As if there weren’t enough hype and heartbreak hovering over The Dark Knight, director Chris Nolan had one more headache facing him, right there in his garage, for his latest Batman film: how to top the Tumbler—a two-and-a-half ton, bulletproof Batmobile that leapt 60 ft. and did a sub-five zero to 60 in Batman Begins. His solution? Ditch the spoiler-and-fin sports car mod of Batmobile lore. Hell, ditch the sports car altogether. After all, Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne already has a Lambo in The Dark Knight, which opens tomorrow. Enter the Bat-Pod, a motorcycle-ATV hybrid that lands eye-popping stunts sans CGI, a hand-built bike that fires grappling hooks—while shape-shifting. After picking through junkyards, a local Home Depot and that surprisingly hands-on garage, Nolan and production designer Nathan Crowley took a month to assemble a foam-and-plastic model for Batman’s new ride—enough like the Tumbler, but with a heavy-hauling look of its own. “But to actually have a look at what we were thinking, we went down to Warner [Brothers] and got the front wheels off the Batmobile,” Crowley says. When he first laid eyes on the Bat-Pod mockup, special effects supervisor Chris Corbould wasn’t sure if his director actually knew anything about motorcycles. But that’s what makes The Dark Knight at once a throwback superhero movie and a green-screen-light breakthrough in digital Hollywood: It turns fantasy into reality. And building a concept vehicle without a team of automotive …
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