Christian Bale (36 page)

Ironically, after Christian had lost more than 60 lbs. for his role in
The Machinist
, he received mixed reviews and precious few award nominations. For
The Fighter
, Christian was careful not to bandy about the exact weight loss figure; instead he just stated that he had to look like a welterweight (140–147 lbs.). Of course,
The Machinist
came out before Christian was the star of
Batman
and was widely considered difficult to watch.
The Fighter
would
have that Rocky crowd-pleasing vibe, and Christian's fans would see the hunky man who had been Bruce Wayne transformed into a sweet crackhead.

January 2011 would be an exciting month for Christian as he began to rack up acting award nominations and wins for his performance in
The Fighter
. Up against the hugely popular
The Kings Speech
and its Best Supporting Actor front-runner, Geoffrey Rush, Christian scored nominations from BAFTA and the National Society of Film Critics to name a couple. However, Vegas odds-makers were taking notice when Christian won Best Supporting Actor awards from the Screen Actors Guild, the National Board of Review, and most importantly, a Golden Globe Award.

For his Golden Globe acceptance speech, Christian astonished viewers with a frank admission about the Hollywood Foreign Press Association—the people who had voted for him to win the Golden Globe. He said: “Thanks to the HFPA. I never really knew who those guys were. I'd always leave the press junkets going who were those oddball characters in that room?”

The Golden Globe Award win tilted Hollywood pundits to favor Christian for an Oscar nomination. And on February 27, 2011, Christian would see his hard work for
The Fighter
honored with a gold statuette. Christian beat out front-runner Geoffrey Rush (
The King's Speech
), John Hawkes (
Winter's Bone
), Jeremy Renner (
The Town
), and Mark Ruffalo (
The Kids Are All Right
).

When Christian walked up to the podium to accept his award, he took a self-humored jab at his potty mouth reputation, saying, “I'm not going to drop the f-bomb like
she
did, I've done that plenty before.” He was referring to his
Fighter
costar Melissa Leo, who had earlier taken home the Best Support Actress Oscar and said “fuck” on live TV. Thanking the cast and crew of
The Fighter
, Christian astonished the audience by seemingly forgetting his wife's name. With hesitation and fumbling, obviously charged with emotion, he concluded: “And of course [pause] mostly, my wonderful wife,
[pause] I didn't think I was like this. My wonderful wife who's my mast through the storms of life, I hope I'm likewise to you darling and our little girl who's taught me so much more than I'll ever be able to teach her. Thank you, thank you so much.”

Five thousand miles away, Jenny Bale proudly sent her son an e-mail of congratulations. No response. She had not heard from her son in the three years since the incident at The Dorchester Hotel.

 

C
hristian stunned everyone during the 2011 awards season by looking like a scruffy, homeless person. He joked about his bushy beard, laughing it off as being “too lazy” between movies.

When actors are in between projects during their “downtime,” you'll see their candid shots in entertainment magazines—unshaven and unkempt on the beach or at the supermarket. But rarely do you see actors looking disheveled during a publicity tour. They're selling a movie and, of course, they're selling themselves. In 2010, Joaquin Phoenix declared that he had quit acting and showed up notoriously on David Letterman with a shaggy beard, looking like, in Letterman's words, the Unabomber. Though
Christian was doing publicity duties to promote
The Fighter
, it seemed that his Joaquin Phoenix-like appearance during the press junket and especially during award shows was his way of telling the press that no matter how many big movies he starred in, he was never going to be a typical movie star.

After the end of his publicity tour, he did manage to get cleaned up and to head off to China to start his next film. On paper,
The Flowers of War
looked like a master stroke for Christian's career. With more and more movies relying on foreign markets for profits, a film by China's best known filmmaker, Yimou Zang, seemed like a smart move for Christian to build his Chinese box office presence outside of Batman. And making a Chinese movie also got Christian around China's foreign film quota.

Christian was never a great scholar of history, but he was always curious—he loved to ask why things were a certain way, just like a kid. When the U.K. had to return Hong Kong to China in 1997, he asked me to explain why. I told him about the infamous ninety-nine-year lease and what I knew of the Opium Wars, but Christian was thinking about England's 1982 victory over Argentina contesting the Falkland Islands and wondering aloud why the British Navy couldn't simply win a war with China to secure Hong Kong permanently.

“A war with China,” I told him with just a touch of ethnic pride, “wouldn't be the same as the Falkland War.” Christian smiled back at me, equally confident of the Royal Navy's abilities.

While Christian was researching for his role in
American Psycho
, he was eager to read about atrocities to understand more about the human capacity for cruelty. I presented him Iris Chang's landmark book
The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
, the first English-language account of the Nanjing Massacre when hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and unarmed soldiers were murdered and tens of thousands of Chinese women were raped by Japanese soldiers after the city
was captured on December 13, 1937. He and I sat up late one evening poring over the horrific photos in the book of the dead and mutilated. It was important for me to have my friend learn a little history.

The Flowers of War
was based on Geling Yan's novel,
The 13 Flowers of Nanjing
, which is set during the Nanking Massacre. The novel is the story of thirteen prostitutes taking refuge in a church who offer to trade places with thirteen school girls to save them from being raped by Japanese soldiers. Yan is a very successful Chinese-American writer who may be the only person to be a member of both the Writers Guild of America and the Writers' Association of China. A number of her works have been adapted into movies in China.

On the Chinese side, moviegoers were impressed that a major Hollywood star like Christian Bale would be in a Chinese film—his first major shoot in China since
Empire of the Sun
. But outside of China, Yimou Zang's reputation had been tarnished in recent years. Zang's career began as one of China's most daring new directors, known for powerful dramas and stunning primary-color palettes. Films like
Red Sorghum
(1987),
Ju Dou
(1990), and
Raise the Red Lantern
(1991) earned Zang an international reputation as one of China's best directors and launched the career of actress Gong Li.

But his 1994 film
To Live
, which depicted life and hardship during China's Cultural Revolution, not only earned him the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival but also a
two-year ban
from filmmaking by Communist China. Its star, Gong Li, also suffered a two-year ban because, it was said, the Chinese government felt that the film took a negative stance toward certain aspects of Chinese history.

The ban seemed to have affected Zang's career as he shifted gears from dramas to big historic epics like
Hero
with none-too-subtle messages that some critics complained toed the
Communist Party line. By 2008, Zang impressed China and the world with the spectacularly elaborate opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics, but as the
New York Times'
Edward Wong noted, it looked as if Zang had become “China's Leni Reifenstahl.”

The Flowers of War
, a big wartime drama about the Rape of Nanking Massacre during World War II, earned both Christian and Zang negative reviews. On one hand, it was the most expensive Chinese movie ever made, with a reported budget of US$100 million. The shoot took over six months, with a part of Beijing used to look like wartime Nanjing. Christian enjoyed the shoot, telling the
Los Angeles Times
that “one of the things he liked about shooting so far away is the relative anonymity, not to mention the remove from Hollywood.” It was also one of the top grossing films in China, earning $83 million in its first 17 days of release.

On the other hand,
The Flowers of War
earned a Golden Broom nomination for Worst Picture. The Golden Broom is China's equivalent of the Razzie Award. Some movie critics decided that Christian was miscast and that Zang had made a big-screen spectacle out of a war tragedy. The reviews were not kind.

The Flowers of War
was China's biggest film production, ready to open on 8,000 screens on December 13, 2011—the anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre—and backed by a nationwide promotion campaign. Its script had to be approved by government censors. It was China's submission for an Academy Award nomination, with the hopes to win China's very first Oscar. On Sunday, December 11, the film premiered in Beijing in a government building called The People's Political Consultative Conference. Little wonder that at the Beijing premiere, Christian seemed annoyed when asked whether he had made a propaganda movie for the Chinese government. “I think that would be a bit of a knee-jerk reaction,” he said. “I don't think they're looking closely enough at the movie.”

A few days after the Beijing premiere, Christian and a CNN news crew drove out to meet with Chinese dissident Chen Guangchen, but were stopped and shoved back by security guards blocking the road to his village. Chen is a blind lawyer who has become a cause célèbre as he's taken up the cases of women in China who have been victims of its aggressive one-child policy that includes mandatory sterilizations and abortions. As Christian and the CNN crew drove back, he said, “I'm not being brave doing this. The local people who are standing up to the authorities and insisting on going to visit Chen and his family and getting beaten up for it and my understanding is getting detained for it, I want to support what they're doing.”

CNN declared, “Actor Christian Bale, CNN crew roughed up trying to visit Chinese activist” and featured the video of the incident on the front of its Web site as well as on the CNN network. However, some were amused at what cynically looked
like a publicity stunt—whether by Christian to distance himself from
The Flowers of War
—or by CNN to use a celebrity to run a blockade. After all, Christian is not known for any Angelina Jolie-style political activism.

Adam Minter, of
Bloomberg
in Shanghai, tweeted, “News orgs that want to maintain their credibility in China don't set up confrontations between cops and celebrities, at celebrity request.” Shaun Rein, of
Forbes
, wrote, “Shame on CNN for its Christian Bale stunt. CNN's China team, in a complete failure of journalistic integrity, decided last week to become the news rather than just report it.”

In China, the incident was partially censored from the Internet—CNN's video of the incident was blocked—but as an Internet meme, it was portrayed on China's social networks as PandaMan versus Batman. “Batman couldn't do it alone,” tweeted a Chinese commentator on Sina Weibo, a Chinese social network. “But if he takes Spiderman, Superman, the Hulk, Wolverine, Captain America, and Harry Potter, they can get it done, right?”

The Chinese government criticized Christian for the incident. Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said that Christian “was not invited to create a story or shoot film in a certain village.” Liu continued, “I think if you want to make up news in China, you will not be welcome here.”

However, Hollywood insiders considered the incident a major public relations nightmare for China and its very expensive bid for an Oscar, for its hopes for a big box office hit in the U.S., as well as for Christian's prospects of ever shooting in the Middle Kingdom ever again.