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The Q&A

Christian Bale: 'Terminator' Limits

The Oscar contender takes us inside the making of the new-to-DVD ''Rescue Dawn'' -- but can we get him to dish about becoming John Connor?

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CHRISTIAN BALE ''[The local people] would come to me in between takes and ask me why was I letting everybody treat me that way.... [that] I shouldn't let them tie me up to a buffalo and drag me behind it''

Armando Gallo / Retna

All About

Christian Bale

By Vanessa Juarez

Vanessa Juarez

He may be one of the most talented actors around, but one senses that Christian Bale isn't trying to impress anybody. He's not the chummy kind of star who consciously drums up an arsenal of one-liners for the press. The guy merely says what he has to, and nothing more. Take, for example, the following interview, in which EW.com talked to Bale about the new-to-DVD Rescue Dawn, Werner Herzog's critically acclaimed Vietnam-era adventure drama in which the actor plays real-life American POW Dieter Dengler. Certainly, Bale is gracious; he'd just rather let his films ''speak for themselves'' — and keep the ones we haven't seen yet (including a certain sci-fi franchise film in which he plays some guy named John Connor) a mystery.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: On the Rescue Dawn extras, you talk about a meeting you had with Werner Herzog over drinks, where he laid a lot of the physical demands of playing Dieter Dengler out on the table. What did he say that made you say yes?
CHRISTIAN BALE: He was just trying to push my buttons and see how I reacted. He just wanted to see if I flinched, basically. He does that a lot with people.

Had you gone into the meeting already deciding more or less that you wanted to take the part?
No, because the first time we met, we were actually talking about me playing one of the other roles. It was just kind of general talk about it. And then it wasn't until a few weeks after our meeting, I was down in Patagonia and I got an e-mail from Werner saying, What did I think about playing Dieter. I thought, Yeah.

What attracted you to the part?
He's a very charismatic character, very intriguing. It was a mixture of Dieter and Werner. The character was very good. I really liked the script.... And then just knowing Werner's reputation, I wanted to see for myself.

Had you seen Little Dieter Needs to Fly [the documentary that Herzog made in 1997 about Dengler, which was the basis for Rescue Dawn]?
Yeah. I saw it because of reading the script.

Were you worried about how that would translate into a Hollywood film?
Hollywood as opposed to...

As opposed to a documentary that fewer people saw.
We just tried to tell the parts of the story that you can't include in a documentary. I never met Dieter, he died a couple of years before [in 2001]. Werner said when he showed Dieter the documentary, Dieter said something like, ''this is unfinished business here.'' They were a funny couple of guys. [Laughs] I would have liked to have met him, I would have liked to have had a drink with him and Werner. I think Werner and Dieter are hilarious and great characters and I just don't want to be bored. And Werner is anything but boring, and likewise for Dieter.

Werner seems to have a very deadpan sense of humor, but at the same time I understand he's a very demanding director. Is that apt?
It depends what he's choosing to show you. He actually laughs and smiles a lot. But like anybody, he's one person in the morning and another person in the evening; it just depends on your relationship. But he does tend to be more extreme than most people and most people always think of Werner in terms of intensity and aggression, which absolutely he has. But it also goes the other way: He can be very, very mellow, very, very laid back, and more so than most people. And very amusing. He's good company.

Were there ever moments where you thought you might not be able to get through certain parts of shooting the film?
I always like those moments. So I never think that I'm not going to get through it, I just think, Aw, this is great. When I see that other people are thinking something is ridiculous or impossible, then I start enjoy myself.

One of those for me would have been the scene where you eat a snake.
Well, we had been out in the jungle for some time by then, and it isn't strange to see these snakes going by, and lizards. It was not any more memorable than the other days. And the local kids would catch these snakes and people would eat them regularly, so to them, nobody was batting an eyelid.

NEXT PAGE: Anything you want to tell us about Terminator 4, Mr. Bale? Anything at all?

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