In Defense of Emotional Actors...

Now hold on, certainly there is no defense for anyone abusing his family, or his film-set family, including the DP.  What am I talking about?  I'm sure you've heard this rant by Christian Bale on the set of the McG-directed new Terminator movie:  Christian Bale Going Ballistic  So, anyway, I thought I'd share my opinion...hey, it's my blog!

Acting is a very emotionally-labor-intensive profession.  I don't care whether you are doing high action, comedy, or a dark tragedy.  It is taxing on the body, the brain, the emotions.  I have great respect for actors, and understand they have to find the characters through their own means.  Take Heath Ledger's state of mind on the latest Batman flick.  We all know how that ended.  I am not making excuses for being a rude prick to crew, but I do think it is highly naive for people to criticize the fury.  What it reflects, more than anything, is a director who may not have been in control of his set.  But even then, perhaps he wanted to let Bale do that, to help tap resources for the character.

As one of my law school profs used to love to say, no matter how flat you get the pancake, there's still two sides to it.  We don't know what had been happening for the thirty minutes prior to this.  We don't know much at all to put this in context.

Acting is a very unique profession, one where you have to bring to the surface all sorts of demons sometimes, and you do it in front of a film-family where you need to trust your work process is respected.  I hope actors whom I direct have that kind of passion they can access.  But of course, control and time/place awareness are equally essential.

Bale should privately and publicly apologize.  But the real disappointment I felt was that this clip leaked out.  Sets are private places, creative sanctuaries, no-go zones for anyone outside the film-family.  It is the director's job to protect that environment, which means containing the explosions, not necessarily putting them out.  McG should be apologizing to Bale for letting Bale's work environment get so out of hand.

But again, maybe I am completely wrong and Bale is a huge tool.  The key here is that we really just don't know.  For me, tie goes to the runner (and in this case that's Bale).  Ride on.

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[JBBenson]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yed75kLiJ3M