When production designer James Chinlund got the call to help craft the world of Matt Reeves’ The Batman, the Hollywood veteran (who has worked with industry titans like Darren Aronofsky and Jon Favreau) was understandably nervous. “I think I immediately went into the sweats as I thought about all the amazing iterations of Gotham that have come before me [and] the designers that I have so much respect for,” he tells SYFY WIRE. “It’s sort of like, ‘How could we possibly find new space?’”

That initial wave of apprehension soon passed as Chinlund found solace in the idea of Reeves leading him and the rest of the crew “to the Promised Land. He found such an interesting take on Bruce and Batman; the idea that Bruce has turned his back on Wayne Industries and was really this self-made vigilante figure. It allowed me to start thinking about Gotham in a much more sort of method way.”

The version of Gotham City in the Dark Knight’s latest big screen reboot is nothing like audiences have ever seen before. It’s a dark, dingy, dirty, and gritty metropolis enveloped in ominous sheets of rainfall on an almost constant basis (à la David Fincher’s Se7en). In a lot of ways, Reeves’ take on the city is a physical representation of the darkness swirling within Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne.

“If Gotham was a real place in America right now, how could we start to unpack that?” Chinlund muses. “We started into the [Batmobile] design and thinking about the car as a vehicle that Bruce had built himself and how could we show that visually? I love the idea of Bruce living in the city and living in the tower as opposed to living in the suburbs. It felt much more representative of who he might be and that led us to the Batcave as an old train station under that tower.”

He continues: “As I started to follow those threads, it made me realize that we were finding new space and new bits of the world. It gave us a lot more confidence that we were gonna be able to deliver a Gotham that felt our own and new, and at the same time deliver to the fans a familiar feeling. That they felt like this is home [and would say] ‘This is our Gotham that we know and love.’ We weren’t interested in tearing that down, we just wanted to expand it and make it richer and deeper and make it feel like a complete world.”