After Batman & Robin had put the character more or less back in ’60s TV-Batman Adam West territory, Batman Begins’ immediate agenda was to move Bruce Wayne firmly back into the shadows. “The concept was always to present him from the criminal’s point of view,” explains Christopher Nolan. “I always liken Batman to the first Alien, where you just glimpse it. So he’s frightening, threatening and elusive. You understand why they’re afraid of him.”

“We had to lay new foundations,” continues production designer Nathan Crowley, “but there was still a lot we had to respect. We decided that his money is his superpower, that was really our starting point. He has this great company, and Chris came up with the military tech and the Applied Science Division — our Q Branch.”

Christian Bale may not have seemed like obvious casting, since he’d just dropped his weight to an almost catastrophic thinness to play the disturbed lead in The Machinist. It was precisely that intensity, though, that made him the man to play Gotham’s crimebusting Fledermaus. “The reason Christian was ideal is he can live and breathe and think that extreme of a character,” says Nolan. “That’s his gift as an actor. He is an extremely dedicated and disciplined person and so I think he relates to those qualities in the character.”

Bale says he was most interested in playing facets of the character that had never previously been seen. “What makes Batman, Bruce Wayne, intriguing to me,” says Bale, “is this notion of the multiple personalities that he chooses to display, of the notion that Batman actually is not a performance; that’s genuine. Bruce Wayne publicly is the performance...”