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How much of a fan were you of Training Day?
“I had met David regarding Training Day many years back. I am a fan of it. However, this feels more personal to me. You can tell, this is just more his real piece. This is something he started before Training Day. This is something that he just, like he says himself, kind of owns a part of his own soul. And personally, I feel that with this one. I also love that it’s just the kind of grittier, more kind of low-income version.”
Were you up for the Ethan Hawke role?
“That would have been the part that, ultimately, I would have been up for. But I just feel, to me Harsh Times is similar and obviously Dave’s attachment and obviously the locale, the locations. But to me, it goes that much further than Training Day did. I think that was why David kind of wanted to keep it in his pocket. He felt like this was his piece. He didn’t want anyone else messing with it. Training Day, he kind of let out to the studio and he got great results. But this one really felt like it meant too much. It meant more to him than that one.”
How can you be so intense with an American accent?
“I’ve been living it for a number of years. If I hadn’t gotten it down, it would be a little bit questionable by now. I’ve been living here for almost 14 years. The new thing for me on this one was obviously getting the military lingo down, and getting the Chicano lingo down as well - and finding a happy blend of the two.”
How did you get into the Latino culture being that you’re British?
“I’m a shape shifter, man. I’m just like Jim in that respect. He can look at the Chicano culture, he can’t ever be a part of it completely, but he knows it. He can walk it. He can belong there but he’s a pinchero ultimately, and he’s never going to be completely embraced.
He can go to the military. You see him in the scenes in the offices with the bureaucrats. He knows how to behave. And I had to do that, too. I know how to sit in a room and kid people into thinking that I’m one of them, and then I’ll walk out the room and I’ll be somebody else completely. That doesn’t mean I’ve got multiple personalities. I think yourself, you were probably a little bit different this morning than you are right now. When you go back home with your kids if you have them, or family or whatever, tonight you’re going to be a slightly different person again. Everybody’s a shape shifter to a certain degree. But some people can actually really bring it on when they know they need to, and I have that in common with Jim.”
Can you discuss your scene with Freddy Rodriguez and Terry Crews?
“Yeah, that was a hilarious scene. Terry’s great. He’s a great guy. We just rapped. We just kept going because that was one of the few days where, due to locations, we kind of had that house and we were a little bit too far away from any other location. We had a lot of time to be shooting that scene. We ended up with something like a 15-20 minute scene because everybody just kept on going. We went completely off script. It just kept going and we were pissing ourselves laughing. We’d have to stop because we’d just gone way too far off of the script. And eventually just time constraints condensed it to whatever it is, a three minute scene or something, but that was a good day. That was definitely one of the funnier days.
One of the more memorable days on the movie was actually early on in Mexico when we were filming in this little town down south in Ensenada. We just invited the whole town down for a fiesta. There was food… A pig was actually slaughtered right there so there was great eating for everybody that night. There was a band playing. Everybody was dancing. We were handing out drinks for everybody. It was just a genuine party, and we just filmed in the middle of it. We just tried to get our scenes done in the middle with hopefully not too many people walking past looking in camera or stumbling past. That was a very memorable evening. That was a real good beginning to the movie. You also had Dave’s wife and her dad doing the catering for everybody. It was a real family affair.”
There’s also an extremely intense scene in a car. How tough is it to do something that intense where you’re threatening your costar?
“It’s obviously a very uncomfortable scene. That’s one where you’re squirming in your seat. He thinks he’s in control. He thinks that he’s just showing a side of himself that would make her never want to have anything to do with him again. He’s not had the courage to actually talk to her about the decision that he’s had to make, but he does know exactly how to scare her physically. However, at that point, the trauma starts kicking in and he kind of starts really losing it. That was not an easy scene to shoot whatsoever. There’s nothing easy whenever you’re dealing with guns and behaving with them in that fashion.
[The scene] was cut a great deal. In my mind it was just, ‘This is as extreme as Jim gets.’ We actually decided, ‘You know what? We’ve got to take it back some here.’ But no, scenes like that [are difficult]. They are. You don’t leave that feeling good about yourself. You do kind of feel like you’ve got to go have a good shower, clean up.
The thing that I like so much about this movie is I begin it, it’s a joyride. I want to be in the car with the guys, I want to be doing what they’re doing. Then suddenly I go, ‘Whew, I want to be nowhere near them anymore. This is hideous, this is ugly.’ You’re certainly witnessing the ugliness of war in the inner cities, of war in the individual, of just the ugliness of life. There’s such potential for beauty but it’s just getting completely raped. I ended up… You just feel almost physically uncomfortable towards the end of the movie. I finished it and all I could think was, ‘I don't know what I’m going to do, but I have to go perform some really good act for somebody. I’ve got to go and do something to try and make this world a slightly better place.’ That was how I ended up. I feel like my hope is that a lot of people are going to donate to charities or something or help that homeless person on the street or whatever because I tell you, that’s what I felt like doing. It was kind of the moral equivalent of needing to take a shower.”
Page 3: Bale on Interesting Roles
