Christian Bale (2 page)

Instead of returning from the bathroom, Christian decided to make a break for the elevator doors. He was soon walking out through the hotel lobby and heading down the Champs-Elysées. With each step, he felt a weight being lifted off him and happily immersed himself in the anonymity of the noisy streets where everyone was speaking a language he could not understand.

It was 1988 and fourteen-year-old Christian Bale was on his very first press junket for the Warner Brothers film
Empire of the Sun
. As
Empire Magazine
wrote in 1998, Christian “was rude, gave monosyllabic answers and generally proved as uncooperative as possible. His reputation for being difficult was born.”

As the next interviewer lost his patience, it soon became apparent that Christian was going to be late for this interview. And the next one. And the two after that. Word would soon spread throughout the hotel that the young star of Steven Spielberg's latest movie was missing.

While a small posse of worried publicists and personal assistants started combing through the streets of Paris, Christian
was contentedly sitting in the grass in a park, enjoying the cool weather and the solitude.

Back at the hotel, the publicist had alerted Christian's older sister Sharon, who was just seventeen, and she in turn anxiously called their father, David, who was back home in England. He would know what to do, she thought. He was the only one who could handle Christian.

“You
must
get a hold of Christian at once,” David hissed at his daughter. “Tell him he's embarrassing Steven. He
mustn't
do this to Steven!” David was emphatic, his voice edging up in panic. From the very first wonderful review of his only son's major motion picture debut, the future looked absolutely bright. But to have Christian walking out on the all-too-crucial press junket would most certainly get back to Spielberg, and David was worried about Christian's acting future, if word got out that he was throwing tantrums and being difficult.

Christian often tried to describe to me that time period—there was an incredible amount of pressure riding on his small shoulders. He enjoyed making movies, but the publicity junket made him miserable. It was the beginning of his severe dislike of the words “must” and “should.” He didn't like being told what he should do or must do—unless it was coming from the director of a movie.

This wasn't something I could understand easily. I always thought that if I had the good fortune of being a celebrity, I'd gladly deal with publicity. But then again, Christian was a child actor and he had a lot of people depending on him at a very early age.

Acting was not his chosen profession but an accident he had cheerfully stumbled into when he was eight years old. Acting was just something he played at, tagging along with his older sisters, Sharon and Louise, when they went to dance and acting workshops. Watching his sisters have fun, Christian jumped right in,
glad for the creative outlet to make some noise, conjure up silly faces, and to run around the room. “It was better than just leaving him in the van,” explained David.

Christian told the
Daily Mirror
at the time: “I wasn't really interested in acting till I went to see my sister Louise on stage in
Bugsy Malone
. I saw it 27 times and thought it looked fun.” Also starring in that 1983 production of
Bugsy
—a stage adaptation of the 1976 Alan Parker movie—was Catherine Zeta-Jones.

But now acting was set to be Christian's profession and his family's livelihood. Christian and his sisters were enrolled in acting workshops while they lived in Reading. Their classmates included Kate and Anna Winslet. Soon, casting agents were picking Christian over his sisters for small parts in television commercials for the now defunct Pac-Man cereal, which capitalized on the video game's popularity in the 1980s, and he was paid £80 for a Lenor clothes conditioner commercial.

“I was one of those annoying kids who peeked around the washing-machine with their dirty football boots,” recalled Christian. “I was just eight years old at the time and I had to say: ‘Oh mummy, this smells nice.'” Still, movie acting was just a fantasy. Christian's only ambition at the time was to be a Stormtrooper in a
Star Wars
movie.

Commercials gave way to small stage, television, and film roles. Within a space of two years, he had a bit part in the BBC miniseries
Heart of the Country
, based on the Fay Weldon novel. Then, Christian ended up making £12 a night, playing a “noisy, obnoxious American kid” in the West End comedy
The Nerd
, opposite comedian and Mr. Bean star Rowan Atkinson. He had a supporting role in
The Land of Far Away
, a children's film based on a book by Astrid Lindgren, the well-known author of the Pippi Longstocking series. And he was crowned Tsarevich of Russia, as Alexei, in the NBC telefilm
Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna
, opposite Amy Irving, who was then Mrs. Steven Spielberg.

When Spielberg was ready to cast the lead role in
Empire of the Sun
, a film based on the semiautobiographical novel by J.G. Ballard about his childhood in war-torn China, Amy suggested Christian. But Spielberg was not convinced. “Spielberg actually told me he didn't like my performance in
Anastasia
,” Christian said. But the boy eventually won the role after many screen tests and readings. It took Spielberg almost seven months to cast the role, and choosing Christian ended up being a perfect casting decision that impressed Ballard when he visited the set.

David and Jenny Bale were thrilled when Christian landed the part. Christian later told
Movieline
that his father was preparing him for a life-changing experience: “Before we started, my dad told me: ‘This could be a fantastic experience, but it could also be the worst thing that could happen to you.' There have been moments when I've wished it had never happened . . . You know, when you're a teenager, you just want to be normal.”

It seems to me that
Empire of the Sun
was truly the last great American epic, lovingly crafted before today's era of digital effects where crowds of hundreds can be digitally multiplied into hordes of thousands. The sixteen-week shoot involved 500 crew members and more than 15,000 extras. The film used real stunt pilots and real vintage World War II aircraft—not a computerized rendering of aerial battles as in
Pearl Harbor
or
Independence Day
. Shot on location in China and Spain, the film was Spielberg's most ambitious project and an unusual subject matter for him at the time, because it was about the
end
of childhood—innocence brutally lost because of war.
Empire of the Sun
also happened to be the first major Hollywood production shot in China since the 1949 Communist revolution.

The subject matter was unique in many ways because it was set in Shanghai on the eve of World War II during the Sino-Japanese war—not an arena of the war familiar to American moviegoers but painfully known to my family history. I had lost
my grandmother during the war, and it was practically a family ritual for my parents to recount the tales of growing up as a child in war-torn China.

Shanghai was the unfortunate first city in history to suffer the devastation of aerial bombardment. Christian played Jamie Graham, a privileged English schoolboy who, like J.G. Ballard, was born and raised in the British section of Shanghai. (Before World War II, Shanghai had a number of European enclaves.) During the Japanese invasion, Jamie is separated from his parents. He is captured and thrown into a Japanese concentration camp where he survives through ferocious skills he learns from two American prisoners.

When production began on
Empire of the Sun
, the cast had grown to include an impressive list of distinguished actors including Nigel Havers, Miranda Richardson, Joe Pantoliano, and John Malkovich. (It also happened to be Ben Stiller's first movie role as “Dainty”—an imprisoned American!) But it was Christian who dominated the screen for the duration of the 154-minute film. It was a striking, career-making debut, and Christian's performance was the heart and soul of the film. Unlike the typical cherubic child actor, Spielberg needed a child who could compellingly portray a concentration camp survivor.

“I really enjoyed working on that film,” recalled Christian. “The main thing I remember about it is that it was so well organized. Very well planned indeed. And Spielberg was very friendly to me. But at that age, I didn't know what was going on, which was just as well I suppose. Consequently, I wasn't nervous on the set—it didn't even cross my mind.”

Off the set, an English boy stuck in China's largest city was a different story. “There was nothing to do, and everything is very dusty and crowded,” Christian recalled. “There's no color anywhere and the Chinese are always coughing.”

Though Christian was accompanied by his mother during the
production, he called his father whenever possible and David remembered how lonely Christian was during the shoot.

“He looked forward to playing table tennis with cast and crew, particularly with John Malkovich. But on some days, Malkovich refused to play with Christian and I had to console him and explain that grown-ups don't always like to play games with children.”

Once the four-month shoot was finished, Christian was thrilled to be home in England. He told a reporter: “The first thing I did was to head with my sister Louise to the beach and then the local McDonald's. I hated the food in Shanghai.”

When it was released in the U.S. at Christmas in 1987, the film itself received mixed reviews as it sugarcoated the nihilism of Ballard's book. With John Williams' “choir of angels” score, no major American stars, and Spielberg's trademark gloss on a part of World War II unknown to most Americans,
Empire of the Sun
, budgeted at $38 million, grossed only $22 million, making it the biggest bomb of Spielberg's career to date.

Worse,
Empire of the Sun
was released just weeks after Bernardo Bertolucci's masterpiece
The Last Emperor
, a film about the last emperor of China, Pu-yi. Spielberg's similarly titled film invited comparison. Both pictures were set in China. Both were centered on a young boy growing up during war and strife. America's pop director set himself up to be compared to Europe's highbrow film maestro, and the critics responded.
The Last Emperor
swept that year's Academy Awards, winning nine Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director.

But most critics, regardless of how they felt about the film, were impressed by Christian's portrayal, from spoiled, privileged private school brat to feral young prisoner in a Japanese prison camp.

Janet Maslin of the
New York Times
wrote, “Mr. Bale takes the film to a different dramatic plane. This fine young actor is eminently able to handle an ambitious and demanding role.”

Roger Ebert,
Chicago Sun-Times
, added, “Kind of a grim poetry that suggests a young Tom Courtenay.”

And Michael Atkinson,
Movieline
, praised, “Bale manages so many strange, heartbreaking, transcendent moments that we are continually caught off guard.”

At the film's London premiere, Christian was presented to Queen Elizabeth II. It was a glitzy affair that made a deep impression on David, who recalled: “Here I was, a nobody from South Africa, and my son was shaking hands with the Queen!”

Christian's performance earned him an Outstanding Juvenile Performance citation from the National Board of Review and a Young Artist Award. Christian was considered an odds-on favorite to be nominated for an Oscar, but when the nomination failed to materialize, Christian was relieved. “People are ready for recognition at different ages and I wasn't.”

Empire of the Sun
was my favorite film at the time. I was living in Toronto and belonged to a cappuccino-swilling indie film counterculture; we all dressed like Robert Smith from The Cure and had long outgrown Spielberg movies. But
Empire of the Sun
, with its epic sweep and a subject matter near and dear to my own family history, resonated with me. The bodies of the dead Chinese civilians floating down the river? That brought back to my mind every horrific story my parents had told me about the war. That poor little boy eating potatoes and weevils? I wanted to save him from the Japanese concentration camps!

David was soon making plans for Christian's next film. The
New York Times
reported that Christian had several offers. By March 1988, the
Sunday Express
was reporting that Christian was planning to do a movie with his sister Louise. David had ditched his job to manage his son's career full-time.

But David's post
-Empire
plans were premature. Little did anyone know how Christian would react to the demands of a press junket. By the time Christian found himself in that hotel
room in Paris stabbing an orange in frustration, he had been doing ten hours of interviews a day with few breaks. To promote
Empire
, Christian would complete over 160 interviews with newspapers, television, magazines, and radio. In an almost parallel of the movie, Christian now saw himself as a prisoner, only this time his jail was a hotel room as different reporters were marched in and out.

After the Paris press junket, Christian was pretty confident that he no longer wanted to have anything to do with show business. His movie career seemingly over, Christian retreated to his home in Bournemouth in the south of England, happy to be finished with the movie industry.