On long, involved movie rants.

[demiurgent]

So, I finally got around to listening to the Christian Bale rantfest that's... um... 'news.' For those who haven't, essentially Bale and his costar were playing an intensely emotional scene, and the director of production -- who'd been warned to not cross onto the set and make light adjustments while rolling before -- walked into Bale's field of vision and broke his concentration. Bale went apeshit on the guy. Many examples of 'fuck' and 'amateur' were thrown around.

This is now... apparently... some kind of controversy.

I dunno, man. I've been in a lot of theater. In the middle of rehearsals -- much less when it goes up -- what you're doing becomes disproportionately important to you. I've heard probably forty explosive rants of that kind over the last twenty five years. There is, to use the theater aphorism, a reason they call it drama.

People are coming down on Bale for 'taking it out on a coworker.' Only this isn't the office. This is a creative endeavor. Actors are napalm at the best of times -- get them worked up for a highly emotional scene and you're lucky no one gets knifed. This is just how it goes. This is how it goes in penny-ante community theater productions that less than a hundred people will ever see -- are you telling me it's going to be way more mellow when you're shooting a movie that's expected to make hundreds of millions of dollars?

It's just theater. Everyone's embarrassed for about two hours and there's whispering for a day and then you move on. Being a prima donna is walking off the set and not coming back. Blowing up at a DP is news?

Oh, wait. He's a big star. That makes it news, because we can 'tsk' at his potty mouth. Fucking cultural puritanism.

Comments

[roniliquidity.livejournal.com]

I don't really care about the rant, but I kind of love this remix:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTihsJQHt48

[wednesday]

That really belongs on one of the Mortal Kombat soundtracks. Dang.

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

Oh holy crap. That's beautiful.

[rustmon.livejournal.com]

when I heard it driving to work today - I got a woody.

[mrbankies.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes it is.

[clodia-risa.livejournal.com]

You perfectly encapsulated what I was thinking. Except for he really could have gone a lot worse. He stuck to the guy's professionalism, didn't attack the man himself. I'm bewildered by all the attention that it's grabbing.

[dagbrown.livejournal.com]

In the middle of the rant, he said "You're a good guy, and all, but..." and then went back to attacking the lighting guy's performance. I respect him all that much more for that. At no point did he attack the lighting guy--all he did was attack his performance.

There is no reason to lose any respect for Christian Bale over this. He was being intensely professional about his work.

Someone who cares that much about his work? I can get behind him.

[mrbankies.livejournal.com]

Haven't listened to it, don't intend to listen to it, don't give a flying fuck. Yawn.

[tacohime.livejournal.com]

Is it wrong of me to like him EVEN MORE after listening to that?

<3 <3 <3

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

No. No it is not.

[dagbrown.livejournal.com]

Indeed, understanding what his job is, the only reasonable reaction is to respect him more as a result of that.

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

I am inevitably reminded of the various outtakes of Casey Kasem recording the commentary and the station ID blurbs for American Top 40 Countdown that made the rounds lo these many years ago. "We come in out of an upbeat song and then I gotta do a piece about somebody's goddamn dog dying! Jesus Christ!"

[onalark.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Except for one very small thing, which is that it violates my basic rules of human decency. Call a cut, grab the guy, and dress him down away from prying eyes (and cellphones, or whatever recorded the rant). That's a level of professionalism I can respect.

But we also have no idea what preceded that. It could be Bale did exactly that previously. It could be he did not. We don't know. Out of context rant is out of context.

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

Oh, unquestionably it violates the basic rules of human decency. Except we're talking about an atmosphere that isn't just emotionally charged, it's intentionally charging emotions as powerfully as they can be charged. In theater, in cinema, in almost any acting done with more than one person, a lot of time and effort is made to reduce emotional barriers between the actors, whip them up into an emotional state, and then let them loose. This is in fact what the job is.

Further, after weeks of working on a set, and working to break down those emotional barriers, the feeling is intimate and intense. That's why actors go through post-theater depression after shows end. Here's a group of people you're as close to as your family, who you've been working with day in and day out in some of the most emotional moments and scenes, refining and polishing. Lead actor to stagehand, it's infectious and powerful and losing it is like losing a limb.

So if someone -- especially someone who's been on enough sets to where he's a director of photography -- breaks the moment, particularly repeatedly (and from what I've seen, he's been spoken to before about it), you're going to touch off a reaction. If Christian Bale went apeshit in the grocery store, I'd be aghast. But on a set? Dude, you don't smoke around gunpowder -- it leads to an explosion.

Is it indecent? Yeah. But it's the nature of it. It's the price of trying to feel real emotion in a scene and evoke real emotion with a scene. And this scene was apparently one of the major emotional payoffs of the film.

And, from all accounts, after the explosion died down, Bale and Hurlbut filmed for another seven hours that same day. Like I said above -- you have an explosion, people are embarrassed for a bit, they shake it off and they go back to work. It's theater. Capital-D Drama. For it to make newspapers is just silly gossipmongering.

[onalark.livejournal.com]

My extremely limited (high school plays) experience with acting caused me to decide it wasn't for me. Even at that extremely amateur level, I felt drained, exhausted, and strangely hollow after every rehearsal and performance. I was a human eggshell, and I didn't like it.

I have never wondered why some actors become drug addicts or emotional powder kegs or get into bad relationships with questionable individuals.

[lurkerwithout.livejournal.com]

Man, if I were stuck on a McG helmed picture I'd be blowing up every fucking hour...

[zoethe.livejournal.com]

What you can barely hear, at least in the version I listened to, was the other guy giving a "whatevah, I'm sorry!" poor excuse for an apology. Nothing is more likely to wind a guy FURTHER up than having the thing that upsets him treated trivially, particularly more than once. It doesn't surprise me that Bale keeps after him; he doesn't think he's being taken seriously.

Besides, he's the Goddamn Batman.

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

Don't mess with the Goddamn Batman.

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

Goddamn Batman Dos and Don'ts

DON'T: mess with the goddamn Batman.

DO: offer the goddamn Batman some Primatene.

[roniliquidity.livejournal.com]

That pretty much sums it all up; "Don't fuck with his lights, he's the goddamn Batman!"

[wedgex.livejournal.com]

Director of Photography, fwiw.

Also, couple of interesting points. One, yeah, blow ups on set happen, everything emotionally charged and such, but he apparently went on about it for quite some time. When you start lashing out at the director for trying to reign things in? Not so good. I'd love to hear the alternate universe version of this were Cameron still directing the franchise. Bale would be a *goddamn grease spot* right now. :D

The other thing which really makes this interesting? This apparently happened a few days before the whole deal where Bale was briefly accused of assaulting his own mother.

There's on-set energy? And then there's anger management issues. ;)

[ardaniel]

Yeah, you can be passionate about the integrity of your performance, or you can just be a giant goddamn douche. ;)

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

I listened to the whole five minutes. It was a pretty bog standard actor hissy-fit rant. Lots of "fuck," lots of "you're being amateur and you don't know what you're doing," lots of noise and fury.

As for the mother thing -- I hadn't heard about it, but checking briefly... there's a difference between assault and verbal assault, with charges dismissed. I don't condone verbal assault, mind. :)

I totally concur, by the by, about Cameron. Cameron would have nailed him with a fire extinguisher, then given him a verbal superplex followed by a verbal elbow off the top rope. :)

None of which make any of this news ;).

[cythraul.livejournal.com]

I was with you up until "cultural puritanism". Concern about the potty mouth would be puritanism, yes, but the blowing up on a coworker angle would be potentially objectionable even without the profanity.

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

See above, ad nauseum. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but this isn't an office setting.

[cythraul.livejournal.com]

Never mind office setting. There were threats of violence in there, and at one point he sounds like he rushes at the guy for a second. In a public place he'd have had cops on him.

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

Oh, and remember -- this story broke very very briefly back in July. It was a very standard "there was a blowup on the set of Terminator Salvation ha ha" puff piece in the gossip journalism circles, and it went away just as fast.

It's a major story now that there's audio and they can count how many times he said "fuck." That's cultural puritanism.

[rustmon.livejournal.com]

it's not news.

they pay this guy a lot of money. They expect him to carry an entire movie that is supposed to make millions of dollars.

they know he's an intense actor who really gets into his scenes.

they wait til one of the biggest, more emotional scenes in a movie, and then they break his concentration.

I dunno - what do you expect?

I liken it to me being the lead programmer on a piece of software that can make or break the company's bottom line. We have a tighttight schedule, and I'm right in the middle of coding one of the most critical architectural functions the application has - then all of the sudden I notice that one of the junior programmers is tweaking the APIs I'm using (even though I asked him not to because I was doing some big development today).

I'd break his fucking hands.

and, well - it's not all true. But close.

sometimes - it's okay to get right up in someone's face and express your displeasure. Especially when you've been talking and talking, and it seems like you're not being listened to.

I remember when a British? Times writer published an AMAZING rant about an editor who didn't listen to what he had to say when he cautioned about messing with his work.

That article was looked at as "Wow - that's a cool way to fight back."

Why is this any different?

just my rantyness.

[5eh.livejournal.com]

I've said fuck more than 40 times in four minutes. It is called being drunk and talking about existentialism.

I don't see what the big deal is. He does get paid the big bucks, and having some lackey fuck up your concentration after the dude has been told NOT to do it...well, I can understand the rantasticity. I just wish I had the balls to rant like that in a semi-public setting...maybe that's what all of this is about...the fact that HE can get away with it, but we the plebs can't.

[ardaniel]

DP == generally not a "lackey." Just sayin'.

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

I was mistaken when I thought he was a Production guy instead of -- well, effectively the Cinematographer. And an award-winning one at that, from what I've seen.

I stand by what I wrote -- this is such total non-news -- but the guy isn't some guy off the street by any stretch.

(Though it reinforces to me that he should know way better than to walk onto the set during a live take. If he wants to run rehearsals so he can adjust the lighting during the live scene, he should do just that.)

[5eh.livejournal.com]

yeah, that just reinforces the "dude, you should know better."

[magentamom.livejournal.com]

I think it's less about this specific incident and more that it ties into "Christian Bale is a loose cannon" narrative. That isn't news either, but it's been out there since the news about his mom and sister.

[dagbrown.livejournal.com]

You know, this all makes me feel kind of good about how things have been going at my place of work.

I work at an ISP that also does web hosting. There's one fellow who seriously overestimates his level of skill.

The systems are designed so that if any random server fails, generally a quick reboot will fix it. Everything is redundantly-clustered to a fare-thee-well.

This fellow managed to get it into his head that because the servers are running Solaris, they should never be rebooted. Because, you know, Solaris isn't Windows.

So he spent two hours wrestling with this one server over how, because of a bug in NFS, one filesystem doesn't mount correctly. He unmounted, remounted, unmounted, remounted, and unmounted one filesystem on this box over and over. Because, you know, Solaris never needs to be rebooted.

Eventually he gave up and rebooted the system. And by golly, everything worked fine after that. Because the system was designed so that rebooting a server (which was, y'know, Server 3 of 5) would generally work out right.

So because this guy tried to be a hero instead of applying the quick'n'easy fix, a whole bunch of people got bizarre broken results for a couple of hours. Fortunately, those bizarre broken results happened during the dead of night, and would've been easily fixed by the user hitting reload. But still--he just Didn't Get It. Because of his strange attraction to Not Rebooting Servers, he caused problems for a couple of hours, where taking the easy route out would have fixed everything.

The next morning, he talked about the problems he'd had, and how rebooting the server fixed it. The knowledgeable people he worked with all said, "Yup, you should've rebooted it first."

All of us were models of calmness next to how Christian Bale reacted. But we all would've been within our rights to tear him a new asshole on that account.