Press
Last Update
- June 21th, 2003
Christian Bails
on His Feelings
Mark Salisbury, Premiere Magazine, March 2001.
Christian
Bale has spent the past five hours blowing away the same nine
people, over and over again. "Repetition," he sighs,
"seems to be my job." That and gun maintenance. Admittedly,
Bale ('American Psycho') has had a few problems with his weapon
jamming on 'Equilibrium''s Berlin set, where the production has
transformed an abandoned concert venue, built during the Nazi
era, into a film-studio complex. "The last one seemed to
have, like, an elephant load in it. When I fired, the whole bloody
gun fell apart."
Directed
by Kurt Wimmer (who co-wrote the screenplay for 1999's 'The Thomas
Crown Affair'), 'Equilibrium' posits a totalitarian future society
where emotions of any kind are outlawed, suppressed by a daily
dose of a state-controlled drug called Equium. Anyone who doesn't
comply is executed, and Bale's character, Preston, is responsible
for policing offenders. "Emotions are sacrificed for the
greater good," explains Taye Diggs ('The Way of the Gun'),
who costars as Bale's partner. "The downside is that everything
else that comes from passion--artwork, sports, pets--gets sacrificed,
too." When Preston falls in love with a member of the emotional
resistance ('Angela's Ashes'' Emily Watson), he stops his dosage
and joins the revolt. "I go from bad guy to good guy in five
days," says Bale, who signed after Dougray Scott ('M:I-2')
passed. "I'm feeling everything for the first time. It's
been quite confusing, really, and the character is quite confusing
himself for half of it."
Although the
plot echoes such dystopian literary classics as 'Brave New World',
'1984', and 'Fahrenheit 451'--and even Japanese samurai films--producer
Lucas Foster makes a far different comparison. "I would liken
it, in a strange way, to 'Field of Dreams'," he says. "It's
a movie about getting in touch with oneself." Set in the
fictional nation of Libria, the sci-fi action film allowed Bale,
who's often associated with period dramas ('Little Women', 'The
Portrait of a Lady'), the chance to engage in gunplay as well
as kendo and samurai swordplay. But it was the casting of Watson,
his costar in 1998's 'Metroland', that sold him on the project--even
though Dimension Films (a division of Miramax) wasn't too keen
on her initially. "It took some convincing," Foster
notes, "but after a time they saw the wisdom of it. Emily
told me 'I don't know why everybody always offers me these serious
movies. I want to say "warp speed" on 'Star Trek'.'
We lucked out because this had some of that crash-bang-wallop
but was also about something."
What that
something is, exactly, is still somewhat unclear, since Wimmer--who,
Foster says, originally wrote the film for producer Jan De Bont
to direct--refuses to speak to the press. "Look, he's not
familiar with this part of the process and needs to be worked
on," insists Foster of his director's Kubrickean stance.
Considering that the marketing-mind Miramax is bankrolling the
$20 million-plus project, it's an attitude that might not go down
well with the Messieurs Weinstein. "I think he will do an
interview," Foster muses, "when he gets back to the
world and calms down." If not, there's always Equium.
Source - The
Bale Collection