Batman director Tim Burton still hasn’t gotten over the nippled Batsuit of Batman Forever.
During an interview with Empire Magazine, the 63-year-old filmmaker had some strong words for Warner Bros. who replaced Burton for the third film after Batman Returns was “too dark”.
“They went the other way,” said Burton. “That’s the funny thing about it. But then I was like, ‘Wait a minute. Okay. Hold on a second here. You complain about me, I’m too weird, I’m too dark, and then you put nipples on the costume? Go f**k yourself.’ Seriously. So, yeah, I think that’s why I didn’t end up [doing a third film.]”
Batman Returns was met with concern from Warner Bros.
Essentially, they thought the critically acclaimed Batman sequel was just too dark and didn’t want to make another sequel with Burton at the helm. After he left, Burton was replaced by Joel Schumacher who, let’s face it, made some definite… choices.
But the conversation about Batman Returns being too dark reminded Burton of The Batman. “It is funny to see this now, because all these memories come back of, ‘It’s too dark,’ So, it makes me laugh a little bit.”
Although Burton is yet to see the recent Batman film, his observations about the film being too dark are clearly reminiscent of his own experiences with the err… Dark Knight.
“I’m not just overly dark,” Burton explained. “That represents me in the sense that… that’s how I see things. It’s not meant as pure darkness. There’s a mixture. I feel really fondly about [Batman Returns] because of the weird experiment that it felt like.”
As for the bat nipples, those were the work of Schumacher and his lead sculptor, Jose Fernandez.
“It wasn’t fetish to me, it was more informed by Roman armor — like Centurions,” Fernandez told Mel Magazine about the legendary nipples. “And, in the comic books, the characters always looked like they were naked with spray paint on them — it was all about anatomy, and I like to push anatomy. I don’t know exactly where my head was at back in the day, but that’s what I remember. And so, I added the nipples. I had no idea there was going to end up being all this buzz about it.”
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It turned out that Schumacher was a big fan… and made them even more prominent in the sequel.
“I didn’t really care or think much about it,” Fernandez said about the nipple controversy. “Whenever I had a chance, I’d explain where the concept came from — from Roman armor — but after a while, it got its own life and I just let it be. I couldn’t think of it much more after that.”
Read more about the dark knight’s latest outing with IGN’s The Batman review, as well as our list of 10 things you didn’t know about the Batman reboot, and a wild detail about Paul Dano’s Riddler.
Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.