“It sucked.” That was Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s accurate assessment of McG‘s bungled “Terminator Salvation,” the fourth film in the franchise, which is perhaps most infamous for Christian Bale‘s onset tirade which went viral, more than anything else. Hell, I can’t even remember the storyline. In a series that has had no shortage of disappointments since “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” ‘Salvation” may be the nadir. However, Bale remains reflective about his time on the movie, and constructive about what he took away from the experience.
Chatting with Happy Sad Confused, the actor is candid about joining “Terminator Salvation” for all the wrong reasons, and details how things went from bad to worse.
“I said no three times. I thought that the franchise…I went ‘Nah, there’s no story there.’ I’d seen seen the first one and enjoyed that back in England, I’d been to the movies and seen the second one. It was an unfortunate series of events involving the writers’ strike, involving Jonah Nolan, who was able to come on, and really start to write a wonderful script, but then got called away for a prior commitment that he had,” Bale explained. “And it’s a great thorn in my side, because I wish we could have reinvigorated [the franchise]. And unfortunately, during production, you could tell that wasn’t happening. It’s a great shame.”
“There’s a perverse side to me, where people were telling me that, there’s no way on God’s Earth that I should take that role, and I was thinking the same thing,” he continued. “But when people started verbalizing that to me, I started to go, ‘Oh really? All right, well watch this then.’ So there was a little bit of that involved in the choice.”
Pride comes before a fall as they say. And then there’s “the incident,” in which Bale unleashed on director of photography Shane Hurlbut, who had walked into a shot during a take. Footage circulated widely, and Bale doesn’t look back fondly on how that went down.
“That was a very unusual occasion. Great learning lesson for me. Do you remember that scene with Linda Hamilton where she’s really going nuts in ‘Terminator 2’? We said, we’ve got to channel that at some point in the film, and that was the scene in which we were channeling it. Great lesson for me of, no matter how much you lose yourself in a scene, you do not allow yourself to behave that way. And yeah, of course I’ve got enormous regrets about it…” he admitted.
Thankfully for Bale, he says he didn’t gain a reputation for being difficult, and in the pictures that followed — the next one was David O. Russell’s “The Fighter” — he was mocked for his outburst.
Check out the full talk with Bale below. His latest film, “Hostiles,” is now playing in limited release.