meeting with Christian Bale

I met with Bale in Culver City during the short break he to took while filming Terminator Salvation shoot, right before going to the Dark Knight premiere in London.

He was sporting the John Connor look and the first thing i said was

that I never thought I'd see his name and McG's together on the same credit sequence. Christian was developing a fascinating and challenging body of work, and putting him and the terminator franchise under the helm of the director of Charlie's Angels, wasn't exactly the most logical step to me. After a short silence, Christian assured me this was very different from everything McGinty, as he refers to him, had done so far. I kept the faith. I was hoping with with Bale on the lead and Johnathan Nolan's and Paul Harris' passes on the scrīpt, Salvation could prove a pleasant surprise.

But we mainly talked about other projects: Killing Pablo... Bale had been in talks with Joe Carnahan on this story of Colombian Mafioso Pablo Escobar, he said he loved the scrīpt but producers want to place many name actors in roles that Christian feels should go to unknown Colombian actors. He mentioned a rift between how "hollywood", or how realistic the movie should be, with Carnahan and Bale on one side and the suits on the other... guess who's on which side? Yup, as most of you know both Bale and Carnahan have shown great artistic integrity throughout their careers. Christian doesn't paint the producers as villains at all, merely recognizes that they are thinking simply in terms of money, that's it. Oh, and also, there is the issue of timing. Oliver Stone is competing with a similar project based on another book related to the events. We also talked a lot about writing and in particular the work of Joe's brother, Matthew Carnahan who we very much admire as a writer.

I greatly admire director Werner Herzog 's career (and he recently collaborated with Bale on Rescue Dawn) and was glad to hear he and Christian are good friends and were in the very early stages of developing another project together. Here's hoping more Herzog/Bale collaborations materialize. He was very friendly to me and his wife Sibi is an absolute sweetheart.

That's it, gotta go!