Since Christian Bale's been making news for his outburst on the set of Terminator Salvation , I thought I'd load up the trailer for the film so you could see what's going on in front of the cameras rather than just the sensationalism behind the scenes. The outburst was apparently provoked by the director of photography walking onto the set to adjust lights and ruining a take. While Bale dropped the f-bomb a few more times than was probably necessary I actually don't understand all the attention this is getting and the uproar it seemed to provoke. An actor had a fit on the set -- what else is new? The person I blame for all this is director McG. With credits like Charlie's Angels 1 and 2 , and We Are Marshall he's not exactly a filmmaker who commands immediate respect. A director is responsible for being in control of his set and McG obviously wasn't in control of his. I mean can you imagine that anyone on Stanley Kubrick's set would ever be in doubt about when a shot was live and when it was a rehearsal? Plus a director should step in to insure that a performer doesn't ream someone like this in front of the entire cast and crew. Even if the basis for the outburst is valid a good dircetor should calm everyone down and bring the combatants behind closed doors. I suspect that Bale -- who's worked with such assured directors as Werner Herzog, Christopher Nolan, Todd Haynes, Jane Campion and Steven Spielberg -- may have been frustrated with the production as a whole and this incident just set him off. McG can't command a whole lot of respect if Bale talks about the film as "his set." If he had done that on Herzog's set he probably would have been the one to get the grilling. All this just confirms my original feelings when I heard about the film: why is someone like McG being given a huge budget and the reins of such an iconic franchise? I thought the first Terminator was a lean, mean sci-fi genre film but I've been unimpressed by any of the sequels. So I'm going into this one with guarded expectations. But I hope it's a worthy follow up (or prequel depending on how you look at the timeline of the story) to the original film. Trailer is courtesy of Warner Brothers.
