This Is Not Bruce Wayne’s Gotham — ‘The Penguin’ Adds a Working Class Borough to ‘Batman’ Lore
Colin Farrell’s Penguin character is a sharp deviation from previous versions of the “Batman” villain. Instead of descending from the wealthy Cobblepot family, dressed in a tuxedo with a monocle and cigarette holder, “The Batman” writer/director Matt Reeves envisioned him as a working-class gangster (renamed Oswald “Oz” Cobbs), scraping his way up Gotham’s underworld-ladder.
Therefore, when “The Penguin” creator Lauren LeFranc was tasked with developing an eight-episode arc of Oz’s rise from underworld middle-management in “The Batman” to Gotham’s top gangster in Reeves’ soon-to-be-shot sequel, she needed to flesh out his backstory. She needed a neighborhood that not only spoke to who he was but also the environment in which he’d rise to power.
More from IndieWire
“I thought a lot about how Gotham City was built and who builds a city like that, and it tends to be the wealthier people,” said LeFranc. “I created Crown Point because I wanted it to be like a low-lying area in Gotham.”
The Flood Zone
In the wake of the Riddler (Paul Dano) having flooded Gotham at the end of “The Batman,” the low-lying Crown Point’s proximity to the sea wall meant it suffered the greatest devastation. LeFranc and production designer Kalina Ivanov studied flood-ravished urban areas for story and design inspiration, examining how less-wealthy areas often suffer far worse.
“When I decided I wanted to create this character Victor Aguillar [Rhenzy Feliz], I knew we were picking up a week after the flood, and that the city was even more broken than it was in Matt’s film. I really wanted to humanize what that experience would be for someone who has experienced something as tragic as that, and who did nothing wrong,” said LeFranc, referencing the Episode 3 flashback in which we see how Vic’s family died. “It feels like a no man’s land, and the survivors of that neighborhood feel as if the city at large and government don’t care about them.”
Ivanov recalled living in the East Village after Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and how other areas of Manhattan got power back days before she did. For research, she studied the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, not only the damage caused by the flooding but also the government’s response.
In creating the flood-ravaged Crown Point, the small details mattered, like the way FEMA marked doors, condemned residences, and put up barriers. Ivanov’s team tirelessly painted flood lines on the exterior and interior walls and recreated the way flood waters left cars stacked on top of each other. But more than anything, it was trash and dirt, the debris and muck left covering everything in Crown Point.
“The first thing you have to do is bring tons and tons of dirt; I mean, literally tons of dirt was dumped on the street to create that level of muck,” said Ivanov. “Because that’s really what makes it, when the water recedes, that’s what’s left behind, it’s all the earth that it has moved.”
Certainly, collaboration with the visual effects department came into play, but in the foreground (the areas the actors interacted with), it would often need to be practical, and there was no such thing as too much trash, dirt, and sprayed-on the muck. Back at the studio, there was a whole stage for making debris piles.
There was one location, the hero block, where Vic stashes Oz’s mom, Francis (Deirdre O’Connell) – unknowingly under the watchful eye of a local crook. It’s a five-way intersection with cars still piled in the middle of the road, which, more than any other location, came to embody Ivanov and LeFranc’s Crown Point.
“That particular five-corner intersection has quite a bit going on around and was very carefully orchestrated,” said Ivanov. “We definitely knew where VFX would extend it, and we created those concepts for them, but when the mom arrives for the first time, it’s all in camera.”
It is by far the widest scope of destruction “The Penguin” team would need to recreate practically on location. Once finding the perfect intersection in Yonkers, they’d work with the city to take over the location for over a week. And then at their backlot, they would recreate one of the destroyed buildings to shoot tighter shots.
A Working Class Hero
As “The Penguin” was just starting to shoot, LeFranc was still calling the neighborhood “The Narrows,” which has appeared in numerous other versions of Batman, including Christopher Nolan’s trilogy. When Reeves asked “The Batman” production designer James Chinlund what name he thought would feel of a piece with the Gotham they’d established in the film, Chinlund suggested the lesser known “Crown Point,” which appeared in the “Detective Comics 807.” While LeFranc took to the name, she abandoned its comic book history as a crime- and violence-ridden neighborhood in the Bowery. Her Crown Point would be on the Eastside, across the river from Gotham, and be a vibrant, tight-knit, working-class neighborhood. Vic, like Oz before him, would grow up looking across the river at wealthy Gotham.
Ivanov leaned into the history of the real-life area once known as the Lung District, the area on the Lower East Side near the foot of the Manhattan Bridge (currently Chinatown), where the first tenants were built in the early 20th century. But, outside of the rooftop flashback scene in Episode 3, location-based shooting would be predominantly outside of Manhattan.
“We spent a lot of time [shooting] in the Bronx, Yonkers, and Queens because that’s the old Manhattan of working-class neighborhoods that doesn’t exist anymore in Manhattan,” said Ivanov.
The Bronx and Yonkers supplied hills and elevation, essential for creating the sense of Crown Point as a low-lying area that would suffer the most extreme flooding. Queens, on the other hand, supplied another aspect of urban design that visually defined “The Penguin.”
“When you’re Bruce [Wayne], you’re in that ivory tower. You are looking a little bit down on the world.” said Reeves of creating the visual world of “The Batman” when he was a guest on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast.
In Reeves’ early conversations with Episode 1-3 director Craig Zobel, they discussed how “The Penguin” should switch to a different point-of-view, one that was more street level with Oz. Compared to the high-angle preciseness of Batman, “The Penguin” would feel unmoored and unhinged. Reeves and Zobel cinematically thought of a gritty New York City captured by the frenetic handheld camera in “The French Connection.”
“[The] ‘French Connection’ [reference] immediately grounded us in being under subways, under highways, under passages, and a lot of tunnels,” said Ivanov. “In Manhattan, everything is underground; the elevated subways are in Queens, that’s why we put the red light district underneath the subway. Later you will see there’s a secret passage built into the foundations of the bridges that are going to become a very big story point.”
The Gatsby Contrast
While Oz’s business takes him into Gotham, and the series occasionally (but not often) into Manhattan-based locations (Oz’s office is set in the Diamond District), the key to creating the series’ sharp visual contrast between the haves-and-have-nots would come in creating the Falconess life outside the city.
“For this vision of old money, I wanted to go back to ‘The Great Gatsby’ because nothing speaks better about wealth in America than the Gatsby era,” said Ivanov.
The production designer and locations team found the perfect Italian-style mansion from the era in the North Shore estates area of Long Island and augmented the location with fountains and lush greenery.
“It was literally where the Gatsby novels are written, it is in that part of Long Island, which in the turn of the century is where the Vanderbilts and all the rich families were,” said Ivanov. “The interior bones [of the house] were very interesting, so we were able to combine the existing location with building a set and interpreting what that would have been inside.”
New episodes of “The Penguin” premiere Sundays on HBO and Max.
Look for IndieWire’s Toolkit episode with Matt Reeves on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other major podcast platforms on November 11 following “The Penguin” series finale.
Best of IndieWire
Sign up for Indiewire's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
