VIDEO INTERVIEW: Christian Bale's caped crusading has given Batman a blacker edge in The Dark Knight
Leaner and more streamlined, he's donning a re-invented Batsuit to take up the crime-fighting cudgels again on the violence-plagued streets of Gotham.
Christian Bale, the man behind Batman's dark mask, is just as mysterious as the Caped Crusader's alter ego Bruce Wayne.
In person, the Welsh-born star has a searing intensity, keen intellect and jealously guards his privacy. It's well known that he is a slave to his craft.
Bale reunites with British director Christopher Nolan for The Dark Knight. The follow-up to the gritty Batman Begins is winning rave reviews, critics praising the final completed performance of Heath Ledger and his chaotic and sinister take on the villainous Joker.
Promoting The Dark Knight in Los Angeles, Bale finds himself at the centre of two new films based on well-loved movies – the Batman franchise and the Terminator trilogy. He is playing John Connor in Terminator Salvation.
Asked why he's decided to tackle two iconic characters, Bale says simply, "because I was asked''.
"With Batman Begins it was a re-invention. It was an origin story and what Chris Nolan managed to do was absolutely re-invigorate the mythology of Batman. To me, that's the same task at hand with Terminator.''
Terminator Salvation is not an origin story -- that was done in the Arnold Schwarzenegger originals -- but the film crew is hoping to continue the storyline, Bale says.
"I see it as an opportunity to re-invent and again revitalise that mythology and I think that's what our responsibility is as filmmakers and that's what I'm trying to do,'' he says.
But for now, Bale is talking about his role in The Dark Knight, where he returns as Batman. He admits being drawn to the character's contradictions, his shades of grey.
"He's not a one-dimensional hero. `The Dark Knight' sums him up very well,'' he says. "Usually it's a knight in shining armour who arrives and he is pure of heart completely.
"Well this man arrives and he wishes to do good. He also has a great deal of revenge and a great deal of violence and anger and very negative emotions that he has to keep in check all the time.''
In The Dark Knight, Batman finally meets his match in Ledger's Joker and it forms the core of the film. The Joker, an anarchist bent on destruction, is constantly prodding Batman, pushing him to cross the line between hero and vigilante.
"The one thing you can say for The Joker is he's not a hypocrite. He stands by his word. He's willing to live and die by his beliefs and that's why he despises society so much, that they will quit their beliefs so easily,'' Bale says.
"He finds in Batman an equally uncompromising character, but Batman has a weakness that The Joker doesn't, in that he does have morality and he will not kill.
"He's provoking Batman. As The Joker says, 'You complete me'. He's finally got a really worthy opponent.''
In The Dark Knight, Bale says the tension comes because The Joker wants to prove that everybody has a price, including Batman.
Batman's own internal struggle is complicated by his desire to shrug off the responsibility he has taken on to protect the citizens of Gotham, his quest to hang up the Batsuit and just concentrate on being billionaire Bruce Wayne.
The Dark Knight is a blockbuster in every sense of the word, and Bale says he has never given a damn about whether a movie is studio or independent.
"I've just gone with whatever stories have interested me. I've made many mistakes,'' he says, before correcting himself by saying "team mistakes'', explaining he believes it's the director who makes a movie good or otherwise.
"Chris Nolan has made The Dark Knight the wonderful movie that it is. Regardless of the fact that Heath (Ledger) gives a fantastic, iconic performance, regardless of the fact that there's a wonderful cast. Chris still cast those people you know, and equally if a movie fails miserably it's the director's fault completely.''
A director should take all the credit, as well as the blame, Bale says.
"But I've never cared about where the finances are coming from, I just care about the story. I get as much satisfaction from doing a small independent movie as I do making The Dark Knight or making Terminator.''
Bale believes Nolan has proven with his more realistic interpretation of Batman's world that any genre of movie can really be superb if put in the right hands.
"I think Chris has really proven these are not movies that need to be looked down upon in any fashion whatsoever, and that so-called popcorn movies can be just that, popcorn movies, but there's no reason why you can't stick some real substance and wonderful storytelling into them.
"I hope he's changed the game for good,'' Bale adds.
Before putting on the Batsuit, Bale -- who was first noticed at just 13 in Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun -- had concentrated mostly on independent films and slavishly transformed his physique for roles.
He was athletic as the serial killer Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, and was literally emaciated in The Machinist, starving himself on a diet of apples and coffee, before having to rebuild his muscle mass again for Batman Begins.
With The Dark Knight he says he wasn't coming from such a place of weakness as when he first played the comic-book crimefighting hero.
The Batsuit too is more flexible, and has been re-designed from the one used in Batman Begins to give Bale a greater range of movement.
The original suit was made of three segments, but in The Dark Knight, Batman's armour consists of 110 separate pieces, including polyester mesh, which is used by the military, and carbon-fibre panels.
Bale says: "It was much more comfortable and far less claustrophobic than the first suit. It was also more agile and gave me better range of motion, which helped with the action and fight sequences.
"But it still gave me that feeling of invincibility. You can't help but feel protected and more powerful when you put the Batsuit on. It just works.''
Bale adds that keeping with the more linear feel of the Batsuit, he also wanted to lean down, explaining his physical appearance was the difference between the large, buff regular military guys and the more wiry special-operations specialists.
Bale also took a refresher course in the Keysi Fighting Method (KFM) that Batman uses against his enemies. Never one to do things by half, Bale trained up to three hours a day to use every part of his body as a weapon.
Bale not only has a new suit and the Batmobile, but there's a whole new gadget with the Bat-pod: an all-terrain heavily armed two-wheeled hi-tech machine that puts a normal motorcycle to shame.
With several critically acclaimed performances and the box-office hit of Batman Begins under his belt, the 34-year-old, who has been working for more than 20 years, says he's now more confident in his ability to be able to assess how a movie is going while making it.
"I find I'm tending to be more correct nowadays than I was before -- that doesn't mean I'm not going to make mistakes in the future at all but hopefully I'll make less than I have in the past,'' he says.
Roles such as Batman seem to draw Bale in, and he admits to sharing a fascination with the extreme.
"It's a notion of kind of seeing somebody test their mettle, seeing people and how they react when the chips are really down,'' he says.
"Dark characters tend to attract more attention because they're more intriguing. We're interested in people who break the rules of civilised society because that side of us is in all of us, that shadow side.''
