Christian Bale (25 page)

Perhaps the toughest criticism came from the
Wall Street Journal's
Joe Morgenstern, who wrote: “I wish I'd brought a pair of peas to the screening. Then I could have taken in the glorious scenery without the dumb dialogue, which is delivered in a jangle of accents that makes a mockery of ethnicity.”

Alarmed at the bad reviews, Christian decided to skip the L.A. premiere, breaking with Hollywood tradition where even a poorly reviewed studio movie merited a glamorous red carpet event where the cast could express their solidarity, generate press coverage, and schmooze with filmmakers for their
next
project. Christian didn't like the Hollywood game—particularly publicity and the red carpet walk where one had to spit out all the same answers to the same questions.

The night of the premiere for
Captain Corelli's Mandolin
was memorable for a number of reasons. I had recently moved to an apartment in Marina del Rey, and since Christian had decided not to attend the premiere, he came over to meet my new dog, Dodger, the world's largest dachshund, which I had adopted from a rescue in Canoga Park. As Christian settled on my couch,
Dodger took one look at Christian, jumped up, and bit him right in the crotch. Dodger survived Christian's wrath by being fast, but it definitely added to Christian's unhappy mood for the evening.

Touchstone Pictures'
Reign of Fire
was another popcorn movie. Directed by Rob Bowman (best known for his work on the
X-Files
), this was Christian's first role with the gruff, survivalist beard that would become a familiar sight in his later films.

Shot in Ireland,
Reign of Fire
was supposed to be a modern dragon movie. Budgeted at $60 million, it was
Dragonheart
meets
Dragonslayer
meets
Mad Max
. In a construction site in London, hibernating dragons are accidentally awakened. The dragons lay waste to the earth and the surviving humans are holed up in little communities in a postapocalyptic existence. Christian stars as the leader of one English survival camp. A seventeen-year-old English actor named Scott Moutter played Christian's adopted son, Jared. When an army of Americans show up—led by Matthew McConaughey biting a big cigar—the humans band together to kill the lone male dragon.

When I first read the script, I had added my own flurry of sticky notes to give to Christian. I had done my IMDb research and warned him that no live-action dragon movie had ever done well at the box office, so I was wondering if the script could be changed to be more about pterodactyls in the vein of
Jurassic Park
.

Christian took these concerns to Bowman. He said in an interview: “I had some concerns about the story but what was great is that Rob had the exact same concerns and promised that there were going to be changes. I did a complete 180 degree turn in the meeting. I went in there thinking: ‘No, probably not,' and left thinking this is something exciting and different for me to do.”

Christian's costar Matthew McConaughey, was a big fan of
Empire of the Sun
. He told
OK! Magazine
in 2008 that he had whistled the theme from
Empire of the Sun
to his son, Levi, while
he was still in the womb. McConaughey was thrilled to be doing the project, although in typical McConaughey style, Christian recalled that he kept asking Bowman for a nude scene.

Shooting a special effects movie was a lot of fun for Christian. He told a journalist: “This was more like playing silly buggers in the playground than almost any movie I've ever done before.” But Dublin was not his favorite place to live. He complained about Dublin as much as he complained about Greece. “We stayed in a house right in the middle of Temple Bar. We had vomit and vodka bottles on the doorstep each morning and had to stick foam up against the windows if we wanted to sleep at night.”

Science fiction fans are very fussy about story line—particularly believability. And one of the many problems of the critically-reviled
Reign of Fire
was that of dragon biology, since the movie's key plot point was that there was only one lone male dragon that presumably flew around the world to mate with the females. With an improbable and unbelievable scenario and a movie that looked as if it were
Waterworld
in flames,
Reign of Fire
opened as the big summer movie for 2002 only to be shot down by the critics.

Reign of Fire
ended up as a box office disappointment, grossing just $43 million domestically, far short of its estimated $60 million production costs. However, the movie gave Christian his first opportunity to appear on an American talk show. When he appeared on
The Late Late Show
with Craig Kilborn, he bristled at doing the obligatory station identification, where the celebrity would say, “I'm Christian Bale and you're watching
The Late Late Show
on CBS.” Kilborn decided to force the issue by asking Christian to do the station identification live on the air during a segment called “5 Questions for Christian Bale.” Christian wittily replied, “I'm Christian Bale and I'm sucking corporate cock right now.”

Christian's young costar, Scott Moutter, came to the
Reign of
Fire
premiere with his family to size up the possibility of pursuing a Hollywood career. Interestingly enough, Christian passed on lunching with the Moutters, so David and I took them out for lunch instead. After all that David had been through in America, I was surprised when David bluntly told Moutter's father not to move to Hollywood. “It's too difficult and competitive,” David explained. “And your son will never get his childhood back again.” The Moutters ended up staying in England.

It was while Christian was shooting
Reign of Fire
in Ireland that
Batman
came up. There were competing Batman projects at Warner Bros. to reboot the franchise and only one would proceed. Warner Bros. had also changed its casting strategy, preferring to look for a good actor it could transform into Batman, rather than a movie star that would distract from the reboot. For my very first use of
Amazon.co.uk
, I had sent Christian Alan Moore's
Batman: The Killing Joke
and Frank Miller's
The Dark Knight Returns
and
Batman: Year One
so that he could consider pursuing a Batman project that was in the works.

Christian was feeling pretty good about his career at this point. In the 1990s, post-Little
Women
, he was relegated to small British indie films that couldn't find distribution. Now in the 2000s, he was doing major studio work. I remember we had a good laugh at his résumé then.

“What do you think my porno movies would be called?” Christian asked me.

“Your porno movies?”

“You know, if they do porno versions of my movies, what kind of titles would they come up with? Of course, there'd be
Empire of the Bum.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“Newsies
would be
Nude-sies. A Midsummer Night's Shag
, um,
Poke-Her-Eyes-Out, American Shag-o
. . .”

“Yes.”

“Swing Kids
would be
Swinging Dicks
. But of course,
Shaft
and
Little Women
would keep their existing titles!”

Eventually, there would of course be a couple of actual porn parodies; the most infamous would be
European Psycho
, which starred British porn star Danny Mountain.

One strange thing about living in Los Angeles is that time moves slowly. Maybe it's the near perfect weather without seasons that makes you forget how many years have passed. One day, Christian presented me with a new computer. He wrote:

He was referring to our family production company that I was eagerly waiting to begin. I had dreams about writing screenplays and producing films, but I was patient because Christian was always getting hit by surprise expenses thanks to his father's financial mismanagement.

There was a lot of debate in the House of Bale about
Equilibrium
. On one hand, Christian liked the script and wanted to work again with his
Metroland
costar Emily Watson. On the other hand, it was a small production ($20 million) and writer/director Kurt Wimmer was green. Though Wimmer would go on to direct other cult sci-fi movies like
Ultraviolet
and have a very successful screenwriting career, it took a lot of convincing before Christian would agree to work again with a first-time director since his experience on
Swing Kids
.

Originally entitled
Librium
, the first sign of trouble was that the drug maker of Librium, an anti-anxiety drug, threatened to sue unless there was a title change. When directorial duties
were beginning to overwhelm Wimmer, there was talk that one of
Equilibrium's
producers, Jan de Bont, might direct. De Bont had directed
Speed, Twister
, and
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
. But Wimmer ended up helming the project, which was primarily shot in Berlin, Germany, with an impressive cast that included Emily Watson, Angus McFayden, Taye Diggs, Sean Bean, Sean Pertwee, and William Fichtner.

De Bont was one of the main reasons why Christian decided to do
Equilibrium
. His 1994 action hit,
Speed
, turned Keanu Reeves into an action hero. Reeves was one of Christian's favorite actors. But before
Speed
, Reeves was best known for playing dufus roles like
Bill & Ted
. After
Speed
, Reeves's career shifted into high gear, paving the way for
The Matrix
trilogy. Would
Equilibrium
do the same for Christian?

Christian and I both saw
Equilibrium
as a good stepping-stone. He would look good as an action hero, had a couple of shirtless scenes to show off his buff body, and he was sold on the film as a low-budget version of
The Matrix
. Christian would be trained in martial arts. Wimmer envisioned a gun-based martial art called gun-kata or gun-fu. Unfortunately, by the time production began, Christian did not get along with Wimmer and there was a lot of tension on the set. To say that he was happy when production finally wrapped in December 2000 would be an understatement.

“This movie is finally fucking over!!!” Christian e-mailed me. “Director didn't even say goodbye. He ran out with his tail between his legs.”

The shoot in Berlin wasn't all moviemaking pain. Christian recorded vocals for a now defunct German breakcore band called The Thunderinas which was headed by Austrian musician, Rachael Kozak (aka “Bloody Knuckles”). On the song “1-800-INNOCENT,” Christian calls a suicide help line and says, “It's very hard for me to talk about this, to know if I really have a problem or
not. I need to come to terms with myself. Christian was very disappointed that the original ending of the film had been cut back because of the budget. In the original ending, the climactic battle between Christian's character, Preston, and MacFayden's character, Dupont, was supposed to be a stylized gun battle where the two men would be shooting at each other, but the bullets would hit in midair because both men had been trained identically. It would have been a more elaborate version of
The Matrix's
bullet-time fighting. What actually ended up on the screen, Christian laughed, “looked like the two of us were trying to bitch slap each other with guns.”

Equilibrium
was ravaged by critics and it bombed at the box office.

But the film served an important part of Christian's campaign to win
Batman
. He demonstrated vividly that he was not just an actor, but that he could be an action hero.

At the time, I remember a series of journalists in a hotel room asking Christian which of his characters he identified with the most.

“I'm not going to answer that,” he'd say to each one.

After the last journalist had left, I turned to Christian and said, “I bet I know which character you identify with the most.”

He looked back at me, eyebrows raised, a slightly amused look on his face.

“Patrick Bateman,” I said.

Christian laughed. “That's right!”

It's not that I thought Christian was a serial killer, but the curious torment Bateman has with himself was very much Christian. I thought back to a line from the movie: “I have all the characteristics of a human being: blood, flesh, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion.”

Back to the Hollywood maxim—one for the studio, one for yourself. After doing a string of big studio films and earning big studio dollars, Christian returned to small drama in
Laurel Canyon
. It would reunite Christian with his
Prince of Jutland
costar Kate Beckinsale. Indie queen Frances McDormand starred as a veteran rock producer, while Christian played her uptight, conservative son, a theme Christian had explored earlier in
Metroland
.