We spoke to Glyn Dillon, costume designer behind Robert Pattinson's batsuit in The Batman, on the eve of the film's long-awaited release. The interview has been edited for clarity.
I'd worked with Simon Emmanuel, one of the producers, previously on the Star Wars projects Rogue One and Solo. Dave Crossman and I were the costume designers for those two films, so Simon rang up and said, "Batman, are you interested?" And yeah, of course I was interested. I'm the artist, and Dave was on a film at the time, so I was able to crack on with the drawing. I think the reason why Simon suggested us is because Dave and I both like to do very realistic, grounded costumes. We don't like things to look costume-y.
We had an initial conversation with Matt Reeves. I said that I like to do things that feel very real, and he said, "Well that's great, because that's exactly what we want to do with this". He explained that it was supposed to be the second year of Batman, and he wanted it to feel like it was a used costume, moving away from that much more stylised, shiny kind of thing.
Dave and I both had issues with the stiff rubber necks of the previous batsuits, where they have to kind-of turn their whole [body]. We wanted something that you would actually be able to fight in. And whenever you read interviews about previous Batman films, there's always that joke about them going to the toilet and it taking five costume assistant to help. So our big mission was that we want him to be able to go to the toilet on his own, and it'd be nice and easy. Because again, if it was a real suit, you'd want to be able to take a wazz on the street after you've beaten someone up.
We'd designed an awful lot of it before we actually met Robert Pattinson because he was really tied up with Tenet. But we had 3D scans of his head and his body, so we'd print out a big body and fit the costume. We worked on the cowl on the computer while he wasn't there. So when we first met him, we had quite a workable suit already for his first fitting. He was very surprised because he'd tried on a previous batsuit at Warner Bros., so he was surprised by the mobility he had. I don't think I tried the batsuit, but I did stick the cowl on my head. I was too chubby for it, and it doesn't look good with a big beard either.
I was very excited by the possibility that it might be Robert Pattinson. When I sat down with Matt Reeves initially, we were saying he would be great. That jawline is brilliant. On previous cinema iterations they bring the cowl a lot further forward, but I really didn't want to do that with Robert because he's got such a great jaw, which is much more like the comic Batman. He's got the perfect face for it. I was looking at Venetian face masks, the ones worn at parties, and I liked the idea of it being very skull-like. If you look at the neck piece there's this cervical vertebrae. I wanted it to have a grim reaper feel.
I did a concept of him with the black eye make-up, the panda eyes. It was just about making everything real – I think in one of the previous films, they take the mask off and there's no eye make-up there! It was a great emo look for him to have.
We'd designed so much of the suit, and we hadn't really paid much attention to the chest emblem. I'd designed the shape and Matt liked it, but I remember us thinking, 'It's a bit odd, you don't want to just have some leather bit stuck on the front'. So the conversation became, 'How can it be something that is useful?' Maybe if some of the edges were blades, and maybe it could be some sort of knife. I'm kind of proud that we managed to make almost everything useful in some way. Even the ears, I guess, were so hard and spiky you could use them as weapons by running at someone. But everything had a proper purpose on that suit. Even the cape.
