Copied from my very own blog. No idea why I took this long to actually post it here as well.
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For anyone who hasn’t heard yet, Christian Bale, the actor who played Batman in The Dark Knight, went completely balistic on one of the crew members of Terminator Salvation. Apparently they were doing a scene and some guy randomly walked on to the set to check out if his lights were working or something.
The funny thing about this story is that the entire thing was recorded, by accident or on purpose, who knows. Be advised before listening though, it’s a pretty intense audio clip and not exactly safe for work unless you’re allowed to swear a lot.
Download the audio clip here.
I’m kind of two sided on this entire thing and here’s why. I go to school to learn about stuff like backstage work particularly, so I understand how this guy must have thought “let me just check the light real quick, otherwise they have to redo the entire scene just because I screwed up a light”.
That right there is doing more then you’re hired to do. If the director thinks the view of the scene is bad because a light is busted or aimed wrong then he’ll tell you and THEN you can go fix it. Unless you are specifically told to get on the set to fix something you should be as far away from the damn thing as a possible. And according to the audio clip this guy walked right onto the set twice in a row, in my books you’re just dense if that happens. As if everyone on the set being in position to shoot isn’t enough indication for you to stay clear.
So does that justify how Bale reacted? No of course not, but it’s understandable. Acting isn’t an easy job. As much as we all like to bitch at people for bad acting, we couldn’t do it any better ourselves if we tried. So when you spent a week memorizing a scene and have to do it for real it would be nice if things could go right in one try. Can you imagine some dude ruining your scene twice in a row? I think I would be pissed too.
Anyway to make something good come from a bad situation someone took the above audio clip and used it to make a remix. It’s quite nicely done, you can download it
here.
Christian Bale Loses It On Set
