Most actors read a script imagining their close-ups. Bale seems to be trying to recede, and the paradox is that directors (and moviegoers) are eager to put him on-screen full-face and see what's cooking in that subtle brain. Behind his eyes is the man underneath, immersing in real life with its threats, demons and discontents.
After he signed on with director Brad Anderson to make "The Machinist," which took the idea of darkness to an almost absurd extreme, he surprised the company by appearing for the Barcelona, Spain, shoot with such an extreme weight loss.
Bale's happy enough to have a laugh about tramping through actual sewers in the low-budget shoot in which Barcelona subbed for L.A., but he doesn't cling to the many positive reviews, nor to the fixation the media had on his weight loss.
Indeed, offered the chance to skip the retelling of his air, gum and cigarettes diet for "The Machinist," Bale says, "I do like leaving that aside because unfortunately it became the thing that everybody focused on and that was never the intention -- because then it appears like some kind of gimmick.... If I could go back and do it again, I wouldn't discuss that whole side of it with the weight loss."
These days Bale finds himself finessing inquiries about the purportedly possessed Werner Herzog, who directed him in "Rescue Dawn" to such good effect that MGM -- caught in an embarrassment of possibly award-worthy riches with David Ayer's Bale-led entrant, "Harsh Times," also coming out this fall -- pushed the film to next year rather than trip both pictures up by having Bale compete with himself.
The feature version of a filmed remembrance (1997's "Little Dieter Needs to Fly") of the German director's friend Dieter Dengler, who emigrated from Germany to America as a teenager to pursue his dreams of being a pilot and ended up shot down over Laos, the film traces the aviator's motivations back to a moment where, as a child in a German village, he got a long look at an American pilot who shot past his second-story window at eye level during an aerial assault.
He acknowledges but laughs off the accounts of his moments of temper with Herzog: "Being with Werner is a roller coaster. He brings out emotion in people, even if he doesn't try to. He can be a very, very quiet gentleman and he can be a frenzied, vein-popping fighter."
