At the LA press junket for Warner Bros Pictures' Terminator Salvation, Christian Bale talked a little about another film he has hitting theaters in the summer of 2009: Public Enemies. Bale plays FBI Agent Melvin Purvis in the period drama based on the real life exploits of John Dillinger (played by Johnny Depp), Pretty Boy Floyd (played by Channing Tatum), and Baby Face Nelson (played by Stephen Graham).
On His Public Enemies Experience:
"Absolutely fantastic. Michael Mann I think to be one of the finest filmmakers around. His ability for all aspects of filming is stunning. His thoroughness... I just loved the research, the attention to detail, his perception of exactly what each actor is doing at any given moment. It's truly stunning. I liked my experience working with him as much as any that I've ever been through. I would certainly hope to repeat that because you don't get people with his kind of talent very often."
Christian Bale on His Public Enemies Co-Star Johnny Depp:
"I think Johnny is a superb actor, and what I like so much about him is that there's nobody else like him. We don't know each other in the slightest. I met him at the script read-through. We chatted for 5 or 10 minutes. Other than that, I had two scenes with him, one in which he's in a jail cell. I have a tendency, and it seemed like he was happy to do the same, I have at tendency to not really wish to talk unless we're doing the scene. I enjoy it that way. And then it just happened that the other scene we were doing we were about 200 feet away from each other. He was a silhouette in a window and I was shooting at him. I was behind a tree and he was shooting at me, and that was the closest we got that evening, you know? So I'll get to know Johnny somewhere down the track because it certainly didn't happen on the movie."
On the 1930s and 1940s in Chicago:
"It's just a wonderful period, in every way. The clothing, the cars, the guns even. It was sort of to me the last dying breath of the guns that seemed to have some sort of character to them. The ones we have nowadays are absolutely fatal and have incredible precision, much more so than the others, but these are the last ones where there’s the kind of wood. And I would actually like to smell it afterward and kind of enjoy carrying it around with me. The era is so fascinating as well in the conception of Hoover's idea of the Bureau and the birth pangs of that, and how two apparently very similar characters - I'm talking now about Purvis and [J Edgar] Hoover - people who admired each other so much, could, with both of them doing their job incredibly well, come to have such animosity between the two.
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Public Enemies hits theaters on July 1, 2009 and is rated R for gangster violence and some language.
