Brad Anderson, the director of the new goose bump inducing, jaw-tightening thriller “The Machinist,” speaks very little Spanish. Or Catalan.
Not that this would normally be much of an issue, but when U.S. financing failed to come through for “The Machinist,” Anderson — a tall, scruffy 39-year-old American who favors worn flannel and scuffed pants — suddenly found himself in Spain, with an all-Spanish crew, trying to elicit a vision of cool Los Angeles out of sunny Barcelona.
“It ended up being some weird, alternative universe,” he explains about using the outskirts of the Spanish city to illustrate a post-industrial Los Angeles, suffused with icy, bluish shades. “It’s not America exactly, it’s not Europe. It’s a place that seems familiar but maybe isn’t.”
Which, in the end, may have made all the difference for “The Machinist,” a dark, paranoid tale about a man losing his grip on reality. In the film, Barcelona — the cradle of surrealism — is portrayed as timeless and weary, the streets empty and echoing. Its pockets of comfort are rare, sepia and always temporary.
In the film, Trevor Reznik (a haunting, mesmerizing Christian Bale) suppresses a simple, terrible and, initially, mysterious act. Later, when his carelessness causes another horror — an acquaintance at the grimy, shadowy machine shop where Trevor works loses an arm — Trevor begins to unravel. Suddenly, handwritten Post-its appear on his refrigerator door with the mother of all existential riddles: “Who are you?”
Hardly typical
“I didn’t want to do anything typical,” says Anderson, who came to feature filmmaking by documentaries and editing. “I know that most audiences are conditioned to be shocked by thrillers, but I wanted to set a tone, I wanted a sense of foreboding, a sense that for this guy, Trevor Reznik, life was slowly falling apart. I didn’t want to make `The Sixth Sense,’ I didn’t want to make `The Others.’ I didn’t want the audience to get to the end and suddenly tell them, `Aha, I’m dead,’ or, `I’m a ghost; I’m a space alien.’ I didn’t want to have a third act pull-the-rug moment.”
But because this was the first time Anderson (the cult hit “Session 9,” “Next Stop Wonderland,” “Happy Accidents”) had ever directed anything he hadn’t written, the challenge in understanding and accurately portraying the nuances was even greater. But communicating in rudimentary Spanish reduced those ideas to their most basic essence.
“I remember the first few days on the set, watching Brad trying to communicate and constantly being misinterpreted,” says Bale, who’d gotten raves for previous movies such as “Empire of the Sun” and “American Psycho.” “I mean, Brad was just kind of grunting about costume choices or whatever. But then something happened; he developed a lingua franca with the Spaniards. In the end, he was speaking enough Spanish to be understood, but not enough to be dismissed. Everybody had to pay attention. I really enjoyed that, watching him, and I liked that he just rolled with everything, and that he kept everything simple.”
Still, sometimes it seemed the forces of the universe were conspiring to complicate matters. No sooner had Anderson arrived in Barcelona, than the director tore a tendon and ended up on crutches. As soon as that healed, his back spasmed out of control and he ended up guiding the bulk of the movie — practically monosyllabically — from a gurney.
“It probably affected the perspective some,” he says now with a laugh. “The movie does have this skewed sense to it.”
“But, really, mostly I took my cues from Scott Kosar’s script,” says Anderson, who holds a degree in Russian literature from tiny Bowden College in Maine.
“From the minute I read it, I felt such a strong kinship with the story. Scott’s writing was just spooky; it was all between the lines, never obvious. It’s horror in the way that I think of the best horror, like [Roman] Polanski, [Stanley] Kubrick, [David] Lynch. The horror is much more intense when it’s inside you — when you’re losing your mind — than when it’s some guy with a chainsaw chasing you. I mean, if you can’t trust your own senses, then what can you trust?”
He also knew that, fabulous script and all, they needed a very special actor to play Trevor Reznik — a man the audience needed to care about even as he acted more and more irrationally.
“We had a short list of actors, but Christian got the script and read it,” says Anderson. “And he just fell for it. He called me and I thought, `I know this guy’s work, he’ll do anything.’ So as far as I was concerned, that was it, he had the part.”
“I like risky movies,” Bale says. “And when I saw the script and how beautifully written it was, how great in its detail, I just absolutely knew it’d be a movie I really liked.”
An easy decision
He’d never seen Anderson’s previous movies but it didn’t matter, the conversation had been enough for him too. (Later, when he had a chance to screen Anderson’s other work, Bale was stunned at how different it was, how “The Machinist” seemed light-years away from all but the futuristic “Session 9.”)
Anderson was clear that the Trevor role would be rigorous. Kosar’s script explained that Trevor Reznik was reed thin; in the story, people kept telling him that if he lost any more weight, he’d disappear.
“I figured Christian would lose some weight and we’d put him in really baggy clothes, shoot him in a certain light,” Anderson recalls with a rueful laugh.
“I didn’t exactly expect him to drop a third of his body weight.”
But when Bale arrived in Barcelona, Anderson was stunned. “It immediately posed the question: `What happened to him? What happened to this man?’ I was delighted, though I never in my wildest dreams would have asked him to do that.”
“I like to feel like I’ve worked in a movie,” says Bale, who followed up “The Machinist” with a lead role in the Batman film franchise. “But the truth is, also, that I had the time. I hadn’t worked in a year and a half. Nothing that had been offered to me was interesting; I had chosen to turn down things.
“So I could take this step, though I never planned or imagined I’d go that far.”
Using as a model an old photograph of Hank Williams only weeks before his death, Bale went from 180 pounds to 120. The usually athletic actor was rendered waiflike, tired and fatigued throughout the shoot.
“You become a loner, by default, because you don’t have the willpower or the strength to be around friends,” Bale says. “You lose all nervousness, you don’t fidget. Your heartbeat slows down, you have no urge to move. You become cerebral, all cerebral. You find you can entertain yourself doing nothing for hours and hours at a time.”
“He was almost in a euphoric state,” says Anderson, who — between his mishaps and Bale’s blank stares — barely socialized with him during the shoot. “He’d sit on the sidelines between takes like a Zen master, listening to his music through these earphones.”
“Actually, I wasn’t really listening to anything,” Bale confesses. “I just had the earphones on so people’d leave me alone. That way, I could also just listen to everyone around me.”
To complicate matters even more, Bale couldn’t do anything that required physical exertion. Yet his condition — his shoulders poked at his sweaters, his belly had become completely concave — meant that Anderson couldn’t use a stunt double.
“I mean, this wasn’t an action film, but there was this one sequence in which he has to run from the cops, and we ended up just having to break that down into a bunch of takes so Christian could catch his breath,” Anderson explains.
“He did such a classy job,” Bale says of the director. “In my own personal collection of movies, this is one I love. It’s the movie I’m proudest of.”
