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May 2009 

Return to Table of Contents May 2009

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Interview: Christian Bale
Who Gave Christian Bale a Gun?

The coming together of an intense actor and an intense role can only mean one thing. Terminator Salvation is going to be intense. Christian Bale talks about reinventing the 25-year-old franchise


By Bob Strauss

"Look, I’m an actor, people shouldn’t know much about me,” Christian Bale said during our Beverly Hills interview  early last summer.

 

Famous last words?


Within a month, the very private star of the biggest movie of the decade was not only accused of assault by his mother and sister on the day of The Dark Knight’s London premiere (no charges were ever filed); he also let loose an expletive-laden tirade on the New Mexico set of Terminator Salvation against director of photography Shane Hurlbut. The first incident instantly dragged skeletons out of the Bale family closet for all the world to ponder. It wasn’t until February of this year that a recording of the Terminator meltdown hit the internet, but within hours it was being satirized on TV and turned into X-rated dance mixes.

 

Bale publicly apologized for the harangue — although many in the acting community defended the reason for, if not the length and intensity, of his outburst, since Hurlbut broke basic set decorum by adjusting lights in Bale’s sightline while cameras were rolling, disrupting the actor’s concentration.


Still, while the 35-year-old actor has never nurtured a nice-guy image — or much of any off-screen image at all — such embarrassing revelations could not have been comfortable for the guarded star. And Terminator Salvation didn’t need anything else that might make people snicker.


The fourth entry in the once-groundbreaking sci-fi series, Salvation has neither director-creator James Cameron nor iconic star Arnold Schwarzenegger on board. Instead, it’s directed by McG, who, beside the goofy name, is best known for making the aggressively brainless Charlie’s Angels movies.


“Absolutely, I was hesitant,” Bale says of being asked to play the grown-up John Connor, leader of the human resistance against the Skynet machines that have all but taken over a near-future Earth. “I was working with Michael Mann on Public Enemies in Chicago when I got the offer, and I saw a great deal of potential in it. But if we didn’t achieve it, or achieved anything less than that, it would be quite a failure.”

 

Actually, Salvation looks like a pretty decent apocalyptic action pic that tells a neat story about a crucial period in the Terminator movies’ timeline. Some years after Skynet became sentient and sent its missiles, robots and cyborgs to wipe out humanity, Connor’s resistance group comes upon a young anti-machine fighter, Kyle Reese. Played by Anton Yelchin in the new movie, Reese will grow into the warrior who goes back in time to not only save Sarah Connor from the T-800 Terminator sent to kill her in the first movie, but perform his duty of becoming John’s father.


That should make for a pretty interesting relationship between Bale’s Connor and his much younger dad. Oh, and there are some pretty cool-looking spider-bots and techno-tentacled things, not to mention early models of the deceptively human-looking killing machines that give the series its title.

 


Christian Bale as John Connor

“With Terminator, to me, there was an opportunity there in a way that I enjoy approaching all genres of movies,” says Bale. “That in a similar fashion to what we did with Batman Begins — even though we’re going to recognize a previous mythology, unlike we did with Batman Begins, which started the story there — it’s an opportunity, which is our responsibility, to revitalize it and to reinvent. There’s no point in doing it otherwise, and that’s what I aimed to do.”


Yet reinventing the popular Terminator movies creates some understandable pressure. Why run the risk of screwing up a beloved franchise when you’re already the lead in the most successful movie series reboot in a generation? Perhaps it has something to do with Bale’s outlook on his profession: when good-paying work is offered, you grab it.

 

“There’s probably not an actor alive, unless they come from some wealthy family, who at some point hasn’t been absolutely broke,” he reckons. “Nobody who has any intention of getting rich becomes an actor. The likelihood that that’s gonna happen… It ain’t gonna happen. And if it does, you’re a lucky bastard because, you know what, you were never a businessman. I’m certainly not. You know what I like doing? I like pretending to be other people. Do you ever think that that could lead to any kind of financial stability? Certainly not. I never did, whatsoever.”

 

In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that Bale hasn’t always liked playing other people, either. Born in Wales to a South African pilot and entrepreneur (who later married noted feminist Gloria Steinem) and an English circus performer, Christian began acting professionally as a child. After his big movie breakthrough in Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, the 13-year-old Bale found being a celebrity so distasteful that he almost quit acting for good.


“That’s why I have very strong opinions about why kids should not be working at such a young age,” says Bale, who with wife Sibi Blazic has a four-year-old daughter whose name he refuses to reveal in public. “I think that introducing children to an industry where they may not recognize the pressure — but, very quickly, they’re going to — and which is an adult industry…I would be very skeptical about putting anybody that I cared about, who was close to me, into this professionally at a young age. I would absolutely support it as a hobby and as an amateur pursuit. But to enter into the professional world is a whole different ballgame.”

 

By the time he reached adulthood, though, Bale was totally committed to acting — often beyond the call of duty. He pumped himself up to physical perfection for American Psycho, Reign of Fire and the Batman movies, starved himself to ghostly dimensions for The Machinist, and went pretty far toward both extremes for the P.O.W. escape adventure Rescue Dawn.


Until he hit the Bat-jackpot, few of Bale’s films made significant money. But that never stopped him from investing an intense emotional and physical commitment into his work. That’s resulted in some pretty disturbing performances, which we now know kind of come naturally to him. “Whilst I’m making movies, the rest of the world kind of ceases to exist for me,” he says.


And if whatever’s eating at Christian Bale helps power his performances, we sort of hope that he never gets over it.


Bob Strauss lives in L.A. where he writes about movies and filmmakers.



McG at work

McG explains his name

When a director named simply McG leapt from obscurity into the big leagues to direct 2000’s Charlie’s Angels everyone assumed he was some cutting-edge hip-hop impresario — an assumption reinforced by the fact that his only credits to date were some music videos. But then we caught glimpse of McG — a pasty, motor-mouthed redhead who looks about as fly as Simon Pegg.

On his blog at Warnerbros.com/terminatorsalvation, McG finally explains his McMoniker: “I realize my name is ridiculous. I was born Joseph McGinty Nichol. McG is short for McGinty. I have been called this since the day I was born to create separation from my Uncle Joe and Grandpa Joe. I realize it sounds like some Hollywood nickname, hip-hop choice. But the truth is, this is simply my name — for every day of elementary school, every zit-filled day of high school. I have been taking sh-t for it ever since. I get it, I would think it’s lame too. But it’s just a name, and to change it now would seem fraudulent.”

 —Marni Weisz

 



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