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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 18, 2017 7:26:51 GMT
We know Bale is a Star Wars fan, but I didn't know of Hamill attending The Fighter premiere until know. Do we know any more of this story? The connection? Any potential meeting between Bale and Hamill?
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 19, 2017 6:14:35 GMT
From the Carpetbagger interview at NYtimes with O' Russell:
Q. The film opens with a documentary-style interview with Micky and Dicky that exposes their relationship, but that wasn’t in the original script?
A.[It was] a discovery in the editing room. We had no time in the schedule. You shoot these interviews as you go, throw them in the frames: Tell me about this. Talk about this.
Q. It was totally unscripted?
A. We had worked on the characters. Christian was in character nonstop, and Mark, coming from the John Garfield school, is always kind of in character, because it’s always him in some way. I pretend to be the HBO interviewer, and I would say, tell me when you started fighting. Then Christian would go down the road, and then I would say, ‘No, say this.’ I would just start throwing lines at him that we would make up on the spot, and we got that gold where he cried at the end. That’s like a cinematic haiku.
Q. Tell me about working with Christian. He has a reputation as an intense actor.
A. Christian is a serious guy, and by that I mean he’s a sincere guy, so when he commits to something, you can feel how much sincerity there is. And we both talked about wanting to come from a place of love for Dicky, that’s what made it interesting. We had to figure each other out the first couple of weeks, but once we found a rhythm we were very, very comfortable. He does his thing. He goes off to his workshop, and he comes back with his shaved hairline and his bones sticking out.
He listened to the music of Dicky and the movement of Dicky. Dicky is basically a black guy, like a Muhammad Ali type of black guy who never stops moving and talking, which was very liberating to Christian, because he is a very quiet person. And then there was a question of calibrating it. He came out of the gate with his creature, and I would have to say: “You’ve got to bring it down a little bit, and it’s a matter of trusting me, understanding that you’re still very much Dicky, you’re just a little too big right now.” Ideally in any director-actor relationship that’s what you want: Is this too much? Is this too little?
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 20, 2017 4:45:12 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 22, 2017 16:47:39 GMT
From a 2013 interview by David O'Russell: www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/magazine/david-o-russell-in-conversation.htmlD.R.: ... When I made “The Fighter,” I said to myself, “Mr. Overthinking Things, how about really, really just do it as good as you can from your heart. Can you do that? Well, actually just try to do that. That would be an achievement.” For whatever reason, I came to appreciate and respect the honor and privilege of telling such human stories. The emotion is what I want.
N.G.: You are not exactly the first director anyone would have thought of for “The Fighter.” You were known for black comedies.
D.R.: I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Mark Wahlberg. We’ve made three films together. He was having a great period of success, and I was having a period of changing my life and not knowing what I wanted to do, and I wasn’t being as successful, and it wasn’t as easy for me to get a film made. He could tell from speaking to me that I had a great feel for the family thing between Dicky and his mother. And he knew how hungry I was.
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Post by RhodoraO on Apr 2, 2017 14:01:40 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Apr 16, 2019 22:01:31 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Dec 22, 2020 13:31:45 GMT
Some fun notes on production from Bale's entry on an Oscar Nominees analysis piece on EW: ew.com/article/2011/01/28/oscars-2011-best-supporting-actor-nominees/Christian Bale *The Frontrunner The Fighter Age 37 Role Dicky Eklund, the charming but troubled mama’s boy who’s the key to the title hopes of his boxing half brother (Mark Wahlberg). Oscar History First nomination. Them’s Fighting Words Bale captured the squirrelly vibe of boxer Micky Ward’s ne’er-do-well half brother so well that townies in Lowell, Mass., occasionally mistook the actor for Eklund himself. But at least one local didn’t much care for Bale’s devotion to detail: Ward’s trainer — and Lowell police officer — Mickey O’Keefe, who portrayed himself in the movie. True to the relationship depicted on film, O’Keefe and Eklund can barely stand to be in the same room with each other. After Bale observed that dynamic, the actor began improvising in his first scene with O’Keefe and poking fun at the cop. ”You could see it was really pissing Mickey off,” recalls director David O. Russell. ”O’Keefe’s sitting there with his finger over his mouth, like he’s reliving the past with Dicky, and Christian plugged right into that. That scene [later] where he yells at Dicky, and the veins are sticking out of his neck, I think it was very cathartic for O’Keefe. He could’ve done that all day.” Up Next Bale stars in Zhang Yimou’s big-budget Chinese epic The 13 Women of Nanjing before appearing as Batman in 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises. —Jeff Labrecque
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