As a child, a young Bruce Wayne witnesses the death of his parents at the hands of a crazed criminal. As an adult, Bruce travels the world seeking the means to fight injustice. He lives amongst the boroughs of criminals and thieves in central Asia. Eventually, he meets a mysterious figure named Ra's Al Guhl and joins his gang called the League of Shadows. Using his training, he is able to defeat his trainer. Finally meeting up with his estate caretaker Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne returns to Gotham. There, he becomes the new head of Wayne Enterprises. Together, with the help of the C.E.O. of the Wayne Enterprises Applied Sciences division, a man name Lucius Fox, he dons a new persona: Batman. As Batman takes on the criminals and organized crime underworld of Gotham, a sinister new underbelly of the city is exposed, and a new class of criminal is born. Will Batman be the one to stop them all, or does Gotham need a hero with a face?
Page 2 of 3
Bale showed up to audition weighing just 120 pounds because he'd dropped 63 pounds for The Machinist. Nolan told him to get as big as possible, so Bale spent six months bulking up to 220 pounds — so much muscle that some crew members started jokingly calling him 'Fatman,' and he actually had to slim back down before filming.
Just like Michael Keaton before him, Bale found the Batsuit genuinely miserable to wear, describing it as heavy and claustrophobic. He turned that discomfort into a performance choice though, using the restriction to help shape Batman's strained, growling voice.
Michael Caine didn't just play Alfred as a generic proper English butler. He based the voice and bearing on a colonel he'd served under in the army at eighteen, saying the loyalty and duty Alfred shows Bruce reminded him of that military comradeship.
For his very first scene with Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, Bale was supposed to be lying in bed pretending to sleep while Alfred and Lucius Fox woke him up. Except while waiting around for everyone to get set up, he genuinely nodded off for real and had to be poked awake by Caine, who reportedly laughed and said, 'Look at that! He's bloody fallen asleep.'
During the training duel between Bruce and Ducard on the frozen lake, Bale and Liam Neeson could hear the ice splitting and cracking under their feet all day long. They had to hold completely still whenever it happened. By the time the crew came back the next day to reshoot anything, the whole lake had thawed.
Liam Neeson stands at 6'3", which turned out to be a problem for the League of Shadows scenes since he towered over the rest of his ninja army. The crew's fix was pretty low-tech: they just had most of the other ninjas stand on wooden blocks so the height difference wasn't so obvious on camera.
Before Cillian Murphy locked down the role, some genuinely surprising names were floated for Jonathan Crane, including shock rocker Marilyn Manson, along with Christopher Eccleston and Ewan McGregor.
Cillian Murphy actually tried out for the role of Bruce Wayne, not Scarecrow. He didn't get it, obviously, but Nolan liked what he saw so much that he created a role for him anyway and cast him as the film's main villain instead.
If you've noticed Jonathan Crane takes his glasses off a lot in this film, that's not an accident. Nolan reportedly became fascinated with Murphy's pale blue eyes during filming and kept looking for excuses to get the glasses off his face so the camera could catch them.
Years before he was making everyone's skin crawl on the Iron Throne, Jack Gleeson had a tiny role in Batman Begins as a young boy who stumbles across Batman prowling the city at night. Gleeson later described the experience as a genuinely memorable moment early in his career.
