the film.

It becomes a central point for the plot, as people will find out later on in the climactic final scene, where Robin, Batman, and Batgirl have 11 minutes to save, well, I don't want to give away the goat, but the entire city of Gotham. Gotham, which of course we know is a fictional representation of New York City So more action here more fight scenes, more thrills and spills for the punters who have turned up

to come to this movie a little disheartening to find out afterwards that our leading man here Batman started issuing refunds individually to people who would come up to him on the street and say hey i saw batman and robin i feel it was hard to take i actually stood up after the premiere of this film and uh delivered a a heartfelt apology to those who were there uh i insisted on doing the audio mix for the first screening, and what wound up happening was over the entire movie, Dexys Midnight Runners, come on Eileen, just played out.

I'd been listening to it in the audio booth when I was mixing the audio, and I don't know how it happened, but somehow that just played over and over. And you would have thought someone would have stopped it, but because I'd been very insistent on controlling the audio myself. I mean, this is a recurring theme with you, Joel. Not a lot of people who are put in charge of mixing the audio would listen to a song while they're doing it. You know?

A lot of balls in the air. Not a lot of people are the best. Can't argue with that. Again, I can't stress this enough. I was so much prouder with our depiction of Bane rather than that barely audible Christopher Nolan monstrosity that he put on the screen. Chris fucking Nolan.

If you are listening, you better protect yourself and those you love the most because guess what? I'm coming for you, you little bitch. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Christopher Nolan's never even touched my wife and he's still not the director of a Batman film I hate the most,

except that he is because of that goddamn trilogy. He was just doing Memento when we were doing this, but... That's right. What a confusing piece of shit that was. Here's an idea for you, Chris fucking Nolan. Why don't you try directing a movie in order for once in your goddamn life? I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Batman careening down the sort of Gotham representation of the Statue of Liberty. That's right. And, of course, we've got a real tension at play between Batman and Robin, and it was fertile ground to explore. What is the power dynamic of their relationship? Is Robin happy in his role as the sidekick?

Absolutely not. He's not satisfied that was the whole point of this it is about the apprentice questioning the master and the master saying you're a stupid piece of shit for asking the question how dare you question me never question me again uh he disables his motorcycle in this scene by remote control from the batmobile which i thought was a cool little technological touch that i added to the script executed very well i thought by your special effects team thank you yeah donnie on the other hand you a baffling reaction i don't know how that was the best take on the day but again you

from memory weren't there on that particular day either that you just sent the dailies of that one i couldn't make it that day of course um i had a sore toe on the would you believe it on the other foot so just as my my left foot had recovered my right toe was feeling very painful very sore that morning but yeah i think again um the crew really pulled together they did their best without me. And when I came back to set the next day, a lot of them said, we had a really good time on set yesterday. You weren't missed at all.

And I was really pleased and proud of them for pulling together in my absence. Everyone loves a united enemy, you know? Really gets a team working. Not how I interpreted it, but I was just glad that they could all bond and really have a good time working hard together. You know what I found interesting in subsequent watches of this film

that we made together, Batman and Robin? Of the two actors that we've got kind of leading this, George Clooney and Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's the Austrian bodybuilder for whom acting was certainly not their first career choice in life nor was English obviously their first language in life who's really delivering the much more convincing performance well and I think I can do a little to explain that first of all Arnold Schwarzenegger is the consummate professional. He brings a fantastic attitude. And his housewife. And his housewife.

And also his housekeeper, which I think might be how he got busted to set every day. I don't know how many times you've got to be reminded of this. I'm a writer. You get two words, make them one word, you're saving time, okay? Okay, thank you.

But George, he brought a really positive attitude, a really good energy to set on the first day. And I think that's part of the reason we were so excited to do this big prank. And what wound up happening is, you know, people say that your emotional landscape can mirror your physical landscape. So where you are physically can suddenly affect where you are emotionally. And you put him in a desert. Well, we put him in a cast iron

bad suit and i think he felt heavy and his attitude changed on a dime for someone who's willing to dish it out and prank up a storm on set he certainly can't take it because he bought nothing but negativity and a bad attitude to set for all all the following days what a piece of shit, eh? Take the joke, George. It's funny. It's a goof. That's why you've got like 50 vertebrae.

A couple of them get crushed. There's more to take the load. There's so many vertebrae. That's why God doesn't give you one vertebrae. That's it. George doesn't get it. You know who gets it? Arnie gets it.

Yeah, do you know who doesn't get it? Who? Donnie. Oh gets it yeah do you know who doesn't get it who Donnie oh Donnie never Donnie couldn't even conceive of it that little piece of shit he's a piece of work isn't he that's what I said I said to George

I said you know who you remind me of a lot right now while he was being crushed by his cast iron bass I said do you know who you remind me of right now

Donnie you're being a Donnie you're being a Donnie and then I said you know who's got it rough Mr. 50 vertebrae Jellyfish Guess what God gave them

No fucking vertebrae Why don't you think about What it's like to be a jellyfish While you stay there In that set overnight While the rest of the cast and crew Go home Oh God

I'm really sorry I thought I put it on flight mode Do you want to take that No I don't think I should take that call in front of you okay a weird response now oxbridge a clever clever little writing trick uh that i developed to get around the fact that we actually sought permission uh to use both cambridge and oxford as college backstories that alicia Silverstone was coming to us from. Yeah.

Neither would relinquish. To imbue the film with a sense of realism. That's right. Which, once again, the sole motivation of this film. The modus operandi. Every Batman. Alicia Silverstone coming to us from studying abroad in sunny old England at a prestigious university.

We asked Cambridge. They said no we asked oxford they said never contact us again so what i did is i made oxbridge oxbridge yeah get the two words put them together save time this is what i do everyone as a writer understood that from from the get-go but you were insistent on explaining it and every time we were recording a take whenever alicia silverstone would say oxbridge you'd step in and you'd you'd halt the entire production you got to tell them they gotta know the people got super disruptive we've got to sell tickets the people putting out enough fires on set every day now at this point in the movie we're at about half way

Mr Freeze has been apprehended by our Caped Crusader, the world's greatest detective Batman, George Clooney great personal friend of mine and so he's in Arkham Asylum now Mr Freeze and they've sort of got him trapped inside of a cold beam

which was something I conceived of on my cocaine binge They've sort of got him trapped inside of a cold beam, which was something I conceived of on my cocaine binge because I was noticing that when I stopped doing cocaine, I was feeling very, very cold. Yeah. And so what I needed at that time was more cocaine. So I thought, what's a way of kind of visually representing this for the supervillain of the film who needs to be cold all the time? Cold, cocaine, C, C, to be cold all the time cold cocaine c c keep them

cold keep them on cocaine do you have any cocaine very pleased i don't know sorry that was the question for now i don't know and you've done so well these last sort of 15 years i really would hate for you to revisit that dark dark time in your life but when you wrote this into the script uh i bought a lot of stock in leds and um dry ice just off the back of that oh no before the before this so the first scene i did and then when you did that i saw a perfect opportunity to make some of my own money back on set so that entire effect that cold beam while you were obsessing over cocaine, I guess it was buying a lot of LEDs in a dress. I didn't realize that. Is that how you did that effect?

It's also how I got found out. It was very believable. Thank you. Very good effect. Very effective effect. Now, this next scene, we really didn't have any idea what to do with it. You just left a few pages blank and said improvise, which, funnily enough, is exactly what i did with uma

thurman and bane i um i told them to take a few cameras take a few buckets of glow-in-the-dark paint uh and just have fun for a few days and this is what they turned in and it worked out so perfectly we just put it right in the middle of the film the the midpoint so for the for the visually impaired i'll just describe the scene uh we've got poison ivy and the ultra strong bane have arrived at their new layer am i saying that correctly leah leah leah their words not mine i took a real hands-off approach to this scene punks with glow-in-the-dark paint just lathered upon themselves have taken over a little quarter which used to be um i think an ice cream parlor perhaps if i remember the exterior shot right for the location that you

picked and so now bane's got a set about taking on these young men with chains and glow and dark paint and uh we do we do a great job you and i of showing how strong a man can be a lot of wire work a lot of throwing humans i can't take any credit for this scene. So as long as we're in this environment, I didn't shoot any of this. This was all Uma and Bane. Remember, this is Uma Thurman's first feature film. So for her to not only pick up the acting side of things so quickly,

but all of the production and directorial elements. I just can't help but think that Pulp Fiction came out before this. I don't know what you're talking about. Certainly, as I understood it, this was Uma's on-screen debut, and she brought it. What is this floor? One of my classic lines. What does an artist do?

Ask questions. So Bane kicks through the floor, which was previously tile, to reveal the dirt ground below so that she can be better connected to the earth you see everything is there for a reason there isn't a second wasted in this film and i think that is due in large part to me akiva goldsman and me joel schumacher the director director of Batman and Robin. I mean, I've got to admit, I kind of tuned out of this bit when I saw it at the cinema for the first time. Well, I did too

and I've got to say, I really regret giving Uma and Bane the camera and just creative license because I mean, you can get away with that as long as you don't also give them editing privileges because they went to town. This is just back and forth between them. Bane can't even talk.

Sort of more of a monosyllabic character. Just repeating the odd word that Uma's throwing out. And we're in this for a long time. I just don't quite understand why we have to be here. Akiva, live by the sword, die by the sword. You gave me two blank pages. I gave Uma and Bane creative license you get what you're given i guess so al mcpherson we're cutting to now used to great effect in this film uh easy

for a lot of people to forget she's in it well i understand you do you want to know why why she is gingerly peppered throughout this script we got a lot of criticism over her scenes. She was described as a superfluous prop, given no real backbone or purpose. What do you say to those criticisms? If I could look that critique in the eye, I would say to you, you are valid, you're correct, and I'm sorry for what I did. We had a great time hanging out with her on set, though.

She is a liar. And she is hot. Boy, is she hot. You know, there's really no denying that. Of course, we introduced her as being sort of a vapid vessel of femininity, basically to serve solely to show everyone. And once again again you want to tell them rather than show them but this was one of the opportunities i took to use the other option that bruce wayne is the the country the world's most eligible bachelor you know he's a millionaire he's got women lying at his feet everywhere he goes and we just we needed an empty vessel to be

able to kind of show the... I'm sweating in here. I just can't help but ask again, do you have access to cocaine? Maybe you've got someone with a phone number on that cell phone. I run a drug-free house, just like I ran a drug-free set. Really? Yeah. This set?

This set was drug-free. And all of this movie? No, just that particular room. Oh, that scene. That was also you can't see it but on the other side of the camera

I had my nanny and my several children on set and so I was very strict I said absolutely no drugs to be consumed in front of the children or the nanny

who was a recovering drug addict herself that's very thoughtful of you wish you had extended the same courtesy to me but did manage to get myself clean five years after this movie was released.

So not a bad go. Now, this next scene, we have the building of a bond between Robin and Alicia Silverstone, aka Catgirl, aka Batgirl, who has not yet revealed herself to be either of those. All we know now is that she has a real penchant for riding motorbikes at at pace um also we just so happen to find out that coolio was in town and wanted to find a way to to squeeze him into the film and for the eagle eye amongst you

you can look forward to his cameo coming up momentarily like Like a little pimple, we just squeezed him in there, didn't we? There he is. On screen, accepting money for a motorcycle race that Alicia Silverstone is going to enter into. Well, that's what we made it, but on the day he was actually selling the remaining bootlegs of Gangster's Paradise. So he was hawking those on set,

taking real money from real people and again, we just rolled with the punch. Luckily, we had the connection through Coolio to introduce us to R. Kelly, who at the time was a very problem-free and popular music artist who managed to bang out a track for us. Obviously...

It was no I Believe I Can Fly, I'll tell you that. No, no, the track wasn't good and obviously subsequent damage to his reputation, quite rightly, kind of worked against us during the 10-year anniversary of this film when we tried to get it back into a cinema release. Not a lot of studios willing to back the re-release once Warner Brothers had released the rights after that 10-year period, their contract was up.

Not a lot of cinemas that wanted to put it in there on the big screen. Not a lot of people willing to give me cocaine during that time either which I found difficult and cold you were look if you could stop going on about it for one hot second

that would be fantastic now we get asked quite often about the special effects used in this film those aren't real motorbikes what we did instead is take two pizza boxes and uh we used an old broom we took the head off of it an old aluminum broom and we wedged it between the two pizza boxes and then got a bunch of 18 year old kids high on lsd to run around in a padded room. Everything you see in terms of lights and motion, helmets and crashes.

Let me guess. That's post. That's special effects. That was all in post. Those were special effects. And we lost a lot of good workers when they were editing these scenes. I was called tyrannical in one blog post that they released on the 15 year anniversary uh and for good reason i was a genuine tyrant i mean when you saw the footage raw it was a mess you just had

a bunch of 18 year olds running around a room with two pizza boxes in a broom going woohoo and then you know sort of 50 to 55 minutes of them crying and uh a lot of people weren't just upset in the room with the fact they had to turn this into a motorcycle chase scene motorcycle chase scene sorry but they're also upset on behalf of the the kids who were who were filmed a lot of them uh with their their brothers their friends and i suppose it's these sorts of anecdotes which people find interesting that's probably why a lot of people listen to this sort of thing, to hear those behind-the-scenes tales. Not all of them good, but there's another one for you.

How old were these kids that you were giving pizza boxes and alley-steers to? They were 18. How old were the kids in the studio? They were exclusively the younger siblings, so they were anywhere between 5 to 13. And they did a bang-up job, I've got to say. For a bunch of kids who had never seen a computer before, you've really got to respect their special effects.

I mean, I know not all of it is aged perfectly, but if you could just see the raw footage that they were given, what they have done is truly incredible. Mate, I don't even know how you make a green flame. Or how you make a flame green. It wasn't my problem, as I said back then. Yeah. Now we've got a beautiful scene

where one of the motorcycle racers and Alicia Silverstone have both been led to the brink of their own doom. They're hanging off the precipice of disaster. It's that building again, think that observatory uh they're way up in the sky way up there so tall above the city that's below them uh not our greatest special effects work not good at all barely believable alicia silverstone dangling and the city below her. Unconvincing, to be honest.

I didn't buy that. It's disappointing you say that because we shot that for real. The biker takes off his helmet who has got one leg holding him up and one arm holding Alicia Silverstone, preventing her from dying. It takes off his helmet. It's Donnie. It's Robin. Yeah.

And he was furious because he'd seen how much money we were spending on special effects for other parts of the film and when we told him he had to do all of his stunts live he was uh rightfully upset and deserved it the little shit we said don't be a little bitch donnie no one likes a little bitch you're gonna slide off the side of that building 200 meters above the ground or so help me God, I will strike down with great vengeance upon thee. It's a quote from Pulp Fiction, a fantastic film and one of the inspirations I took when directing

this. Just I just don't understand because you, so you, so Uma Thurman, this is her first film. That's right, her feature film debut, first time on screen. Okay, so... I mean, are you aware that Uma Thurman was in Pulp Fiction?

The Quentin Tarantino film, Pulp Fiction? Yeah. With Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta as those sort of... Yeah, I've seen it. You know Uma Thurman's in that movie, right? My Uma? Yeah, this one. The Uma who'sman's in that movie, right? My Uma? Yeah, this one. The Uma who's playing Poison Ivy in this film?

Yes. No, I think you've got something mistaken there. I don't even know how you could miss it because Pulp Fiction came out about two years before this film came out. Yeah, I remember. I went to the opening. I loved it. I had drinks with Quentin afterwards.

All right. I said I loved it. Who do you think is the leading lady in Pulp Fiction? Marcel Wallace's wife. I can't remember her name. She was in a Nickelodeon show. I don't think she was... Melissa Joan Hart.

No, that's not right. Yeah. Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I was thinking if Clarissa explains it all, but she did do Sabrina the Teenage Witch as well, yes. And I've got to say, she did a great job. It was a real departure from those sort of bubblegum teenage roles she played in those TV shows,

and she did a great job in Pulp Fiction. Just to remind the audience, I felt it important for us to go back to Arkham Asylum to see Mr. Freeze, who has now carved his wife's visage out of kind of an ice cube, really, and put it on top of a clock, which he busted the face off to make a beautiful rotating,

almost like a ballet dancer style jewelry box device. Yeah, like a music box. I thought that was a nice one I created. Yeah, that was. And we got Arnie to sculpt that himself through his brittle, painted-on, frozen fingers. And he really came into his own. The man can do anything he puts his mind to, really, isn't he?

He's one of those guys who you spend time with and you realize he's just good at whatever he turns his hand to. You set him a task and you'll do it. We keep telling him to beat the crap out of Donnie and he'd come through every time that's right and after after shooting doctors said you need to grow back your skin or you will just be muscle and skeleton for the rest of your life and and he did it so he did that too he does it all arnold schwarzenegger he does it all if you could just uh for those of

uh uh listeners who are visually impaired or can't actually currently see what's happening, or maybe you're just struggling to... We've got the Riddler's costume there. I'll just point it out. A little homage to the last film. Could you please, where are we in terms of plot development and story? What are the stakes right now? Because I got asked that a lot after I finished the film,

and I could never answer that question. So we're at about midway through the second act of the film. And I could never answer that question. So we're at about. Midway through the second act of the film now. We've met all of our characters. We've met the goodies. We've met the baddies. We've been reminded that no one is available. To bring Akiva Goldsman cocaine.

And we're all fighting to try and correct. The problems that we've been presented. So what are the issues that we've got. Mr. Freeze needs some diamonds. So that he can cure cure his wife who is currently held in a cryogenic freezing chamber while she suffers from a disorder which i made up called uh oh i can't even remember what i called it at the time i think mccarthy or something syndrome something along those lines uh we've got batman and we've got robin they're having a bit of a falling out at the moment because little boy wonder there Robin, he's about ready

to leave the nest, he's questioning authority he's getting a big for his boots pleased to see the back of Donnie, he was a real little shit on set real little shit so we've got some conflict there we've got Poison Ivy who has teamed up to bust Mr Freeze

out of Arkham asylum so they're forging an alliance now and uh once again i can't stress this enough mr goldsman's still without any cocaine to his name so we're just trying to figure out how to how to kind of put a button on a lot of these speaking in the present tense or are you remembering both so now that you have an idea of what's happening we just wanted to re-emphasize to everyone bane strength i mean we've got three villains and i remember feeling a little lost on set at this point um it takes a lot to make a stew but too many cooks spoil the broth and certainly with three villains working together

without any real clear purpose, I've always found this to be a slightly muddled and confusing bit of the film. Let me pull down my pants and show you something. You really don't have to do that. It's a tattoo. See that first one? Yeah.

The first one says, gotta sell tickets. Yeah, I can see it. See that second one? Yeah, I can see it. The second one says, got to sell tickets. Yeah, I can see it. See that second one? Yeah, I can see it. The second one says, tell them, don't show them. Yeah, and I can see the third one as well. Fiddle up, fiddle down.

Fiddle up, fiddle down. You see that fourth one? I'd rather not. What does that fourth one say? Jesus Christ. The fourth one says, in blood. Should I top up once a week. That fourth tattoo right there on the left cheek,

just below there. Yeah, I can see it. The more balls, the better. What I meant by that is you want to throw a lot of balls in the air. Is that meant to be written in cursive? Because that just looks like a smear. No, that's just the blood kind of trickled down and sort of created its own trail. That's wet.

I top it up all the time to make sure that it's still... You should... Hold on for a second. I'm just going to vas up a little bit because it actually looks a bit... That looks very tender. So at this point,

with all of the action and all of the balls in the air, at your request, Akiva, what I wanted to imbue the film with was just a little bit more sexual tension between the Batman and Alfred. And so you wrote the scene, I shot it.

At this point, George somehow and the character actor playing Alfred had actually had sex. So all that sexual tension we'd been building up and holding in the air and bubbling up, you know, on set and on camera was gone. So that was a very awkward scene for them to shoot. It's called sexual tension catch and release. It's a little technique I came up with. You build it up and then you get the actors to fuck.

And then you just watch the aftermath, turn the camera on, witness the downfall. I felt like it. Fiddle up, fiddle down. But in a romantic sense. Now, a lot of people were disappointed with our depiction of Commissioner Gordon in this film. And I understand that later on he was cast as the late, great Gary Oldman. Gary Oldman's still alive.

No longer with us, RIP. See you on the other side Gary Oldman. Gary Oldman's still alive. No longer with us. R.I.P. See you on the other side, big fella. He's still on our side. When Christopher Nolan tried to wrestle with this property from our hands. I think he's like 58. But our decision was a little bit more coloured by the Adam West series. Because we were trying to create a grounded every Batman.

Something that was a little bit more realistic. Not some grizzled police chief who, you know, grew up all earnest and did the right thing all the time. We wanted a big fat old cop like you see walking down the street to the donut shop with a hell of a slug on him. That's right. One of those silly cop hats. We tried to reach out to Hank Azaria. We had a very expensive prosthetic Chief William costume made up. That we got Matt Groening to design.

He didn't release the rights. But he designed the costume. It was a very legally confusing move from him. And he said no. So we did an open casting call. This time not in a casket. And that guy just walked in off the street. He was trying to find Dunkin' Donuts,

and we said, you've got the gig. Yeah, man, you're the boy. You're the captain now. That's what we said. You're the captain of the ship. And we gave him a real police badge, a real gun. We made him work on the police force for a week, unbeknownst to the local police

who were actually working in the area. So that created a lot of confusion, and he brought that onto the set. And I think you can see that in a lot of his scenes. So at this point, look, we're approaching the third act. There's a lot going on. I've added a few more balls in the script at this point.

We've got a lot of cops running around. Mr. Freeze has teamed up with Poison Ivy. We're going to got a lot of cops running around mr freeze has teamed up with poison ivy uh we're going to destroy a lot of police officers now by freezing them using the vents because i just i think it's important in a kid's movie for the every kid to kill as many police officers as possible i think it's an important lesson to give to our kids what have i tried to teach everyone wall street can't be trusted. The number 11, you need to look at in the future. Of course, referring to the global financial crisis that hit in 2008,

represented by the Twin Towers because they were financial centers of money. Getting a little heavy in here. And you're losing a lot of blood on that left leg there. And what I also tried to teach everyone is asking the question, what if? It's getting a little heavy in here, and you're losing a lot of blood on that left leg there. Can you see? What I also tried to teach everyone is asking the question, what if? I'm going to put a bandage on it, because if you're not going to do something.

What if Batman fucks Alfred? What if Alfred fucks his niece? What if Alfred and Robin fuck each other? That should at least stem the blood flow for the meantime. Those are good questions, though. Thank you. You're welcome. that should at least stem the blood flow for the meantime those are good questions though thank you you're welcome so poison ivy her main ability as a villain is to blow pheromones into the face of those near to her and uh make them sexually lust after her at which point she'll administer a kiss

and they will die and so she's sort of playing Batman and Robin off of each other. That power dynamic, that power struggle they're confronting throughout the entire film, it comes out in their quest, their mutual quest to bed Poison Ivy. It's just like real life. For example, if you're married to someone and someone else lusts after your wife, that can create some conflict on set or wherever you work.

That's right. That can create conflict on set. It can create an explosive argument. And a lot of magazine sales for various different outlets. People. But there's no... We're looking at you. USA Today.

Yeah. And there's no need to dredge up... Wall Street Journal. The past. Hollywood Reporter Decisions were made Deadline Look

I don't know what to tell you man She made the first move Just tell me that Tell me that just once She accidentally said my name in bed. Do you want me to... Do you want me to say that or do you want me to tell you the truth? I want you to say that.

I have no use for the truth. I'm a storyteller. Just once... Just once Beatrice said your name in bed. I'm awesome sexual dynamite so at this point much like we have now in the director's commentary we both and we were the only ones who were allowed to read the script before each shoot day on set uh just lost interest and sort of i lost interest when i wrote this bit as well, to be honest.

We turned our backs and we had a pretty explosive argument over a mutual love interest at the time. And we just put the cameras on tripods and left them rolling. And once again, it's... A lot of heavy lifting from post. Yeah. Those 13-year-olds sure know how to work a scene between a screenwriter and the director of a franchise beloved by many into cinematic gold.

Or not, as the case may be, if you are wont to look at Rotten Tomatoes rating of this particular feature. I don't measure the success or failure of a film by the percentage doled out by Rotten Tomatoes. How do you measure success, Joel? I measure success by how many people stop me on the street for years to come after the film and say, you taught me how to let go.

What sort of people are telling you that off the back of watching this film mostly Batman fans oh I see and it's certainly it wasn't my mission statement at the start of production but if I can

just change you know for every hundred people who see the film if I can just change one of their lives if I can teach one of them one lesson my job is done and one of those

lessons could be Batman's no good you should abandon the franchise I'm not I don't want to tell people what to take away from my movie

once I put it out into the wild that's no longer mine that's for other people to engage with and take their own lessons away from I love that I love that mentality that is why we've worked together on so many films couldn't name them there's so many i can't name for other reasons any of them either

now we're back in poison ivy's newly revamped layer am i saying that correctly layer layer certainly a lot of vines growing around the place a lot of dry ice a lot of leds on display you can newly revamped Leia am I saying that correctly? Leia? Leia? certainly a lot of vines growing around the place a lot of dry ice a lot of LEDs on display you can really see the budget of this film being splashed around we decided to give Uma Thurman some sunglasses

at this point I wrote that into the original screenplay very important to me what this is representing is her future is looking so bright at this point in the movie she's had to gone and put some shades on. That's right.

We copped a lot of flack about that. But I stand by that decision as well. At this point, after we'd lost interest in actually making the movie, we both started looking to the future. That's why I started buying up a lot of LEDs and dry ice, using it on set, trying to get my money back. Sort of a similar thing that Martha Stewart got done for us, quite an inside trading kind Well, I was spending a lot of time with Martha Stewart at the time.

Of course, Martha and Beatrice, very good friends. The three of us, we cooked a lot of meals, we had a lot of fun. And isn't she fun? Beatrice? Martha Stewart. Yeah, Martha Stewart, she's a lot of meals. We had a lot of fun. And isn't she fun? Beatrice. Martha Stewart. Yeah, Martha Stewart, she's a real joy to be around. You think she's good at tenderizing a little bit of ginger and telling you how much to put in a salad?

You watch her make a cocktail. Yeah. Good God. She knows how to party. After watching her make a cocktail, you watch her and Beatrice have a conversation, if you can call it that. And if you've watched Martha Stewart and Beatrice have a conversation,

watch them undress. Yeah. Big time. Arnold Schwarzenegger once again doing a lot of the good acting in this film. And Uma Thurman in her on-screen debut going toe-to-toe with the big man himself. I got to say, she was a revelation for mine. And I remember the studio, they were really trying to push Melissa Joan Hart on us, trying to say she'd be great with all Poison Ivy.

And I said, I don't know if she can go dark enough. In spite of what I saw from her in Pulp Fiction, I want an unknown. I want something new. And Melissa Joan Hart actually showed up to the open casket call and she was terrible she was wriggling around she was panicking a lot in fairness for her audition we did close the lid and put a camera in the corner of the coffin so it was a little more real um but from from what i saw on the tape did not know how to play dead and if you can can't play dead, you can't play living. And if you can't play living, you cannot embody the character of Poison Ivy convincingly

for my production of Batman and Robin. And I suppose it's just little stories like that, little moments, behind-the-scenes snippets that it's probably why people listen to these sorts of things. Once again, if you're just joining us, this is the Bluetooth special edition audio commentary with myself, Akiva Goldsman, the screenwriter. And myself.

For Batman and Robin. Joel Schumacher, the director who took Akiva's script and brought it to life as best I can. A movie that's been accused of being much too long by some audiences and much too short by no one. No one said that. You want to talk about movies that come out too long. Have you seen anything that that absolute fuckhole, Chris fucking Nolan, good God, has put out?

Get an editor on that, man. Honestly, who was in charge of chopping those movies up? You've seen Memento. You've seen Interstellar? What is that? More like you've seen interstellar what is that more like inter not stellar that's i wrote a personal memo to him in hair i taped it down to a piece of paper i sent it to his house terrifying whose hair was it my hair upstairs or downstairs a little bit of both nice keep from guessing throw a lot of balls in the air

do i have to show you the tattoo again? Probably not because you've learned the lesson No please do not touch any part of your leg Because if you pick at that bandage You know how it was cold before? Now I'm hot I am sweating in here Your face is very gaunt and white Thank you for noticing

Not a compliment What we're trying to push towards at this part of the film folks In the third act We're about midway through the third act, is getting everyone to a precipice for an all is lost moment. That's something you might not be familiar with. It's a little term we use in screenwriting. It's a term you taught me, yeah.

What is the all is lost moment? All is lost moment is the precipice of disaster that you want to take all of the protagonists of the film to just before you resolve everything at the end so what we're doing is we're trying to raise the stakes on everything we've got donnie robin the character railing against batman because he's under the influence through the uh pheromone powder that poison yeah as an ivy which is a direct metaphor for a woman's sexuality getting in the way of two friends and colleagues who work together

as a partnership. Can I just say, while Donnie and I did have our differences on set, and I found him to be a delinquent and an unprofessional shite, he really brought a fantastic energy to those scenes of conflict with george and i i was later told by various different members of the crew that what he was doing was he was channeling his frustration with me uh and also with you uh and using that it's called method acting and i've got to say in spite of our creative and personal differences he really

brought it for those scenes and i I really respect the shit out of him for what he did on camera it's just interesting when you when you said just moments ago I fucked your wife it kind of came out similar just the way that you said it

as creative differences it's so strange the way that you've got your mouth moving I never said I fucked your wife well you've said it now only in the context mouth moving. I never said I fucked your wife. Well, you've said it now. Only in the context of saying I've never said I fucked your wife. I forgive you. I didn't ask for forgiveness.

Al McPherson wheeled out back again in this brief part of the film. We thought it was important to remind people that we managed to secure the rights to get Al McPherson in a film. It was in her contract that if we were going to use her name in the promotional material... She had to be in there film. Well, it was in her contract that if we were going to use her name in the promotional material... She had to be in there somewhere. She had to be in there thrice. Not once, not twice, but thrice.

That's right. And so this is one of the only scenes in the film where you see two people who are acting for the first time acting against each other. And they both did everything they could to imbue the the same with a sense of realism which was the only direction i was willing to give on this day i was very hungover uma thurman our antagonist is poison ivy and her human form is dr patricia

uh talking to commissioner gordon uh i can't even recall what the event was that i've scripted in this moment is this at the fun this is after the fundraiser. I'm not sure why we're all hanging out in this bit. You've created some other large moment wherein all of the characters of the film wind up getting together. George Clooney as handsome as he is

frustrated in this scene. He was definitely wearing the suit. I remember it well on this day. My direction for everyone was to make it realistic or pretend like you've just someone's beefed and you've caught whiff of it that when umathermin blows her little powder we're going to add that out in post you'll you'll see what we've got in mind for that for the pheromone powder but when you get a sense that it is in the room i want you to pretend like someone's farted those are the words you spoke to your cast. And then I said, make it realistic, keep it real.

And I walked out. I walked out of the set that day. My left knee was just killing me. And I got to say, the next day when I came back to set, the crew said, we really missed you yesterday. We could have used your advice. We had a lot of people who were just sniffing for the duration of the day,

whether or not that was because they were following my instruction to pretend i'd smelled a fart or sniffing the bag of cocaine that you were running with to get into your locker that exploded over the set it's hard to say oh boy there was a hard day for everybody not a fun day not a fun day to be around great day Goldsman, that's for sure. My knee started feeling much better. As soon as I was off set, I actually went and played several games of tennis. How'd you get on? Very well.

I was playing against then US Open champion Pete Sampras, just on my private court. I decimated him. Six loves, six loves, six one. Good God. Well, cocaine will do that to a man. Alicia Silverstone now trying to ride in a bit more conflict for her character. She is now trying to crack the code.

Alfred has given to her a data disk. Would it be fair to say you are clutching at straws with this scene? No, absolutely not. We've already introduced this character as being a computer expert. She is studying at the illustrious Oxbridge University. As you were very sure to explain again on set during the time we recorded these scenes. She's a computer expert. She's been given a disc to give to her other uncle, Wilfred.

Not Alfred, Wilfred. People keep confusing these. They're very different names. Alfred is the butler of Batman. Wilfred is his brother. Figure it out. Obviously, figure it out. Just like Melissa Joan Hart would.

Figure it out. Couldn't get it, unfortunately. So Alicia Silverstone is there. We could have had it. Against the wishes of Alfred, she is trying to crack into the starter disc, which she has been given in trust by her dying uncle to give to her other dying uncle.

But she's just curiosity against the cat, and that's how she became Catwoman. Even now, as someone who directed and is watching the film back on this, the 20th anniversary. Bluetooth special edition, thanks for being here. I struggle to keep up exactly with the plot as laid out by you. It's very basic. We've got two main heroes.

Batman has been teamed up with his sidekick, Robin. Robin is now mainstay of this film. Robin is railing against the authority set forth by George Clooney's Batman. Simultaneously, we've introduced Mr. Freeze. Who is he? Well, he is a medical researcher whose wife became very sick with an incurable disease who he trapped in an ice tomb cryogenically freezing her so that he could buy himself enough time to come up with the cure to solve her medical disease simultaneously

to that we introduce alicia silverstone who's she glad you asked al, who is the butler of Batman, has a niece, who also is the niece to his brother. She's got two uncles, is what I'm telling you. She is studying at the illustrious British University of Oxbridge. She is in the computer science division. She has come to visit her dying uncle to rescue him from his career of servitude. What's that? We need more balls in the air? Don't mind if i do here's oma thurman first time actor inheriting the role of poison ivy aka dr patricia who is

introduced alongside her co-worker dr skunk they're working together on botany projects to try and imbue plants with certain powers so they can fight back whereas dr skunk has taken the research and corrupted it weaponizing it into a super soldier which he is going to give to authoritarian dictators from third world countries what's happening now we're introducing an everyman police commissioner in the form of gordon okay i get it i heard you complaints everyone thinks commissioner gordon's supposed to be some superhero he's not he's you everyone out there can be gordon we want to show that on screen so we tried to make a suit up of the bloody simpsons character what's his name chief wigan chief wigan we couldn't get him couldn't get the rights fox

wouldn't give us to them. Okay, so we got another fat guy who was walking through a donut shop. We dress him up like a cop. That's Gordon, okay? So here are all the balls we've got in the air. Mr. Freeze, he was in Arkham Asylum. We've busted him out. We're all together now.

We're in the same room. We're trying to figure out who's going to win. Is it going to be the super soldier Bane, who has now teamed up with Uma Thurman's Po poison ivy and arnold schwarzenegger's mr freeze or is it going to be a recently divided batman and robin played by donnie and george clooney in a suit that has crushed his vertebrae that is the question who will win i would be uh doing you the person watching this movie while listening to the bluetooth commentary and us a disservice to reveal that right now but let's just say with two sequels in the works it's gonna be the good guys i can't believe you've you've you've treated this bluetooth

auditory track like you've treated my marriage. You've ruined it. I wouldn't say that. I would say I've brought the best out in you, something I would say in both instances. And frankly, I resent the accusation. You did a fantastic job. I only wish maybe one of the days that you spent on set loudly inhaling or asking for cocaine and begrudging me for

taking your wife Beatrice away from you that maybe you went to the trouble of explaining what you just did to everyone involved with the production because we were running around like a bunch of headless chooks out there It's all there in the script. Just read it Loved this guy

This was a great casting call The script called for a man to deliver three Just read it. Loved this guy. This was a great casting call. The script called for a man to deliver three lines. One of them is, who is this nutball? Another one was, thank you. Can't even recall what the third one I wrote for him was. It's just one of those days. Of course it is.

And I just inserted as a character description for the man, bespeckled, jacketed, pencil pusher. So he was one of the doctors who's just kind of working around, one of the researchers who's at the observatory. And God, did you guys nail it with the casting there? Well, that was not my decision. You'll be interested to hear. I actually like to make cameos in all of my films, and so I insisted upon myself playing the role.

And I got that across the line with both the studio and the casting director but what happened is on set with the cameras on me i became i became very nervous and i i couldn't deliver the lines and so uh i grabbed the guy who i just grabbed off the street to direct those scenes uh and i said what if you and i places? And that's why we wound up with that. So this is following quite a similar story of how you cast Commissioner Gordon as well. Yeah. How many roles were filled? And I'm talking cast and crew, but people you sort of just saw on the street. So anyone without name recognition, it's their first time on camera or potentially holding the camera.

Well, isn't that something well the thing is and I can't express this enough we spent a lot of the budget on post we weren't necessarily paying these kids much but we were spending a lot of money on the computers they were using technology was

different back then people forget that you know you had a you had a your iMac maybe don't even know if it was invented yet you had your Dell and that was about it those were your choices are you going to get a compact compact was around back then maybe Hewlett Packard i think they might have yeah they merged at some point or so no they started it was the 90s this is this is you know it was just on the cusp of the dot com boom now that speaking of computers this was a little touch i was very happy i made it into the final edit i decided that it would be kind of a cool touch if we got the beloved character of alfred

the faithful servant of Bruce Wayne since child, and we turned him into a computer algorithm. So this was one of the first forays of putting someone's consciousness into a computer screen in a movie. I wanted to follow up that highly technical idea with a sequence of shots of Alicia Silverstone, who at the time might have been a little too young for this,

a montage of close-ups on her breast and butt, putting on the newly inherited rubber suit to become Batwoman or Batgirl. Much like we did for George Clooney when we opened the film. Yes. George Clooney, of course, in his late 30s at the time, and Alicia Silverstone being considerably younger

at the time of shooting her scenes. She was hot on the heels of the success of clueless yeah which uh which was a fantastic film i also directed um that did pretty well paul ride what was he like to work with paul ride yeah he is not a good guy oh really yeah wow that runs contrary to everything i've ever seen read or heard the good guy so convincingly because he's he's going against type yeah he's that bad of person wow so it's always easy to play your opposite what i was trying to put in the script here was for poison ivy to emerge from and i specifically spelled this out, a vagina-like bud. So it was supposed to be a flower that opens up

and reminds everyone of a vagina. I fought hard for that. I fought hard to put her inside of a gigantic prosthetic latex vagina itself, and you'd see Robin walk into and have the scene play out in there and we shot that before we got approval uh it tested poorly with an audience and even worse with the uh studio execs and we eventually had to to reshoot the scene and everything you're seeing here i'm sure you'll be surprised to hear is on uh a new technology at the time called green screen. So this has mostly been done in post. We didn't actually get Uma Thurman or Donnie on set for this.

This is all computer animated. This is CGI. CGI against the green screen. We all know how the movies work, folks. Yeah. I don't need to bore you with the details of exactly how you do that. The reason that we didn't use donny we didn't use emma because she'd already driven her price up to the point that we couldn't use it this is the last scene we shot the reason we didn't use donny is um i was having a pretty

intense personal battle with him at the time um he was suing me for everything i had uh for i think it was professional negligence and psychological torture. And I told that little bitch that he can take his court case and shove it up his tiny, puckered-up arsehole because I'm not listening to a motherfucker who reminds me of Chris fucking Nolan. That's all I took was just the first names. Any guy called Chris gets your goat?

Really boils your blood? No, I was pretty particular about it. I said Chris fucking Nolan. But I mean, if you encounter anyone called Chris, are they going to remind you of Chris Nolan? Not at all. Some of my best friends are called Chris. So you wouldn't call yourself a Chrisist? Certainly not, no.

Unless, of course... Now, I i'm particularly i'm sorry to interrupt but i was particularly proud of that pun uh that we threw alicia silverstone's way uh you're about to become compost what people might not be able to appreciate is compost is a gardening term whereby uh you might know it as mulch you kind of get the clippings and the things that you're going to throw away uh debris branches leaves that sort of stuff grass you put it all in one spot and then um you put it in kind of a container and the worms take care of the rest so it was sort of a clever little uh double entente i've always said if you have to explain it in that much detail it's probably not a very

good pun i was specifically proud of this scene as a new zealand director and specifically proud of this scene because in it uh our film passed the best l test which a lot of people said we couldn't do uh and to those people namely christopher fucking nolan i say why don't you get a fucking grip you little bitch guess what i'm outside your house right now right now open the window let me in i'm gonna kill your cat and put it in your bed i'm sorry i'm very sorry i don't know where that's coming from bechdel test of course is a test established to find out if there's two female characters in a film that have a conversation between each other

without a man being there and the subject of the conversation is not about a man. That's right. And at this point... Bra-burning feminists came up with it and it's been the bane of my existence as a screenwriter ever since. I'd just like to point out

that not a minute and a half ago on screen an interesting decision to get a piece of footage of Donnie falling down into the water. It's about four seconds long. Get that footage, play it forwards, and then get to the final frame, then play it in reverse, thus making the entire sequence eight seconds as he comes up out of the water, and then we'll just rewind, and then it goes back down in the water as if no one would ever notice.

Guess what? People noticed. Well, and I wish they hadn't because there was a bet I'd made with the editor who said that people will notice, and I said they wouldn't. I wagered everything I had at the time, which was on the back of writing the stock success of LED lighting and dry ice, $2.3 billion. A billion with a B. Yeah, people wouldn't notice. And let me tell you, they certainly did.

So money changed hands. It was only one week later that I was sued for defrauding the production by buying exclusively from companies that I had quite a large amount of stock in. Yeah, which funnily enough, the prices were way inflated. I mean, you could have got vastly cheaper LEDs than dry ice. It chopped around a little bit, got a market rate, you know. I was doing so well, it really didn't make a difference to me at the time.

Suffice it to say, that lost bet and the court case that followed, I was really on my haunches when this movie came out. And that's why we're here doing the 20th anniversary Bluetooth special edition audio commentary. Hi, my name is Evika Goldsman, the screenwriter for Batman and Robin. And as always, I am Joel Schumacher, well regarded Hollywood director. Now, to create the effect of freezing an entire city, in this instance, Gotham, what we did is a little something called

On Production Special Effects. Just as an experiment, because we've been throwing a lot at our post guys, we bought several thousand miles of cellophane and we got a bunch of people from around the place just who are on the street to wrap up different buildings, cars, and people. And that's why, you know,

a lot of the special effects in these scenes stand out so specifically against the fantastic work in others because... When you say stand out, it's definitely cellophane. Like, what I'm looking at is cellophane in a lot of these shots. So, yeah, it's why they really jump out at you because it is just cellophane like what i'm looking at is cellophane and a lot of these shots so yeah it's why they really jump out at you because it is just cellophane i'll tell you i'll tell you what let me tell you something could you people out there listening to this bluetooth audio commentary of batman and robin you couldn't accuse joel and i of not being ambitious you couldn't accuse us of not trying a lot of stuff.

Too many films I see today are made by people who don't want to throw a lot of ideas at you and they don't want to execute a lot of different visual styles that don't mesh together and they don't want to introduce a lot of conflicting story elements and what may on first watch appear to be wafer-thin narrative arcs of characters. Similarly, in terms of production, a lot of people will tell you

you can't experiment with the form once you're in production. You can't have walk-on castings. You can't hire a perpetual school, a virtual school of 13-year-olds to do your special effects. You can't make up a storyline where a bunch of satellites are repurposed from being a magnification tool for you to be able to see into the sky to thaw out a city that has been frozen by a supervillain played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. People will tell you you can't do things all the time. You know what you need to do?

You need to not listen to those people. huge middle finger to both the Hollywood establishment and anyone who has ever levelled any criticism or sasson who comes from one of those burning bra liberal hippies at Akiva or myself Joel this is

the work of a lifetime okay we had some dark days on set sure but we had a lot of fun, didn't we? We had a whole lot of fun, especially when the cocaine was flipping around there. Well, it's a real shame we burned through that as quickly as we did. And I mean, this is another example.

This is fetal down at the moment. We've got to show people how the satellite system works. We've got to remind everyone that alicia silverstone's a computer hacker and we've got to thaw out the city in 11 minutes once again throwing that number around a lot it's very obvious we need to splash that on screen at all times need to warn people about the global financial crisis that's coming up now of course that's the uh the big keyboard moment that we were mentioning earlier. Yeah, we were directed a lot of criticism about that. What's incredible is for something to appear on screen for such a small amount of time and yet generate such a lot of correspondence.

Well, I think we had quite a well-publicized search for that specific keyboard, and I think that the criticism was mostly leveled at the fact that if it's only going to be on screen for less than two seconds surely you could just use any keyboard of your choosing why do you need this specific one uh and to those people i say why not why not invent a new layout of a keyboard where instead of being the typical qwerty uh keyboard layout that you're used to, we create our own, which I have called the Yukani keyboard, which only features 20 keys, or 21, something in that order. Why don't we put the space bar up above the letters

to slow down the rate of typing so people can think about what they're writing as they're punching it into a computer. You, of course, were going through severe cocaine withdrawals at this point what if we spelled out on the middle line of that new keyboard layout tbs movies product integration tbs of course had nothing to do with this film but we were looking at them as a prospective partner for other ideas that we had in the works a lot of batman stuff maybe if warner brothers wanted to release the rights, that's right, maybe some more Batman stuff. Maybe some other stuff.

If nothing else, I would like to be remembered for this film as the man who found Uma Thurman. And I was trying to leverage that into contracts with various different production houses, companies, networks. Was she getting confused a lot with Melissa Joan Hart when you were talking to her? Not at all, no, they're very different actors, very different people That's what I thought too up until recently

We've now got a climactic battle scene happening between our hero the Dark Knight himself, Batman Mr Freeze simultaneously trying to set out this satellite network so that it will thaw out a city that he has been able to uh harness his cold laser gun with some giant diamonds he's stolen earlier to freeze all of gotham batman's trying to thaw out the city at the same time

face the man arnie himself in hand-to-hand combat and save some scientists, who we've hired off the street, apparently, to take these particular roles. Bane has taken it upon himself to fight Robin in Batgirl and they've found his weakness, which, of course, like any walking pimple, you just squeeze on the right bit, pop out the pus. That's exactly right, and that's exactly right and that's uh it's exactly what happens look at my butt see that tattoo i can see the pus mostly pop out the pus

that's what i'm not touching that pop out the pus i thought you were physically asking me to pop out the pus from that infected wound where you claim to have a tattoo is but you're actually telling me to read the tattoo beneath that yeah it. It's really obscured by the blood. There we go. Pop out the post. Is that a request or are you reading the tattoo? Because again, I mean, it is a grisly injury. At this point, we had George Clooney ask the extras

who were hanging off the real scaffolding. Couldn't afford to do the blue screen and special effects for that, but this is very late in the movie. You know how we work, and that is chronologically. We'd run out of budget at this point, so we just had to dangle a few extras who had never been in a movie before,

basically fighting for their life to just keep gripping onto that ledge. That's exactly right. They were in real peril, and we managed to capture that with the cameras. And that's how you basically, that's how you hijack

and cheat the system. You know how to cut a corner? Sure. You want to get an actor who has learned how to act and you've got to pay them lots of money because that's what they're trained to do? No, no. That's exactly right.

Get someone off the street and put them in the real situation you're trying to create in the movie and then just film that. Now, I've actually got a little bit of a bone to pick with Sir Peter Jackson on the back end of this uh scene what we did here is we created a sense of relief uh satisfaction for those watching the film in the cinema or at home that finally this protracted uh piece of cinema was coming to an end but rather than actually let them enjoy the ending uh as satisfactory as could possibly be

achieved given the myriad of balls in the air as created by the screenwriter we instead decide to add an unnecessary extra 10 minutes to the film wherein uh dr freeze the man himself michael schumacher played by patrick schwarzenegger uh has planted a bomb on top of the telescope. The role of which was taken by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yeah. So we've got Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Patrick Schwarzenegger, playing famous F1 racer Michael Schumacher, playing Dr. Freeze,

playing Mr. Freeze. Only for this scene. What I'm trying to say is a lot of people thought the movie ended. A lot of people raced out of the cinema and that's the losses on them because they missed out this final scene which ultimately winds up with the same outcome

which is Dr. Freeze being defeated Batman, Robin and Batgirl triumphing and I just can't help but bring you back to your initial point of this diatribe was that you're mad at Peter Jackson you feel like he took that technique of a red herring at the end I think if you

watch back uh the third lord of the rings movie uh whatever it's called return of the king uh he took that idea and he didn't just run with it for a sprint he ran a goddamn marathon and he didn't give you any credit for that well nowhere um and yeah i mean i suppose creative ownership intellectual property in hollywood is always uh murky it's murky waters it's a you know it's a constantly mobile discussion but it's disappointing when something that you so specifically set out to do is appropriated by another filmmaker and credit isn't given uh i certainly wouldn't put him on the same level as Chris fucking Nolan, who, as far as I can tell, is scum of the earth.

But it did upset me. I actually add a little bit to the script, which didn't make the final cinematic release. You can probably find it on the Blu-ray Special Edition. Once again, just to remind you, this is the Bluetooth Special Edition that you're listening to the auditory commentary on now. There was another scene with Al McPherson that we shot that was in there. You went there that day on shooting.

No, I wasn't. I think my right knee was killing me, so I went and played a bit of tennis with the at-the-time French Open champion Andre Agassi, who I absolutely pasted. Did you? Six loves, six loves, six won. As you were, sorry. You had another scene with Al McPherson, I understand.

No, I was just mentioning that we did manage to get her in right at the end. Just to kind of run with the ball of discussing false endings. There was a bit. What you see in the cinema and on most of the DVD releases is the movie ending at a particular point just try to imagine that there is another scene which is 5 minutes long featuring Al McPherson

because that is the way that the screenwriter myself intended it I don't remember shooting it but I do understand that some of that footage is available as a bonus feature on the Blu-ray much like as I was saying earlier there is that bonus footage of the Robin and Alfred scene. And if you do find that, which I recommend you don't,

put on a poncho because things get pretty messy pretty quickly. So our heroes have done it. And you are my hero, Akiva, because you did work in the line It's a Beautiful Day. You told me it couldn't be done. You said, I'll bet you that you can't write a line that doesn't seem to fit in the film and have it become a number one U2 hit years from now. And I said, challenge accepted, buddy.

So what I did is I gingerly peppered with ginger, that's a metaphor, little lines that I thought bono might eventually adopt in the not too distant future to be smash hit singles by the band people can remember as far back as the first scene with alicia silverstone the third line she says after mentioning her parents were killed in a car crash five years ago is a mole digging in a hole digging up my soul hole digging in a hole digging up my soul excavation um and it really blended in pretty pretty well seamlessly you can say it yeah i will i will say seamlessly as you were noticing pouring over that line i of course was um nursing a couple of sore knees and a couple of sore toes now i've got to say,

this scene that we're watching right now... While on the tennis court with all-time Grand Slam record holder and women's tennis, Steffi Graf. We were playing on her preferred surface of grass and I absolutely eviscerated her. Six love, six one, if you're asking. Not the original scene I had intended for this batman

was supposed to eviscerate his enemy for the film dr freeze and a it was actually a bit of test weaponry that alfred had come up with called the semen gun but i'm not going to get into the um mechanics of how it worked but instead due to some notes from the execs when they got the first draft of the script they said batman doesn't't kill people that's not part of the franchise. So I had to sort of rewrite this. To me, it's always stuck out as being a little troubling. He spares the life of Mr. Freeze, a man who moments ago was trying to kill everyone in Gotham and the world. His heart was in the right place.

And I don't mean that metaphorically. I mean physically it was within his rib it was within his rib cage betwixt his lungs now the steely romantic gaze between donnie and alicia silverstone i love um relationship a little love question mark that i did not put in the script yeah that is something that they invented on set and i was not happy about it when i watched the cinematic release of this film and i said there are a lot of love triangles in this movie and batgirl and robin are not one of them we got alfred we got batman we got alfred we got batgirl we've got poison iv and everyone that's it also if you do

get those special features we do have alfred and robin but again fair warning put on something waterproof and if you've got a peg may i recommend putting that over your nose because it is grizzly we also had a love triangle uh on set but off the the camera in the form of Beatrice and myself. I call it a love triangle because Beatrice... Because Martha Stewart, of course, was the third tier of that particular geometric shape. Well, eventually we did form a new love triangle. What the connection Beatrice and I shared was probably more of a love line, if you will. I won't.

It was from point a to point b two people physically emotionally mentally madly in love with each other and beatrice if if you're listening um i'm sorry for the way I behaved. I'd love for you to leave, Chris, and come back to me. Chris fucking Nolan, if you're listening. Oh, man. Fuck you. You cacolding piece of shit! I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I don't know where that came from.

We're back at the Wayne Manor now, in a set piece that I've written in to just keep people in the cinema at this stage. It's more of a psychological experiment than anything else. There's really no need for us all to be here. But guess what, everyone? We've repaired Alfred with the cure that Dr. Freeze came up with, with his little vials of glowing blue goo.

It's a neat bit of storytelling. I didn't see that coming. He's feeling better than ever. What you want to do is, in a good tale, well told, you want to have some genuine stakes for example if you have an old man servant who is clearly past his prime you want to dangle the threat of killing him off but then to undo all the good hard storytelling work you've done you want to yank that carrot away and cure him at the last moment like nothing's ever happened you're back in the

exact same position you were at the start of the film. We both were the only two who had access to the script throughout filming. And you actually held on. Yeah, and I did write the thing. But you kept this under your hat from even me. So directing this scene was a real challenge because none of the actors nor myself had seen what you'd written down and you wouldn't let any of us.

You just said, we'll keep doing it until they get it right. Which is, I can speak as a professional film director, very vague direction. To have a very clear idea for what you want from a scene and not volunteer any of that information and just sort of essentially hold a crew and a cast who are all sick and tired of each other hostage until the actors get it exactly right as you imagined in your head and wrote down on the page

it's a challenging method and one that i took to the next feature i directed yeah uh which did pretty poorly you want to mention what that movie was or you'd rather not say on this particular Bluetooth audio? Let's just say it starts with the word pirates and ends of the Caribbean. Well, that's the movie, folks. Batman and Robin. Thank you for joining us

for this Bluetooth special edition audio commentary. I have been Akiva Goldsman, screenwriter for this wonderful film. And I've been Joel Schumacher. Thank you so much for joining us. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did reminiscing. Certainly, stroll down memory lane fraught with tension. Akiva, with all due respect, would you like to get a beer?

Let's do it. Goodbye, everybody. On each step with Peloton, from their pop runs to walk and talks, you define what it means to be a runner. Whatever your level, embrace it. Journey starts when you say so. If you've got five minutes or 50, Peloton Tread has workouts you can work in. Or bring your classes with you for outdoor runs, walks, and hikes, led by expert instructors on the Peloton app.

Call yourself a runner. Peloton All Access Membership Separate. Learn more at onepeloton.ca slash running.