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.
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Date: 2009-02-04 11:22 pm (UTC)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.