Just saw Terminator Salvation and it reminded me of my meeting with Christian Bale while he was shooting it. So even though i wrote about this in relation to Dark Knight, I thought i'd say my piece about the film and put it in the context of my meeting with its star.
I met with Bale in Culver City during the short break he to took during the Terminator Salvation shoot right before going to the Dark Knight premiere in London.
He had the John Connor look you see in the movie 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 he assured me this was very different from everything McGinty, as he refers to him, had done so far. I kept the faith. I'm thought with with Bale on the lead and Johnathan Nolan's and Paul Harris' rumored passes on the script ... Salvation could prove a pleasant surprise.
Well, I've seen the movie and think some of my fears where well founded. The movie wasn't terrible throughout. In fact it was sort of working for me right up until Marcus and John get into Skynet. Now why on earth would computers use graphic interfaces to communicate to each other? Obviously for the benefit of the human audience who has to navigate skynet along with John Connor but this could have been done in a more subtle manner and if a villain's monologue explaining the whole plot to the hero (audience) before being destroyed is a bad cliche, it's even more ridiculous when it's a computer doing the explaining, and doing the explaining to another machine no less! The digitized governator was a laughable and unnecessary wink to the audience and there was too much recycling of T2 specially, in a failed attempt to bring some of the weight of Cameron's films to this much lighter entertainment. Nothing wrong with light entertainment sometimes, but this franchise, specially as originally envisioned by Cameron, has much more potential than this.
Can you imagine this in the hands of someone like Christopher Nolan directing/ co-writing?
It's sort of the same problem I had with Watchmen.
Alan Moore's Watchmen is my favorite graphic novel of all time, Hayter's script doesn't come close to achieving its complexity, which is understandable, but struck me as a good, faithful enough foundation for the film. I really loved what Snyder is did visually (minus the slow-mo overkill). The film very faithful on the surface but missed the key true sense of cold war paranoia, and the more complex dramatic undercurrents. Zack prides himself of being a true comicbook geek, but was he really on the intellectual level to tackle Alan Moore's work?
I can't help but think that Paul Greengrass' version would have carried more gravitas, more weight... Paul who was well into pre-production for his version of Watchmen before it was pulled from him, has directed the deeply moving and challenging films like Bloody Sunday and United 93, and also showed he had the chops for action/heroics (as seen in Bourne Ultimatum particularly). He would've done great. But i digress....
Back to Terminator and Bale. Salvation had many redeeming qualities, not only did it play very well right up to Skynet which was near the end of the film, but I thought Sam Worthington was perfectly cast and did a great job. By far more sympathetic than Bale's Connor which showed a hardened human being who, like Sarah in T2, has become sort of a machine himself. Christian did alright with a believable portrayal but his character simply didn't have the arc that Marcus did, and thus was far less interesting. The relationship between Marcus and Blair was to me the most interesting thing in the film and i wished it had been more deeply explored.
Like Zack with Watchmen, McG did a great visual job, with great action set-ups most of which we'd seen on the very effective final trailer.
Michael Fitzgerald and Shane Hurlbut also excelled with their approach to the film's cinematography, conjuring a washed out, bleak landscape, using a chemical process that enhanced the metallic feel of the film.
Bale's documented outburst at Hurlbut really did hurt my impression of him. In our conversation he did seem very intense but i didn't expect that sort of disrespectful behavior while on set. I guess once you start shooting a multi-million dollar franchise film that's been marketed to death with a recognizable star at the lead, there is very little you can't let them get away with. But I'd like to think a stronger director would have rained him in.
Christian is a truly fine actor so maybe this stuff coming out is a blessing in disguise for him. A chance to learn from that. I do wish him the best.
In our meeting which stated at noon we also talked about many projects but this is what little else I think I can dish out:

Killing Pablo... Bale had been in talks with Joe Carnahan on this story of Colombian Mafioso Pablo Escobar, he said he loved the script 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, Christian told me there is the issue of timing, was 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. We also talked about one of my projects and he wrote on my sketchbook an address where I could send the new material. Christian liked a drawing of Batman that I had done and left amongst my sketches for a project of mine I was telling him about... so I autographed the Batman drawing and gave it to him ( Funny but true ).He was heading to London with his family so we said goodbye. He struck me as someone that deeply cares about his work and the many aspects of production, There's a dark edge to the guy, which I guess it's that factor that made him perfect for Batman and so many roles. But overall he was very friendly and his wife Sibi is an absolute sweetheart. I got the impression that Batman, was actually quite the family man.
That's it, gotta go!