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

[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.