Fighting crime might be his character’s primary concern, but it turns out that Robert Pattinson, who plays the titular role in new movie The Batman, took time out while on set to bust out some beats.
Discussing the process of making the Matt Reeves-directed movie with GQ, Pattinson said that he turned to music production during shooting, when he had to spend a lot of time sitting around on set.
“The nature of the shoot was so kind of insular, always shooting at night, just really dark all the time, and I felt very much alone,” he explained.
“Even just being in the suit all the time. You’re not really allowed out of the studio with the suit on, so I barely knew what was going on at all outside.”
There was no real-life Batcave to retreat to, sadly; instead, Pattinson says that producers built him a little 'Bat-tent' to mope enigmatically in, and it was here that the ‘Dark Knight’s risers’ took shape.
“I’d be in the tent just making ambient electronic music in the suit, looking over the cowl,” says Pattinson. “There’s something about the construction of the cowl that makes it very difficult to read books, so you have to kind of almost lean forward to see out of the cowl.”
All of which raises a number of questions. What kind of software was he using (an app with a dark mode, we’re guessing, and possibly u-he’s Batman-inspired Dark Zebra synth plugin) and will these presumably brooding soundscapes ever be released?
Maybe they’ll find their way onto the soundtrack, which is being composed by Michael Giacchino, but whatever happens, we’ll always have the mental image of Batman editing MIDI notes and fiddling with compression settings, and that’ll do for us.
The Batman will be released on 4 March.
