Bale Out

You shouldn’t punch your mom in the face, we can all agree, but I would argue that the recent, web-omnipresent recording of Christian Bale’s on-set tirade is no rock solid proof that the phenomenal child actor (recall: Empire of the Sun v. A.I. and be honest with yourself about which teenager really holds down his 2 hour + movie) turned leading man is bad at his job.

I am a production sound mixer and I have had actors:

o Tell me to go home and look up “fuck off” in a dictionary.
o Demand that I place “cancer-preventing” pieces of plastic with adhesive backing on my equipment.
o Tell me how to do my job.

It’s unpleasant. Nobody likes being yelled at and sometimes it seems like actors enjoy yelling at others which makes things more unpleasant still. So why would I defend jerky behavior like Bale’s, especially after he’s publicly apologized for the outburst?

We tend to assume that given better looks and better luck we could easily draw millions of people to movie theaters across the world and win audiences over. When we hear about actors throwing cell phones at people or jumping on the hoods of cars, we think of all the money they are paid and assume, reasonably, that these people are spoiled and that we would never behave in the same way if all we had to do for ten million dollars was say something to somebody else, walk across a room and walk out a door, over and over again, all day long.

It isn’t true, though, that anyone can be an actor. If you’ve tried acting, then you’ll know. I once heard two film actors complimenting each other on the fact that they saw themselves not as artists but as technicians. “It’s very technical” they both said to each other, more than once. And it is. Pretending to guide the wheel of a car that isn’t moving, holding objects at odd angles so that the camera can see them, pretending you love someone that you don’t even like, seeming relaxed in ridiculous clothing. People who can do these things convincingly have abnormal skills. No matter how convinced we are that our facial tics recorded in hi- definition would be compelling or that our inside jokes would be hilarious to people on other continents, the truth runs counter. Most people wither in front of lenses. Some, from a combination of arrogance, intelligence and grit, don’t. These are actors.

So Christian Bale’s rant, while unflattering and vulgar, may not have been as unprofessional as it seems. The director of photography (DP) who was “looking at the light” in Bale’s eyeline was disrupting Christian Bale’s “process” which is to say he was disrupting the tedious and seemingly unnecessary, though actually crucial, talking through of the scene, moment by moment, which actors sometimes require in order to:

A) Make sure that every action the camera needs to see can be seen.
B) That nothing done in the scene contradicts anything that has already been shot and therefore cannot be changed, and, most importantly…
C) Making something that is patently absurd seem not absurd at all, but convincing.

Now, you could go along with this “process” conceit and still make the point that even if Bale was right and this DP’s actions were, in fact, unprofessional and disruptive, yelling and screaming for ten minutes was hardly the best way to make his feelings known or to solve the problem. But you’d be wrong and I’m gonna have to run up to the reason why.

We can agree that movies are glamorous. But, while film premieres and festivals feature wild geysers of money, hysterical acclaim and wanton lust, shooting a movie, at any level, at any budget, is, by comparison, a punishment. All workplaces breed conflict: jealousy fuels decision-making, spite sometimes grabs the wheel. This bitterness can be intensified on a film set because there isn’t really a 5 pm bell to call a halt to hostility. The normal working day on a movie can be scheduled for ten hours. On lower-budget productions (which, admittedly, Terminator: Salvation is not), twelve hours is more common. Working on a movie can isolate you from your family and friends, especially if you’re shooting away from where you live. The world of the movie closes in around you, day by day, and your personality begins to bend, imperceptibly, to match the shape of the way you are perceived by these, the only people you have contact with. The crew, the director, the actors.

Still though, promise of the aforementioned glamour tends to attract big personalities to work on films. This includes not only the artists like the actors, writers and directors but the technicians on the film as well. These folks bear most of the considerable physical brunt of shooting and are just as exposed to the burning monotony of the process. People develop coping mechanisms: a quiet bearing, say, or an endlessly outgoing personality. Being technicians and not necessarily having the ear of the more “powerful” people on the set, some will surrender themselves to the bitter satisfaction of passive aggression.

It must be this way in other workplaces.

In the culture of a film set, the DP is a special citizen. He is a technician but his work comes closest to this realm of “artistry” that the actors and director are said to work in. In the same way that many assume they could be great actors given a slight change in life-vector, most workers on a set assume that they could be great directors given the right opportunity. Everyone mostly keeps this to himself. Except, sometimes, for a misguided DP. A misguided DP thinks that films are about images only; that all departments are working to make a beautiful image that will capture a viewer. Even the actors. But while beautiful images can surely capture a viewer’s attention, they can’t hold it.

What films actually hinge on are performances: beautiful images must capture interesting behavior. An actor performing thinks of himself as the center of the world. This is not actually true, but for the purposes of making the absurdity of the movie seem true, everyone has to play along. This is to facilitate an interesting performance, which is the only thing powerful enough to both capture a viewer’s attention and then do something with it. In this way, actors and misguided DPs are natural rivals. But a good DP knows that performances come first and an experienced one knows that while actors may have eccentric needs to combat the absurdity of the scene, they shouldn’t be second guessed. Because if the absurdity wins then the audience will see that the movie is a lie and all the good light in the world is useless.

So, I’m saying, Bale was defending the audience’s right to fantasy, was battling the absurd. He was yelling and it was ugly. In a civilized, comfortable environment where all are equal there’d be no reason to yell, but a film set is, by nature, none of those things. For better or worse, Bale has spent his life on film sets and in his shrieks and howls I can hear all those years of turf wars and power struggles, warped paranoia, lessons learned.