I SOLEMNLY SWEAR I AM UP TO NO GOOD - EMAIL: CHRISTAYLOR2003@COMCAST.NET

Monday, October 18, 2004

Riddle Me This

This site seems a little light on the Batman as of late. Here's Christian Bale from an IGN interview.

Like with The Machinist, there were a combination of factors which ultimately convinced him that Batman was the next mask he would don. "I was very much interested in playing the character after reading [comic books like] Arkham Asylum and Year One and Dark Victory, and seeing that there was a side to that character that I had never been witness to before and thinking that could make a very good movie," he recalls. "And then the fact that it was Chris Nolan on it; I knew that he was not just going to be doing more of the same and so I wanted to try it."

...

Still, Bale says that not all of the production of Batman Begins was completely painless, even if he's satisfied everything at least looks great on film. "We came up with this very good fighting method which is actually very effective and looks very good," he reveals, "but that was very strenuous learning all of those routines, because there are multiple numbers of them. But beyond that it was all okay. I found that the suit was actually pretty comfortable once you get used to it. You sweat like buckets – that you can't help – and the cowl gives you these migraines beyond belief. I did some wire work, but that was to be honest limited, because there was an accident early in the movie so they got paranoid about sticking me up on the wires. But [even though] I like that stuff, the more I've done it, the more I kind of think I'll leave it to the stunt men."

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Suggesting a guiding principle for aspiring actors who may not be yet able to discern the wheat from the chaff, Bale suggests, "You need to go with your first instincts. I've often questioned myself in wanting to try and learn something and try and an experiment doing a new kind of movie, and generally it's not worked out. I start to say, 'Okay, you can't single-handedly fix a movie.' It's a collaborative effort and if you get a feeling it's not there, it's probably never going to be there.

And how can you not love a guy who follows up that with this:

"Hopefully I've been able to learn from that, but you know what? I'm sure I'm going to be making many a cock-up in the future."

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