Interview with Christian Bale

I would always remember about the fact that this is somebody who is fanatical, you know? If you think about the obsession that somebody must have to retain the pain and anger from an incident that happened 20 years previously and is still in the forefront of his mind. You know that’s an incredible obsession. I mean, that’s an unhealthy obsession. So concentrating on the fact that he’s attempting to take his pain and his guilt and his anger and the rage and do something good with it, even though his impulses are that he does just want to rage and break bones and do damage. So there’s always that conflict. And so, for me, it was very much about remembering that. I would refer to the different graphic novels. I had them on the set with me all the time just because I loved the imagery of it so much. And remembering that I never wanted to appear to be Bruce Wayne in a Batsuit when I was playing the Batman. That he just becomes - that it is an alter ego completely.

With Patrick Bateman from "American Psycho," Trevor Reznik in "The Machinist," and this, you seem to have this attraction to obsessive characters.
I’ve done many other different characters that aren’t so obsessive as well, but I think I would imagine to everybody here I’d be very surprised if anybody here wouldn’t say that an obsessive character is not illuminating in some way. That they are people who you wouldn’t necessarily want to have in your life, but you certainly enjoy hearing about them and watching them. I mean, pretty much anybody you look at throughout history who’s achieved great things, they were obsessive about it. And it also means that with characters who are as obsessive as that, you can kind of make up your own rules because they’re not playing by society’s rules that we all kind of know and acknowledge each and every day of how to get through life without upsetting everybody around you at any given moment. And you can kind of chuck all that out of the window when you’re playing those kind of characters, so they are enjoyable.

There is a legacy of "Batman" and the actors who've played him. How does your approach differ?
I think that you have with the Tim Burton ones a great stylized version. But to me, whilst I enjoyed those ones, it was more the stylization of the villains than Batman himself. I didn’t see a whole lot going on in Batman. The other ones just weren’t my thing at all. And I just felt that I wanted to attempt to base it in reality, starting from a realistic point of view of the pain and the trauma that a child has been through, and really looking at it as that instead of just [he's] this incredibly theatrical character that jumps around in a Batsuit, which to me would be kind of stupid if I met him in the street. You know, I don’t think I would be intimidated. I would laugh at him.

You had to get to a point where the audience would be drawn in enough to believe that this guy has gone through so much pain and anger, and then we have a really nice backstory about how he creates the Batman. And also, there’s a very nice practical backstory to every gadget, and to the Batsuit and to everything. Everything is explained in the movie. Nothing was taken for granted at all. There’s no assumptions that the audience would just understand it immediately. We wanted to show how did this happen and why did he choose everything. And it’s all explained very, very well and in detail. And in making that kind of approach, I think it couldn’t help but appear different because you got a real character, you know?

We were focusing on Bruce Wayne and Batman, whereas what I would find in watching most of the other movies, and also the TV series and things, I always found the villains much more interesting. And that was the main revelation to me in reading one of the graphic novels. Batman is the most interesting of them all, you know? I mean, he’s the really on-the-edge one because he’s the guy that, okay, he’s doing good but he’s the Dark Knight. I mean, a knight is meant to be in shining armor and he’s the Dark Knight. He could do good things but man, he could just as easily flip over and become like the ultimate villain. Hopefully we’ve been able to portray that in a more character-based way than has been shown before.

Page 3: Christian Bale on the Batmobile and Acting in the Batsuit