His The Machinist was one of the spookiest entries in the Toronto Film Fest's Midnight Madness series this year. But Brad Anderson doesn't want to be known as a "horror movie director."
But he does say his leading man scared him. Christian Bale arrived onset in Barcelona last year having lost 50 pounds, face sunken, pores oozing ketosis -- all in the name of verisimilitude.
Bale plays a lathe operator with a mysterious psyche ailment: He goes a delusional year without sleep, destroying his relationship with a prostitute friend (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and causing a horrific accident with a co-worker, played by Michael Ironside ("I think it's in Michael's contract that he has to lose an arm or limb in every movie," Anderson quips).
"It was kind of scary, because we didn't have a doctor on the set or anything," Anderson says of the gaunt Bale. "But it actually worked to get him into the spirit of his character, because he was fatigued, he actually did become an insomniac -- which is one of the symptoms of severe weight loss.
"You might call this kind of movie 'horror,' but to me, The Machinist is more a character study of this guy's descent into his own psyche. I was really thinking about German expressionism when we were conceiving the look of the movie. And there were a couple of scenes where, because he's so bent over and fatigued, Christian became that 'sleepwalker' guy in (The Cabinet Of Dr.) Caligari, with his weird spiderlike posture."
Bale's is not a role you'd associate with someone who's been cast as the next movie Batman -- though by accounts he's managed to bulk those 50 pounds back within a few months. Similarly, The Machinist is not a movie you'd associate with a director whose first two films -- Next Stop Wonderland and Happy Accidents -- were romantic comedies (and whose next film project, Blame It On The Bossa Nova, is a samba musical).
It is of a piece, however, with his last effort, the trippy suspense film Session 9. Both films play with your head with a hallucinatory narrative and cast of characters who may or may not even be real -- an ambiguity it shares with a whole slew of films from The Sixth Sense to The Others to A Beautiful Mind.
Is the tenuousness of reality inherently scary? "Like, are we actually talking right now?" Anderson says with a laugh. "In my mind those are the scariest horror movies, where the monster is not outside, but inside.
"In that sub-genre of movies, The Sixth Sense, The Others, Memento... the character the movie's told through is confronted with a mystery and gradually realizes the answer is himself, whether he's dead or a criminal or whatever. They're creepy because any one of us is susceptible. We can all lose our minds."
More unreal was the fact that, though it's set in New Jersey, The Machinist was shot in an industrial suburb of Barcelona.
"Whenever I see it listed in festivals as a Spanish film, I feel weird," Anderson says. "We couldn't get financing in the States, and the Spanish company Filmax offered us money on the condition that we shoot there. My initial reaction was 'This is insane.' I don't speak Spanish, but luckily most people there speak enough English to get by. Then I got into the periphery of Barcelona and saw all those industrial zones and you realize that, y'know what? You go anywhere in the world now and you find a place that looks like it could be America.
"And I learned a lot. We were able to hire the best people in Spain and I had total control over the project, which wouldn't necessarily have been the case in America. I think American independent filmmakers should definitely look overseas. You can get a lot done for five million Euros."
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