Christian Bale (20 page)

To promote
Velvet Goldmine
, Christian participated in an online chat. He talked about the Ewan McGregor scene: “We forewent all the foreplay and to coin a phrase, went straight to taking it up the Gary Glitter. But it was quite tastefully done. We were first on a train and we thought it would be quite graphic and physical, and Todd chose to shoot it from across the way. Which was easier, except Todd chose to not tell us when he cut.”

McGregor described the rooftop scene in much more graphic detail when he spoke to
Totalfilm
in 2005. “I was fucking Christian
Bale, Batman, up the arse on a rooftop in King's Cross and the crew was filming from another rooftop on the adjacent building. I hadn't done gay penetrative sex, this was my first shot at it, so I'm standing behind Christian's big naked back, going: ‘Wow, this is so . . . Peculiar.' So I start, you know, pumping away slowly and I start to go more like a bunny rabbit, then like a Jack Russell. And I put my head to the side of his head, away from the camera, and I say: ‘I'm sure I'd have come by now. I'm going to have a look,' and I glanced back and I saw the crew packing up and walking away! I think Todd [Haynes] had been so respectful of us that he hadn't wanted to interrupt us by saying: ‘Cut' . . . Or we didn't hear ‘Cut.' It was very funny.”

At the time, both Christian and McGregor were pursuing the role of Obi Wan Kenobi in
Star Wars: Phantom Menace
, so there was a friendly rivalry that Christian often experienced with peers in his age bracket.

What Christian didn't realize was that McGregor had already been told that he had won the part midway through the
Velvet Goldmine
shoot, but was sworn to secrecy until the official announcement would take place months later.

McGregor remembered, “I couldn't do anything because I was on set and I wasn't allowed to tell anyone.”

However, while on set, McGregor shared with Christian a tale of his own bad experience with the Hollywood studio system when he had lost the starring role in
The Beach
to Leonardo DiCaprio. Directed by longtime McGregor collaborator, Danny Boyle (
Trainspotting, Shallow Grave, A Life Less Ordinary
), McGregor was surprised when he was dumped for DiCaprio.

McGregor told
The Times
in 2009: “Danny [Boyle] and I don't speak, we haven't spoken for years. There was a falling out of sorts over
The Beach
and that was quite a messy and hurtful time.”

DiCaprio
. The name burned Christian like a branding iron. Leonardo DiCaprio was shaping up to be Christian's primary
rival in Hollywood. Over the years, Christian had lost
This Boy's Life
and
What's Eating Gilbert Grape
to DiCaprio. Christian had read for the part of Mercutio in
Romeo & Juliet
but was told that they had decided to cast an African-American in the part instead. Christian, too, had gone up for the part of Jack Dawson in
Titanic
but was told that James Cameron didn't want two British lead actors playing the two leads, who were both supposed to be American. Since British actress Kate Winslet was the starring love interest, the role of Jack had to go to an American actor. Now with McGregor's experience with
The Beach
, it was yet another tale that Christian would keenly remember a few years later when he would go to war with DiCaprio for the lead in
American Psycho
.

Eventually, when I informed Christian that McGregor had won the role of Obi Wan Kenobi, he quietly conceded, “Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.”

Velvet Goldmine
won some praise by some critics. Janet Maslin of the
New York Times
described the film as “dazzlingly surreal.” But
Empire Magazine's
Neil Jeffries wrote, “On paper, fine; on celluloid, a Rocky Horror Show of nightmarish proportions.” It was nevertheless a small independent film that few people saw in the theaters, grossing little more than $1 million.

The week before shooting wrapped up on
Velvet Goldmine
, Christian was offered a starring role in his final indie film in his five-movie run:
All The Little Animals
, the directorial debut of Jeremy Thomas, who was, ironically, the Oscar-winning producer of
The Last Emperor
, the Bertolucci film that had decimated
Empire of the Sun
critically and commercially back in 1987.

All the Little Animals
was a nice change of pace for Christian as it was mostly shot in the remote countryside on the Isle of Man.

“It's a place where they can still birch people legally!” said Christian.

Christian was paid a meager £80,000 for starring in
All the Little Animals
with John Hurt. Yes, a handsome salary for an
independent actor, but not even close to enough to keep the House of Bale running back in Los Angeles.

If you watch
All the Little Animals
, you might notice that Bobby, the simple character Christian plays, is remarkably similar to the simpleton character Stevie that Christian played in
The Secret Agent
. I pointed out the similarity to him, noting the only difference was that Stevie couldn't make direct eye contact.

Christian was impressed by my observation. “No one saw
The Secret Agent
, so I could reuse my characterization.”

While all five of these independent films opened in limited theatrical release, each of Christian's films did well at film festivals and on video, thanks to Christian's strong worldwide fan following. For the U.S. premiere of
Metroland
at the Palm Springs Film Festival, Paola Freccero, artistic director, wrote,
“Metroland
by far received the most ticket inquiries of any of our films once our line-up was announced. We had a waiting list of ticket-buyers calling in from Washington, Oregon, Northern California, Colorado, Nevada, and Vancouver—obviously Christian has some very loyal fans willing to travel great distances to see his work!”

The entertainment press continued to cover Christian's rise as a cult star on the Internet:

I had successfully engineered a writing campaign to lobby Disney for a special fifth anniversary DVD treatment for
Newsies
that was loaded with extras, as well as a direct-to-video release for
Prince of Jutland
, which was renamed and reedited as
Royal Deceit
. The films also provided a lot of footage for Christian's video résumé, which was constantly being updated for his agent to find him his next role. Whether Christian liked it or not, the majority of his fans had discovered him on video and because of
Newsies
. Those fans needed to be marketed to so that they could support his new works.

Oddly enough, I was using a small video editing company in West Los Angeles to update Christian's video résumé. The company was My You Me Productions and it was run by a very pleasant couple, Richard Heene and his wife, Mayumi. Mayumi was a skilled video editor who happily spent time with me and Christian every time we needed to add or remove a clip from his video résumé. (Richard and Mayumi Heene would later become famous for the “balloon boy” incident in 2009, when they claimed that one of their sons had floated away in an experimental balloon over the skies of Colorado.)

While Christian was hopping back and forth across the Atlantic for these indie films, David was scrambling to put together bigger business deals. In 1996, I introduced Christian and David to Santa Monica Studios. Headed by David Rose, Santa Monica Studios and its special effects division, VisionArt, had won multiple Emmys for its work on the
Star Trek
television series and shared an Oscar for Best Visual Effects for its work on
Independence Day
.

As luck would have it, Santa Monica Studios' chief technology officer, Ted Fay, was a fan of Christian's and followed Christian's Internet presence. He had helped me with an early edit of Christian's résumé and was very interested in having him star in a screenplay he was writing. Santa Monica Studios was planning to move into feature films, while David was looking for a company to apply for a green card for Christian.

In Tinseltown, where deals are often done with a handshake, Christian and David tried to negotiate a formal contract that would include a green card and a retainer, while Santa Monica Studios preferred a letter of understanding. By 1997, a contract was signed and Fay recalled that it ended with the phrase, “it is in fact a partnership of faith.”

Fay had written a script about pilot Russell O'Quinn, who had famously been asked by the U.S. State Department to head the 1969 food airlift to Biafra during the civil war in Nigeria. Since David often claimed that he had been a commercial pilot for British Airways or British Midland, Fay decided to introduce him to O'Quinn. After meeting with David, O'Quinn remarked: “I doubt he was a pilot of any sort. He definitely was never a commercial pilot!”

On May 13, 1997, the
Hollywood Reporter
announced that Alyssa Milano and Christian Bale would star in
Jungle Croquet
, a romantic adventure film about a small-town librarian who travels to England and finds herself caught up in a romantic scandal with Britain's most eligible blueblood bachelor. It was the first project that marked “a new production partnership between Santa Monica Studios and Bale's production company.”

Christian was furious. He exploded at his father. He had not even seen the script for
Jungle Croquet
, much less agreed to be in it. Christian's agent was also shocked to hear about any deal made without her involvement. David, who was hoping to get some momentum from their production deal with Santa Monica
Studios, hastily canceled the project. The partnership of faith was over before it really began.

However, all was not lost. David definitely profited from reading Fay's screenplay about Russell O'Quinn as he began to embellish his own tales of piloting by adding that it was he who had flown food aid airlifts to Nigeria. Fay observed: “David was apparently so impressed with Russell's story, that in a sense he made it his own.” Years later, in David's
New York Times
obituary, Paul von Zielbauer would write that David “became a pilot in the hope of establishing air rescue and food supply flights in Africa.”

Christian's final small film of the 1990s would be the small part of Demetrius in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
. Shot in 1998 and scheduled to be released on April 26, 1999 (approximately William Shakespeare's birthday), the lavish but very traditional Shakespeare adaptation was a labor of love for director Michael Hoffman (
The Last Station
) and its star, Michelle Pfeiffer, who had always wanted to bring a version to the big screen. Distributed and financed by Fox Searchlight, the film was shot on location in Tuscany, Italy, one of Christian's favorite places, with an all-star cast that included Kevin Kline, Rupert Everett, Stanley Tucci, Calista Flockhart, and Anna Friel.

Reviews were mixed and box office reception was cool, largely thanks to the high expectations set for Shakespeare adaptations by Baz Luhrmann's innovative reimagining of
Romeo & Juliet
in 1996 (which starred Christian's nemesis DiCaprio and his
Little Women
costar Claire Danes) and the witty romantic 1998 comedy and Oscar-hog,
Shakespeare in Love
.

Though Christian loved shooting in breathtaking Montepulciano, a medieval Tuscan town, he didn't find
A Midsummer Night's Dream
particularly fulfilling. His character's love interest was Hermia, played by Calista Flockhart, who was ten years his senior. Chemistry was nonexistent, Christian told me. Christian told a reporter: “To be honest, I didn't really feel attachment to the
character at all and I did find, with the language and everything, that really removed me from it.”

He began going out with Anna Friel during the shoot. Friel, better known in the U.K. thanks to her pioneering role as a lesbian in the British soap opera
Brookside
, would later costar with Will Ferrell in the box office bomb
Land of the Lost
. It was a relationship that David did not approve of, as he assumed that an English actress like Friel was merely trying to get access to Christian's American agent. More likely, though, David was worried about any relationship that could potentially become serious and cause Christian to think about returning to England.

Christian was getting frustrated with his William Morris agent, wondering why his generally well-reviewed performances in these small European indie films weren't translating into a big U.S. part. She continued to blame his low-profile publicity. Again she said Christian's coverage as the biggest star on the Internet wasn't taken seriously by the studios. However, it was rumored that Christian was also dating Winona Ryder whenever the two were in Los Angeles together and his agent was hoping that Christian would go public with the relationship to get him more publicity.