The filmmakers behind The Penguin (one of at least two spinoffs for The Batman) revealed how the disastrous flood of Gotham City plays into the show and why it's so important.
In the final act of Robert Pattinson's The Batman, Paul Dano's The Riddler breaks the floodwalls around Gotham City, drowning the city and killing countless people. By the film's end, everyone, including Bruce Wayne himself, is still picking up the pieces of that disaster.
The Penguin picks up only one week after that unspeakable tragedy, with a massive vacuum in the criminal underworld begging to be filled.
Why a Flooded Gotham City Is Important to Penguin's Journey
The Direct participated in a handful of press roundtables with the filmmakers for The Penguin, where they spoke about why the big flood at the end of The Batman was so important for their story.
Showrunner Lauren Lefranc conceded that "Gotham has always sort of been considered a broken city," but after the flood, "it's more broken than it has been before:"
"Gotham has always been considered a broken city, and certainly, at the beginning of our show, it's more broken than it has been before. I think it was important to try because we have the benefit of eight hours to dig deeper into Gotham as a character and see its different aspects. To me, having Victor be from Crown Point, which we established as a neighborhood that was terribly impacted by the flood in particular, felt important and essential to demonstrate that and tell that story in a deeper way."
She explained how the team behind the show was influenced by various "disasters that have happened in the U.S.:"
"I think there are tons of disasters that have happened in the U.S., and it's on the news every day, so you kind of become desensitized to it, but it's so real and so accurate. So we took a lot of unfortunate things that have happened across the world and saw how these people have been impacted. We really tried to speak to that and use that, you know, for lack of a better word, as inspiration."
"It felt very important to show… what, emotionally and intimately, something like this would do to a community," she said:
"Our production design team worked really hard. We talked a lot about different neighborhoods, which ones had more flooding and more damage, which then visual effects helped us enhance things here and there, but just it was, it felt very important to show as best as we could, what emotionally and intimately, something like this would do to a community."
Executive producers Matt Reeves and Dylan Clark explained why it was best for The Penguin to take place just a week after the big flood.
Reeves said that this dark point in Gotham City's life is Oz's "moment to strike," which was teased at the end of The Batman:
"... It was important to us that it takes place then... We want this to take place a week after this has happened. Because the whole idea is that this story is about that moment that follows the movie. There's an opportunity where Carmine Falcone has had a stranglehold on power for the last 20 years in this place, and now he's dead. And so someone like Oz, who really believes that he can get more, but no one else believes it, this is his moment to strike. And we teased that at the end of 'The Batman' as he's staring out over the city."
The filmmaker also reiterated that they "want Oz to be in the next movie" and for him to be in this fresh new place for the sequel:
"And we wanted to pick things up at that moment. Then, the other parameters that we gave to Lauren were that, obviously, we knew that we wanted Oz to be in the next movie, and we knew the events of that movie. And so we just said, 'Okay, we need him to have this rise to power, to the point that we get him to, and then there need to be these events that give you the sense, okay, so he's going to be entering the movie in this way.'"
Dylan Clark chimed in as well, adding how the series gives them to explore The Penguin in a way that they don't have time for in the films:
"The other thing to flag here is that, obviously, Oz is known as the kingpin inside the comic book space. From our movie, you don't get a sense of how this character is going to become the kingpin. And because... we're focused on Batman and Bruce's point of view and developing him as fully as possible, we don't have a lot of real estate to spend with Oz [in the movies]. This series, this long-form space, allows us to dig into those details."
Clark further teased that when the villain returns as part of the cast for The Batman: Part II, "he's not the same character that Batman interacted with:"
"He sees an opportunity. Carmine is dead. What am I going to do? Well, the series is what I'm going to do, and that's going to get us further down the road so that when he comes back for ['The Batman: Part II'], he's not the same character that Batman interacted with. It just allows us to have more dynamic opportunities with these characters so that we can place them in the movie space, just differently."
On the topic of the big flood, Craig Zobel, the director of The Penguin Episodes 1 and 3, detailed how the traumatic event was "a different way to talk about class disparity:"
"One of the major themes inside of the story is class disparity. It's a different way to talk about class disparity inside of this, which is not possible when your lead character is Bruce Wayne, right? Like, he's a wealthy person. So, it was exciting that we got to tell a story with that thematic element."
Zobel revealed that he and production designer Kalina Ivanov went back and referenced what happened with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans to help make the flood feed authentic:
"And I went back and started looking at a lot of stuff. Kalina Ivanov, the production designer, and I both bought these kind of photo books from post-Katrina and just looked at just putting yourself back and reading stuff and watching videos from Katrina and what happens sort of there… [It] was an interesting thing to reflect on and sort of assume something like this would be a similar scenario. Just like, truly a scary and crazy thing."
They would read stories about Katrina that were "reflective" of "what the Gotham version of that is:"
"That was a lot of reading stories about people [where] the only thing they have is, like, a TV that they're carrying into the Superdome. Stuff like that was, for sure, sort of reflective of where we all started when trying to decide what the Gotham version of that is."
For The Penguin, Oz Cobb faces a new threat: Cristin Milioti's Sofia Falcone, daughter of the late Carmine Falcone from The Batman.
"I wanted an interesting antagonist for Oz" and a "complicated female at the center of the show," showrunner Lauren LeFranc explained:
"I wanted an interesting antagonist for Oz. And I also, selfishly, wanted an interesting, complicated female at the center of the show. And so I just started to question who that might be. It made sense to me that Sophia Falcone would exist on this show because she's Carmine's Falcone daughter in the comics. Obviously, my version of Sophia is quite different from that of previous depictions. She has a much more complex relationship with her father than in the comic iterations of Sophia."
Also on hand was Mike Marino, the series' prosthetic makeup designer, who spoke about the secret details he hid in Colin Farrell's significant transformation.
"I always put hidden things inside the faces of the things I make," Marino admitted, playfully noting that he's "playing God in a sense:"
"Well, I always put hidden things inside the faces of the things I make. I mean, I don't know if anyone is too keen on overanalyzing any of it, but there's always some hidden scar or message or something. A lot of being a designer of these types of characters and faces are, it's not reality, even though you can make it look real. You know, you are also playing Dr Frankenstein a little. You're playing God, in a sense. And you can make things say a certain thing or be a certain thing."
"There are so many bird elements to it," the artist exclaimed, further detailing how he had to "be a little bit more subtle" about it than Batman Returns' take on the character:
"For instance, his face is not only a realistic gangster but there are so many bird elements to it. Even if you look at Danny DeVito's character in the 1992 'Batman Returns,' it's a lot more bird, Penguin, beak-like, with the bald head and all these things. And it's a little bit more in your face. Like, okay, this is like a penguin, dude. But in this, I have to be a little bit more subtle because the tone of the film is so different. So I have to put in bird stuff, but I have to hide it in a way."
Marino dove into the many facets of how he designed The Penguin to align with his name:
"I gave him this very particular angle from the front, this aggressive penguin brow as far as the eyebrows, because I changed Collins's eyebrows... The face from the front and from the side has this kind of beak quality to it. And if you look... from the side, right under the nostril, on one side, is the mouth of a beak. If you look at a penguin or a bird, it has this kind of curve where the two beaks meet; there's the line. One side of the nostril shape is a subtle, small shape of the mouth of a bird. One side is a normal nostril; the other is a curved bird beak in the nose. So it's like subtle things I always try to put in..."
The Penguin is now streaming on Max. New episodes air on HBO on Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET.
