Tim Nasson Interviews Christian Bale
Thirty-three year old Christian Bale was born in England and gained international attention twenty years ago, playing the lead in Steven Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun.”
As an adult, Bale is best known for his roles in the films American Psycho, Batman Begins and The Prestige, among others.
Christian Bale is also known for his versatility as an actor, including mimicking nearly any English-based accent, harsh regimens of shedding and gaining weight (particularly for The Machinist, Batman Begins and, most recently, “Rescue Dawn” and “The Dark Knight”), and generally inhabiting the characters he plays. Before he found success in playing Batman, he was heavily involved in independent films.
Bale is especially noted for his cult following. The tenth anniversary issue of Entertainment Weekly hailed him as one of the “Top 8 Most Powerful Cult Figures of the Past Decade,” citing his impressive cult status on the Internet.
In a 2007 poll of IMDb users, he was voted their favorite actor who is under 40. Entertainment Weekly also called Christian Bale one of the “Most Creative People in Entertainment,” after his performance in American Psycho.
Wild About Movies recently sat with Christian Bale in Los Angeles where he talked about his current film “Rescue Dawn,” and the sequel to “Batman Begins,” “The Dark Knight,” that he just started working on.
WILD ABOUT MOVIES: WHEN YOU SEE THE SCRIPT AND YOU KNOW IT’S GOING TO BE HELL OUT IN THE JUNGLE – HUMID AND HOT AND MISERABLE – WHY DO YOU GO, ‘I HAVE TO DO THAT?’
CHRISTIAN BALE: Because I like going to hell and back. Ha ha! I knew that Werner Herzog would be a good guy to take us there. How many times will I get to do this kind of crazy shit? So it’s something that I wanted to take advantage of and actually that was a big appeal to me, doing that kind of thing. I like that. I like testing myself and seeing how far you can go.
WILD ABOUT MOVIES: YOU TALK ABOUT PUSHING YOURSELF TO HELL AND BACK. ASIDE FROM THESE ROLES THAT YOU TAKE IS THERE ANYTHING IN REAL LIFE THAT YOU LIKE TO DO FOR THRILLS?
CHRISTIAN BALE: Well, even though the finished movie is not real life, when you are actually swimming in snake infested rivers, you’re not acting the swimming in snake infested river. You are swimming in a snake infested river. It’s important to realize that difference, and when you are wrestling with a snake it’s not a pretend snake. You are wrestling with a real snake so, to me, that is real life. That is what had become my real life. I really did do that. Sure, once it’s into the movie then it’s a character, but these are not things that haven’t happened. They have happened. I’m not talking about obviously the acting side of it, the POW camp etcetera. Of course none of that is real life, but it’s always true that in any movie the physical aspect of it is always real. You are doing it unless it’s a stunt guy doing it or if it’s special FX. The acting is always fake, but what you physically do is for real.
WILD ABOUT MOVIES: WAS THE SNAKE REAL AND VENOMOUS? WAS THERE A SNAKE WRANGLER THERE?
CHRISTIAN BALE: The snake wranglers were the local kids. No, the snake was not venomous. He did have some pretty good fangs on him and I got it in the shoulder, but no, he wasn’t venomous. These snakes, for the local kids were no big deal. They were nothing to them. They would see one of those and they would run straight after it, grab it by the tail, whip it around, smash its head and then they would cook it and eat it. That’s often what they would have for dinner, and like everyone says it tastes like chicken, that’s what they said too. They actually called it Chicken Snake. One of the local kids went and caught the snake and then put it into position and the snake started going and then I just kind of ran in on it and grappled with it, but it didn’t end up as dinner with me. We did let that one go.
WILD ABOUT MOVIES: WHAT ABOUT THE MAGGOTS?
CHRISTIAN BALE: Oh, yeah, those were real maggots. They were very real. I didn’t mind eating the maggots, but I just wanted to make sure about where the maggots had come from. Where did they find those maggots?
WILD ABOUT MOVIES: SO WHEN YOU COME HOME ON THAT DAY, DOES YOUR WIFE MAKE YOU BRUSH YOUR TEETH A WHOLE LOT?
CHRISTIAN BALE: I had a little toothpick there. Yeah.
WILD ABOUT MOVIES: I’M JUST CURIOUS ABOUT WHAT YOU WON’T DO. IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU DID A LOT OF THE THINGS YOURSELF.
CHRISTIAN BALE: Well, look, you put yourself in my position. You’re in Thailand, you’ve got these crazy ass Thai chopper pilots who are willing to do anything and they’re saying that they’re all set up with a stunt guy and I’m there and I said, ‘Why can’t I do it?’ They said, ‘Well, the helicopter is going to come in. He’s going to stumble out into the rapids and you’d be falling over in there and you’ve got to grab a rope, you’ve got to hold on once they winch you up. You have to hold onto the railing and they’re going to go over a cliff and they’re really low over the trees. Do you want to be doing that?’ I was like, ‘Fuck yes I want to be doing that. I’m not letting anyone else do that.’
WILD ABOUT MOVIES: ARE THERE LIMITS TO WHAT YOU’LL DO?
CHRISTIAN BALE: Look, I’ve done other things where people have to be set on fire and jump three stories. I’m not doing that. I’ve got limits. I’ll tell you though, this was fantastic being with the Thai Air Force guys. We would take off and they would take out half a tree with them. These weren’t guys who were all about the safety code. They just kind of plowed their way through the jungle and I doubt that I’m going to get a chance to do that again. I’m glad that I did it.
WILD ABOUT MOVIES: DID YOUR AGENT KNOW THAT YOU WERE DOING ALL OF THESE CRAZY STUNTS?
CHRISTIAN BALE: Oh, I don’t tell him anything. We don’t even tell the producers most of the time. They’re not on the set and so they don’t need to know, and then the insurance, certainly they don’t want to know.
WILD ABOUT MOVIES: WHEN DIETER GETS CAPTURED, HE’S SMILING AT PEOPLE AND EXPECTING THEM TO SMILE BACK, BUT IT DOESN’T HAPPEN. DID YOU EVER HAVE A CHANCE TO TALK TO HIM?
CHRISTIAN BALE: He died a couple of years before I met with Werner.
WILD ABOUT MOVIES: HE SEEMED TO BE SUCH AN INNOCENT FOR SOMEONE DURING THAT TIME. DID IT OCCUR TO YOU WHAT HIS MOTIVATION WAS FOR GOING THERE? I ASSUME THAT IT WAS THE LOVE OF FLYING, BUT HE DIDN’T REALLY SEEM TO KNOW WHAT HE WAS GETTING INTO.
CHRISTIAN BALE: I think that he was a peculiar cat in the first place just because of the fact that (when he was a kid) he’s bombed by Americans. Bomber planes, these streaks of strafing by the fighter pilots – he looks at that and says, ‘I want to do that.’ That’s not a normal reaction to people who are actually destroying your home. So he has this great romantic notion of the U.S. and this great dream and idealism of what it means to be a U.S. citizen and what it means to be a pilot as well, and I truly think that he was just absolutely obsessed with the romanticism of the whole thing and thankful on a personal level for what America had done for him. That didn’t really mix with the missions that he was going on. He still maintained that romanticism, and remember, this was his first mission. The poor bastard got shot down on his first mission. So I really think that he had a very unique outlook where he didn’t see them as the enemy. He saw them as just other people, which is why he seems like such an unlikely military man, let alone someone who is actually considered a hero. So with those things he was just curious. He’s tied up. He’s been dragged along. He’s been beaten. He’s still interested in all of it. ‘I wonder what they’re cooking over there? She looks nice. She’s pretty, isn’t she? He looks like a nice guy. I could probably have a good conversation with him.’ It was just a most bizarre outlook on life of absolute optimism and curiosity and interest that kept him going and I think that it disarmed so many people. Even with the guards, they’re torturing him and he’s still looking at them as people and not as monsters. He’s still smiling at them and it must just be the most disarming thing in the world to have that happen to you and annoying as hell at times because he’s not behaving the way that you’re going to behave. He’s not being scared when you’re supposed to be scared. He’s not being depressed and giving up hope when he’s going to be doing that, but he was just wired very differently.
WILD ABOUT MOVIES: TALK A LITTLE BIT ABOUT THE PROCESS YOU GO THROUGH BUILDING A CHARACTER FOR A FILM LIKE THIS.
CHRISTIAN BALE: I really don’t know what it is. I mean, you have time and you just sort of sit and think about it and put it in the back of your head to take over and things suddenly come to you and this had a lot of material that I could read and look at and people to speak to as well. I really don’t feel like I’ve learned any more than the first time I ever did a movie. I don’t feel like I’ve got a technique now where I can kind of do a shortcut kind of thing on it. I mean, I just think about it from as many angles as possible and then when I get there on the day I probably throw everything out of the window because it’s not going to work at that point. I mean, I really don’t have any consistent style or technique whatsoever and I’m pretty happy with working that way.
WILD ABOUT MOVIES: This is the second time that you’ve lost a lot of weight in a very short amount of time for a movie and now you’ve had to gain it all back again to start the Batman movie. Is that healthy?
CHRISTIAN BALE: I really actually didn’t lose a whole lot of weight for Rescue Dawn. You know there’s a lot of good makeup and I just wanted to do enough to give kind of an indication of time and everything for it, but it really wasn’t anything on the scale of The Machinist. I wouldn’t do that again. I’ve kind of conquered that in my mind and don’t need to prove that to myself again.
WILD ABOUT MOVIES: Talk about the prequel to Lonesome Dove and 3:10 to Yuma which you’ve finished.
CHRISTIAN BALE: It’s great. I mean, look, it can all stop very quick but right now it’s great. We get to go from the jungles of Thailand to New Mexico shooting guns and riding horses out there and chewing tobacco and not squatting with your spurs on.
WILD ABOUT MOVIES: You seem to be somebody who always wants to do something new and play interesting and diverse characters. How hard is it to go back and play Batman again? Is there something new you can bring to the character?
CHRISTIAN BALE: You’ve got to see with the other versions, you know, it wasn’t my cup of tea anyway. I didn’t really keep it going. But I’ve got Chris Nolan who I’m working with for the third time now and he ain’t going to be making a movie if he’s not gonna be doing something very different with it which he’s achieved in spades. Actually I’m liking very much the idea because I haven’t reprised a role ever before and so I know it already and you know obviously there’ll be progress. We’ve got a great cast as well, and Chris and I work very well together, so I know that we’re going to be finding an awful lot to add to it. It’s certainly not — the last thing it is is treading water. What we have now — we were confident before in what we wanted to do but other people didn’t know. It was untested. Now the people support us completely too. So we’ve got all of that extra wall of support behind us to just kind of let rip and take it further.
WILD ABOUT MOVIES: As an actor, how important is it to have a franchise character that you can go back to that allows you to do things like Rescue Dawn?
CHRISTIAN BALE: Well, I’d be doing things like this movie anyway because it’s not like if I didn’t have the franchise, I’d say, ‘No, I can’t make Rescue Dawn.’ What it does allow though is if something like Rescue Dawn [comes along]. You know Werner and I have been talking about making it for a good two and a half years and I don’t know but I doubt it’s a huge coincidence that we got the financing pretty quick after I’d been in Batman. So it does mean that I can do these things in a much easier fashion versus a number of years back where, you know, like American Psycho took two years just because they didn’t want me in it. So, yes, certainly it helps with that, but in and of itself, I really like what Chris has done and working with him on Batman. I tell you it’s the only time in my life that I’ve been able to actually plan in the future because usually you know what you’re doing for the next two months if you’re lucky and then after that, you’ve got no idea. And I’ve gone times when I’ve really needed to work and then there was no work coming in for me and I didn’t work for a year and a half or something. I guess having a franchise is the only time you can actually kind of sit back and go ‘It’s alright, you know, it’s gonna be okay.’ Even if nothing else happens, I know that that’s going to come along at some point. But you don’t even know that actually because they could dump me in a second if they want. It’s a good bet that we’ll be making that.
WILD ABOUT MOVIES: Talk about your training for Dark Knight? Are you training a lot?
CHRISTIAN BALE: There are new things that I’m having to train for but again, just in the same way that we kind of were untested before, they know that I know my right from my left now. They know that when I walk, the arm swings the right way and everything so there’s a little more confidence in me about my ability to pick things up quickly. We did start a while back in training which I believe is a mystery for what we are training for.
WILD ABOUT MOVIES: What do you have coming up after Batman?
CHRISTIAN BALE: I have no idea. We do The Dark Knight for the rest of this year.
