Christian Bale discusses his regret over 2009’s Terminator Salvation and his infamous on-set tirade.
It’s not often that actor Christian Bale makes a bad movie choice but it seems he agrees with most people on the subject of his 2009 film, Terminator Salvation. Speaking recently whilst taking part in promotional duties for his upcoming Western, Hostiles, Bale admitted that he had in fact turned down the role of John Connor several times before eventually accepting it;
“I said no three times. I thought that the franchise…I went ‘Nah, there’s no story there.’ I’d 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 [Jonathan] 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.”
It appears that it’s been a great source of regret for the former Batman, who went on to explain;
“And it’s a great thorn in my side, 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 verbalising that to me, I started to go, ‘Oh really? All right, well watch this then.’ So there was a little bit of that involved in the choice.”
The filming of the fourth instalment of the Terminator franchise saw the infamous scene of Bale’s meltdown against a member of the production staff (director of photography Shane Hurlbut), which went viral after a recording of his tirade was leaked online and Bale didn’t shy away from addressing this;
“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.”
Hostiles is on general release now.
Source: Yahoo Movies