Here we go, another Christian Bale "watch me torture myself" movie. In Rescue Dawn he plays captured pilot Dietrich Dengler suffering in a Cambodian POW camp. To Bale, this is the fun stuff.
Christian Bale on Rescue Dawn
"I like going to hell and back," Bale scoffed. "I knew that Werner [Herzog] would be a good guy to take us there. How many times in life do you get to do this kind of crazy sh**? It's something that I was going to take advantage of. That was the big appeal to me of doing it. I like that. Just testing yourself and seeing how far you can go."
Once again trimming down for an unhealthy look, Bale claims he wasn't nearly as skeletal as he was in The Machinist. "I really actually didn’t lose a whole lot of weight for this one. I know it looks [like it] but there’s a lot of good make-up and I just wanted to do enough to give kind of an indication of time and everything for it. It really wasn’t anything on the scale of The Machinist. I wouldn’t do that again. I’ve kind of conquered that in my mind and don’t need to prove that to myself again."
Still, dieting out in the jungle, Bale developed an affinity for bananas and other fruit. "There was a local fruit as well, these kind of grape sized things that grew on trees. They were fantastic too. We just kind of would sit there in rapture over different fruit, just talking about it. We would sit for five minutes just staring at a banana talking about how beautiful it was."
Bale may know what he's getting into, but Dietrich Dengler did not. He just wanted to fly planes so getting imprisoned wasn't in his mind. "I truly think that he was just absolutely obsessed with the romanticism of the whole thing, and thankful on a personal level at what America had done for him. And that didn't really mix with the missions that he was going on. He still maintained that romanticism and remember, this was his first mission. The poor bastard got shot down his first mission. So I really think that had a very unique outlook where he didn't see them as the enemy. He saw them as just other people, which is why he seems such an unlikely military man, let alone somebody who actually is considered a hero."
Throughout the ordeal, Dengler remains hopeful. "With those things, he was curious. He's tied up, he's been dragged along, he's been beaten but he's still interested in 'I wonder what they're cooking over there. Oh, she looks nice. She's pretty, isn't she? He looks like a nice guy. I could probably have a good conversation with him.' It's just the most bizarre outlook on life, the absolute optimism and curiosity and interest that kept him going."
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