New Christian Bale interview


Time is running out.

An interview first set for 3:30 has been moved to 3:45, then 4:30, then put on hold. Because suddenly it's almost 5, and half a dozen blocks away there are cameras and lights, and Charlie Rose is sitting, waiting to tape his show. Cell phones are going off, a town car has pulled up to the curb, and it's time to go, go, go.

But downstairs, outside the hotel, three fans with widening waists and thinning hairlines hold out Batman pictures, posters and action figures. And Christian Bale pauses to sign them all.

"'Batman Begins' changed things, but not in the way most people would imagine," the 34-year-old actor says afterward, as the car inches through Manhattan traffic. "What I did after -- a supporting role in 'The New World,' 'Harsh Times' -- not your typical follow-ups... And it didn't really 'allow' me to do smaller pictures, because I was doing plenty of them before 'Batman.' What it allowed was for me to be talked about. It allowed me to be considered for many more roles."






One of those roles was "Rescue Dawn," the true-life story of American P.O.W. Dieter Dengler. Captured during his first, secret bombing mission over Laos in 1966, Dengler was tortured, starved and ultimately marked for death. But Dengler didn't break. Instead, he immediately started planning a breakout.

For those who remember Bale dieting himself down to skeletal status a few years ago for the dark "The Machinist," "Rescue Dawn" -- opening on Wednesday, July 4th -- is a reminder of how far he's willing to go for a role.

And it's not just that Bale dropped a few dozen pounds again. ("I deliberately never weighed myself this time," he says, "because I knew I didn't want to talk about it over and over later.") It's that he marched off into the Thai jungle with obsessive director Werner Herzog, where he and his co-stars squatted in the mud, ate worms and picked leeches off their frail bodies.

"Getting down to that prison-camp weight class was part of the alchemy of honoring all the people in uniform who went through this," says co-star Jeremy Davies. "The last thing you wanted to do was show up as some well-fed Hollywood actor looking for his trailer... It wasn't candy-coated. It was at times pretty intense and vividly 'Fitzcarraldo'-esque. But you knew that Christian and (co-star) Steve Zahn shared this really fierce desire to honor the memory of these soldiers, and working like this was part of it."

Of course, working with Herzog -- a famously demanding, obsessive artist, finally making his first English-language drama -- added its own dangers.

"Did I have any worries," Bale repeats, thoughtfully. "The idea that we might be there for four years, that a crew member might get shot with an arrow, that an actor might get a gun pulled on him?" He smiles. "I was a little surprised when it came in on schedule, I admit. He's obviously the sort of guy who likes to have a life experience when he's making a movie. But I enjoyed making it."

The car pulls up to the studio and the publicist bounds out. The clock is ticking faster now.

Bale, gets out of the car, calm and unhurried. If he is aware of the people on the street watching him -- and looking like a taller, saner Tom Cruise, he can't help but give off a movie-star vibe -- Bale shows no sign. He walks into the building quietly and when the security guard asks him his name, spells it politely. He waits, sans attitude, to have a temporary picture ID taken. He looks good even in that.

He has been acting for more than half his life, and swears it's nothing but an interesting job. When it began, back home in his native Great Britain, it was nothing more than a lark.

"I never took acting lessons or anything," he says later, sitting in the green room waiting to go on. "It was more of a case of me just being interested in each thing as it came along, rather than thinking this was something I wanted to make a career of. But when I decided I did want to make a career of it, it didn't shock my parents. What would have shocked them was if I wanted to put on a suit and tie and go 9 to 5."

There had been actors in the family before, on both sides -- his mother was even a dancer in the circus -- and his father, a commercial pilot, made no objection when his son decided to start auditioning. The second movie part Bale landed was at 13 in Steven Spielberg's 1987 "Empire of the Sun," the unusual story of a British boy surviving the brutal Japanese occupation of Shanghai. It made him a child star. It also made him very uneasy.

"I had really enjoyed my anonymity before that," he says. "I liked being with my friends and getting into trouble and breaking into places and smashing things and shoplifting, but now, everyone was looking at me. Anonymity is so essential to your growth as a child because it's a time for putting it all to the test, pushing boundaries, seeing how far you can take things. And I lost that."

There was so much quick success that, ironically, Bale quickly wanted to quit the whole thing. As it was, he waited two years before taking another role, this time a small part in Kenneth Branagh's "Henry V."

"I felt I dealt with it fairly well at the time, but I had problems," he says. "I wasn't happy. And, you know, I can't help looking at it now and saying there's a point at which a child acting just becomes abuse. I really think it can just kill all the enjoyment a child is getting from it, and I look at it now with unease. Maybe there are some wonderful people, but me, I always suspect someone who wants to make their money from children."

Bale grew up fast. He was in "Swing Kids" and "Newsies," and then played the young gentleman in "Little Women." By 23, he had transitioned into demanding adult parts -- "Metroland," "Velvet Goldmine" and even the Messiah in "Mary, Mother of Jesus."

He got his most famous -- or, at least, notorious -- break in 2000, when Leonardo DiCaprio suddenly backed out of doing the brutal serial-killer thriller "American Psycho." Bale, always director Mary Harron's first choice, stepped back into the role of Patrick Bateman, his carefully sculpted body dressed in designer clothes, his manically unhinged mind obsessed with eviscerating every woman he saw.

The movie was presented as a satire, a leftist critique of consumerism and a feminist commentary on misogyny. It was greeted -- when people chose not to simply avert their eyes -- as...

"As a piece of schlock," Bale finishes. "I always knew it was going to be perceived by some people that way, but I saw something different. Other people who don't get it, it's not their sense of humor, that's okay. I don't expect things to be universally embraced, nor should they be. If they are, they tend to be very bland."

Bland isn't something Bale is interested in. After "American Psycho" he played a yuppie killer in "Shaft." A supporting part in "Laurel Canyon" followed, as the morally flexible adult son of a Joni-Mitchell-style rock star.

The roles have all been different. Yet what hasn't changed is Bale's commitment to them. Although the murderer he played in "Shaft" says some appallingly racist things, Bale didn't ask to soften any of them. Although some actors would feel it necessary to indicate their own liberalism in "Rescue Dawn" -- making their real-life, anti-war bona fides clear to every fan -- Bale plays Dengler as the gung-ho guy he was.

"I hate that nudge, nudge, wink, wink to the audience," he says. "That kills it, doesn't it? What's fun about acting, what's enjoyable about it, is the immersion. I enjoy that, I enjoy losing myself in the roles. And if you're that removed from it that you're trying to remember your own image, and signal that to the audience -- then there's no way that you're really inside the character."

"Christian is the sort of actor who's very much about keeping you on your game and throwing curve balls," Davies says. "And very comfortable getting curve balls, too. Some actors want to know exactly how things are going to go, how it'll sound -- it's like a Xerox machine from take to take. Christian is the flip of that. It's more like jazz, where neither of us know exactly what we're going to say or do, and there are all these unexpected moments and accidents."

There have been other accidents that aren't so happy. Not every experience has been as challenging on the set as it seemed to promise on paper. Bale's been disappointed, he says, "on numerous occasions." (Certainly 2002's "Reign of Fire," which had him chasing earth-scorching dragons, had to have been one of them.) But then, he says, he moves on.

"Short of people outright lying to me, I don't get mad about it," he says. "If it's just a matter of taste, well, I know I can't work with them again. But unless somebody is being actively dishonest with me, I'm not going to get mad and crazy and bring the whole thing down, because what's the point in that? You just acknowledge, okay, this is going to be a disappointment and try to get something out of the making of it."

When he does find someone simpatico, though, Bale is happy to work with him again. After shooting the glam-rock "Velvet Goldmine" for Todd Haynes, for example, he was eager to sign on for the quirky director's upcoming "I'm Not There," a surreal Dylan biopic in which a large cast of actors take turns playing different persona. And making "Batman Begins" for Christopher Nolan led directly to "The Prestige" -- and now, a new Caped Crusader picture for 2008 with Nolan, "The Dark Knight."

"The script leaves room for a very interesting follow-up, too," Bale says of the potential for a third film. "I think we could take it somewhere else."

Right now where the actor needs to be taken is off to makeup -- and then to the studio where Rose, in a banker's pinstriped suit, waits for the interview.

The host shuffles papers, and calls out questions to his producers. ("What's Herzog done," he asks loudly.) Bale fidgets a bit. "I met your father a couple of times," Rose tells him before the cameras roll. (Bale's father remarried, late in life, to Gloria Steinem; he died three years later, in 2003). Finally, the two spend 20 minutes or so chatting about the film. Bale, who has been doing this all day, remains professionally cordial throughout.

"I think I overcomplicated interviews in the past," Bale says afterwards, after signing the host's autograph book. "If you don't like the questions, you can always say no. You're not always going to have people being pleasant, but tough crap, that's life, isn't it? As long as they're not offending people near to me, I don't care what they say. People want to say negative things about me or even untrue things about me -- well, I'm an actor, aren't I? The whole point is to be unknown and sort of misunderstood."

And so, Bale, who seems so intent, so focused, so obsessive on the screen, just lets it go in real life. He and his wife, Sibi Blazic, a former assistant to Winona Ryder -- they met during the "Little Women" shoot -- have a two-year-old girl, and homes in California and abroad.

"I still do all the things I've always done," Bale says. "I would never want to give up a life of just bumming around, and hanging out by the freeway, or cemeteries, or the parking lot of the 7/11. I would hate to give that up."

And he hasn't. Except that the clock is still running. This interview is now over, too; the car is waiting downstairs for a torturous rush-hour trip to La Guardia, where a plane is waiting to take him still someplace else. The publicist briskly leading the way, Bale walks quickly down hallways, surrendering his temporary security badge to a guard, stepping outside into a summer street where the heat hits you like a slap in the face. The car door opens. That clock is ticking again.

And Bale lets it tick as he sees another group of fans slowly approaching. One talks, with giggly enthusiasm, of once spying Bale on location in Chicago. Three others hold out Batman pictures like holy offerings, relics waiting to be blessed. And carefully, politely, Bale smiles and signs each one and lets everything else wait.






LOL







Edit: I'm in a giving mood, so I'll put a couple more pics:

Christian, bb, why u so ~intense~ while humping that door?



He's so dreamy here:



Ok, /drooling.




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