- Title: FJ-HRN-710
- Summary: Harsh Times /: Harsh Times Junket Christian Bale Interview
- Description:09:51:10 - Sound Bite: Christian Bale You know we shot the whole thing in 24 days so not so strenuous and we kept the kind of momentum and maniac energy going to the way that we shot this you know. It was all kind of hand held, it was kind of like Guerilla filmmaking. And so I loved that, we kind of we kind of just lived it 24/7 and it was really exactly what I was looking for because I was coming off of shooting Batman which had been you know a whole seven eight months of solid shooting, a very stylized thing and this was much more just kind of get in there and mix it up and get messy style of filmmaking and so I was enjoying that immensely. And with the character as good as this one you know he just has, he has this momentum that you cant turn off, you know its all, and once you start behaving that way actually it becomes tricky to turn off yourself you know I could see that I was starting to freak some people out off and on the set when the fact that he just wasnt going away you know. 09:52:20 - Sound Bite: Christian Bale I didnt know him no I met him three or four weeks before we started filming, we did start hanging out a lot, we were all hanging out I mean for me personally I kind of had to immerse myself in the Chicano culture which is a culture that Im not familiar with also with the military mind and adapting to that and obviously Freddy and me had to be a life long buddies and get that a crossed. But you know what you can achieve an awful lot in 24 days you know what I mean wars are won and lost in 24 days, you can bond, you can get that kind of closeness in that amount of time. Especially when youre sitting cooped up in a little car in La, you know you chat about a lot of things, a lot of things go down when theres just two people sitting there which are not all mentionable but are reasons why you can come good friends you know. 09:53:26 - Sound Bite: Christian Bale No there was no coach but uh, well you know there was a coach I had the real deal you know, we had many ex-gang members that were helping us out, who were just king of telling it, they would just sit with me and we would just drink and smoke or whatever and just kind of chat and they would talk to me about it and I would talk back and just start to understand where they were coming from and there whole way of thinking. And there was one particular guy Emilio Rivera whos an actor in the movie, hes the one in the bar that I go to see a piece to and he ends up on the floor you know gushing blood and he inparticaular would kind of come and kind of go through the dialect of the streets and tell me that and I kind of took that and kind of made it a little bit something else because hes a foster child of the Chicano culture hes not actually of it you know. Hes somebody who loves it, who feels like he wants to belong in it but hes always going to be something of an outsider. 09:54:33 - Sound Bite: Christian Bale I think everybodys been in that kind of place you know youve been at things in a certain point in your life when youre younger theres no problem with it, you enjoy it, you want to get into, you wanna go to far, you want to go to extremes you know you want to have these kind of extreme experiences and I think thats why for me the movie is one of the same time topical in you know weve got many returning war veterans right now, some of whom seem to deal with what theyve done, some of whom have PTSD and you know they, theyre not so easy going, there very troubled by what theyve seen. But its also timeless in terms of the friendship like you said, theres times with yourself you have to let go of a former self if youre going to actually move on and everybody must, everybody changes all the time, everybody morphs and like with the character Mike, Freddy Rodriguez who I think does a phenomenal job at this and think it is really his story, its the story of this great friend, this fantastic buddy who just he has to let him go. And ultimately Jim is so relentless and charismatic and forceful character that when he lets him go its in a very extreme manor.
- Collection: Historic Films
- Producer:Historic Films
- Transmission Date:01/01/2005
- Rights:On request
- Decade: 2000s
- File Name: FJ-HRN-710