Getting Keaton to return would take some persuasion. “We took him out to lunch—and we paid,” Barbara Muschietti joked, alluding to both the restaurant check and Keaton’s own payday. “He is the most energetic human being you’ll ever meet. It’s insane. And actually, one of the missions is, when you had him on set, you had to be on the ball one hundred percent, and keeping him busy, because you don’t want that man bored.”
The Muschiettis said they dined at an Italian restaurant in Keaton’s neighborhood. “Andy and I are sitting there, a little nervous,” she said. “He’s very healthy. He’s a nuts, and seeds, and chicken and broccoli kind of man. He came in jogging and sat down. We had food. He rolled the script literally under his arm and left jogging as well. So, Andy and I after the meeting are like, ‘We have Batman…? Do we?’ And we did.”
Keaton’s return came with a lot of emotional baggage for the actor, she added. “Michael hadn’t put on the suit for 30 years, and actually, the last time he had put on the suit, Sean, his son, who’s now a talented music producer with his own family, was a little kid. So, he put on his suit—and the guy looked fucking great.”
The Flash costume designer Alexandra Byrne also devised a Batman suit that looked similar to what Keaton wore in the 1989 film while also solving one of its biggest practical problems. “He made a suit where this guy could actually move his neck, and lift his leg.”
“That old suit was impossible to wear,” Andy Muschietti said. “[Keaton] was very frustrated because he couldn’t move his neck or anything. The design was perfect, but it’s very often in movies that the better a suit looks, the more uncomfortable it is. I did that. This Flash has a suit that is impossible to wear.”
Another emotional moment behind the scenes involved Keaton’s grandchild. “The first scene that we shoot, where he’s wearing the full suit, he’s like, ‘Can you take a picture? It’s for my grandson,’” Andy Muschietti said. “It filled me with [shivers]…I have goosebumps right now.”
“Basically he got to show his tiny grandkid that he was Batman. It was truly amazing,” Barbara Muschietti said.
“He’s a guy who doesn’t show his emotions a lot, but you could tell,” Andy Muschietti said. “We built the entire Batcave on one of the biggest sets at Leavesden Studios, which is the Warner Bros stages in London. Except for the full waterfall that goes down, it’s all entirely practical. And when Keaton arrived to the set, the Batcave was already finished, and it was lit and everything.”
He said Keaton stood alone, overlooking it all. “He stayed like this for a while. I didn’t want to interrupt him or anything, I just wanted for him to take it in,” the director said. “Who knows what was going on there, but something was going on there.”
Sequel Potential
Will there be a follow-up to The Flash, or given the restructuring of the DC universe at Warner Bros., will this version of the character be put aside?
“We didn’t talk about it. I think that we’re all waiting to see how this movie does. Of course, there’s excitement about continuing the story, especially if this movie is successful,” Andy Muschietti said. “There’s an architecture in DC that is brewing, and it’s being created, and the question is, will this new architecture absorb this story? The good thing about the multiverse is that it is possible. The multiverse allows all of these different worlds to coexist and interact. And so, hopefully yes. We don’t know yet. That’s the truth.”
Anthony Breznican
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