Christian Bale Talks About How Things Went From Bad to Worse on TERMINATOR: SALVATION
Terminator: Salvation definitely wasn't Christian Bale's finest moment. The movie started out with a decent concept but was executed terribly by director McG. On top of the mediocre level of filmmaking, it was also the moment where Bale completely blew up at one of the crew members and started yelling at him and the crew. Like I said, this wasn't Bale's finest moment. If you want a little reminder of that, you can listen to it here.
During a recent interview with The Playlist, Bale opened up about his time working on Terminator: Salvation and his "enormous regrets". Not only did he talk about how the film project went from bad to worse, but he also reflected on his foul-mouthed tirade. Things just didn't pan out for the film the way he was hoping:
"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. 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 little bit of that involved in the choice."
He then went on to talk about his biggest regret when he lashed out in a rage at the director of photography Shane Hurlbut. He explained:
"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…"
So I imagine he'll never do that again! It's a shame that this movie didn't work out. I think it could have been a decent film if it had a better writer and director.