Terminator Salvation was not a smart career move for Christian Bale but the same could be said for everyone who chose to star in the McG helmed release. While the concept wasn't a bad one, the execution was massively flawed and no one came out of it looking particularly good. However, that was doubly the case for Bale because he was recorded having a foul-mouthed outburst on the set!
Now, Bale has explained how things went from bad to worse with Terminator Salvation and it sounds like he realised early on that the movie wasn't panning out quite as he'd initially imagined it would.
"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 myside, 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. 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."
Perhaps Bale's biggest regret was the moment which saw him express his rage at director of photography Shane Hurlbut in a foul-mouthed rant which quickly found its way online and shamed The Dark Knight Rises star. Asked to reflect on that, he made it clear he still regrets his actions and offered an explanation of sorts for why things panned out the way they did that way during shooting.
"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…"
Bale has shied away from blockbuster fare in recent years but has made it clear that he might have some interest in Star Wars so here's hoping Terminator Salvation didn't put him off too much! The current plan for that franchise is for it to be rebooted by Tim Miller under the watchful eye of James Cameron so it will be interesting seeing how that turns out. What do you think of these comments?