There are only two things I remember about Terminator Salvation. The first was that jarring CGI Arnold Schwarzenegger; the second was Christian Bale blowing up on set in a tirade that went viral and made him a laughingstock for weeks. Everything else is a blur. But Bale still remembers it quite well, although it sounds like he wishes he didn’t.
Doing some reflecting while on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Bale talks about how he knew doing the film was a terrible idea, and yet a weird sense of pride had him saying “yes” anyway. It was a decision he would come to regret…
“I said no three times. I thought that the franchise…I went ‘Nah, there’s no story there.’ I’d seen seen the first one and enjoyed that back in England, I’d been to the movies and seen the second one.”
“It was an unfortunate series of events involving the writers’ strike, involving Jonah Nolan, who was able to come on, and really start to write a wonderful script, but then got called away for a prior commitment that he had,” Bale explained. “And it’s a great thorn in myside, because I wish we could have reinvigorated [the franchise]. And unfortunately, during production, you could tell that wasn’t happening. It’s a great shame.
“There’s a perverse side to me, where people were telling me that, there’s no way on God’s Earth that I should take that role, and I was thinking the same thing. But when people started verbalizing that to me, I started to go, ‘Oh really? All right, well watch this then.’ So there was a littcharactersle bit of that involved in the choice.”
And then there’s the tirade itself. I had to look it up to see what the whole thing was about, but it was over cinematographer Shane Hurlbut who had wandered into the middle of a key shot. Bale exploded, they were “done professionally” or whatever funny thing he kept screaming about, and the rest is Internet history…
“That was a very unusual occasion. Great learning lesson for me. Do you remember that scene with Linda Hamilton where she’s really going nuts in ‘Terminator 2’? We said, we’ve got to channel that at some point in the film, and that was the scene in which we were channeling it. Great lesson for me of, no matter how much you lose yourself in a scene, you do not allow yourself to behave that way. And yeah, of course I’ve got enormous regrets about it…”
Bale is generally pretty quiet stuff like this so for him to give such a thorough answer suggests it really is something he thinks about. You don’t hear much about that movie or Bale’s outburst anymore, which is probably how he’d want it. [via ThePlaylist]
