Christian Bale: releasing obscene rant audio was a breach of creative trust

Christian Bale is still talking about his obscenity-filled rant at a crew member. The incident happened last year, during filming of Terminator: Salvation, but the audio of the rant didn’t come out until February of this year. Bale apologized for the incident, and for the most part kept his head down as everyone from film producers to Bale’s family freaked out. It was pretty good crisis-management on Bale’s part, but it seems like his apology tour isn’t over.

Bale sat down for an interview with Total Film, and his comments about the incident are revealing. First, he takes full responsibility for what happened, saying that he went “overboard”. I think “overboard” might be too light of a sentence, Bale – I would say “massive hissy fit” or “childish, unprofessional temper tantrum”, but those are just semantics. Then Bale blames the sound people on Terminator for releasing the audio – a bold move.

Christian Bale has claimed that the sound engineers who secretly recorded his Terminator Salvation rant betrayed his “magic circle” of trust.

The audio clip of Bale screaming abuse at the film’s director of photography became a YouTube hit when it was leaked online in February. It featured 39 F-words and Bale threatening to quit the film after the hapless Shane Hurlbut accidentally wandered into shot. Bale’s rant inspired a number of online spoofs and mash-ups with the actor’s expletive-laden tirade put to music.

Breaking his silence about the incident in an interview with Total Film, Bale, 35, said: “Hey, I did what I did. I’m not hiding from that. I went overboard. But there is an essential trust and it’s not a tacit one, it’s a verbal one, a spoken one, which is [that] every sound guy says, ‘We are not only not recording, we’re not even listening.’”

“So, well, there goes that. I do stress, though, it’s not in any way a trust that’s there to cover up bad behaviour. It’s not about that. It’s an essential trust that’s needed for creativity.”

Asked if he was worried that the story would affect audiences’ enjoyment of Termination Salvation, the Batman star replied: “Yeah. It’s not in anyone’s interest to know that much. I understand people are interested, I get that they want to hear about it, but to me I look at it as old-school movie magic and with magic you do not reveal your secrets.”

“You really make people work to find those secrets and generally you just reveal it to people who are going to join your f***ing magic circle and then you know about it. And you know, for me, I’ve never been comfortable with the revealing of those mysteries which I think are wonderful mysteries.”

Bale added: “I’m not making any excuses, I’m not whining, I’m not going, ‘Oh well, if it hadn’t have been for that…’ Hey, listen, I did it, it’s in the public space. Hey, I take the consequences for it. But it’s that. It’s a creative trust.”

Terminator Salvation is the fourth instalment in the franchise, although Bale would prefer people to call it the Terminator “mythology” because “franchise just sounds so money-minded. McDonalds is a franchise”. It opens on June 3.

[From The Telegraph]

Ordinarily, I would think Bale is trying to blame the sound guys for the whole of the controversy, but I tend to think he has a point. He’s taken his knocks, and now he’s not saying it’s the sound guys’ fault for the incident, just the way the incident became public. It is about trust, and most actors need to trust a film’s crew with a lot of personal stuff. As overwhelmingly unprofessional as Bale was in that audio, it was also unprofessional, and a breech of professional trust, to release the tape.

In any case, I doubt Bale was hurt by the incident in the long run. He’s still an in-demand actor, and now members of the crew know better than to walk into his shot. The trailers for Terminator: Salvation makes the film look really good, although it’s probably a bit too reliant on special effects rather than story.

Here’s Christian Bale taking his 4 year old daughter Emmaline to gymnastics in Los Angeles on April 15th. Images thanks to Pacific Coast News.

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