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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 3, 2017 5:08:50 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 5, 2017 8:16:57 GMT
From Vulture's Steven Spielberg’s Child Actors, Ranked From Very Good to All-Time Great: 2. Christian Bale — Empire of the Sun Sure, Empire of the Sun made us mistakenly believe that Christian Bale has the voice of an angel, but three decades later, his performance still holds its own. In just his second film role, Bale shoulders the emotional and metaphorical weight of Spielberg’s visually extravagant war epic, his arc a coming-of-age story on steroids. Bale has no trouble spanning the distance between waited-upon gentry and grimy POW; it’s the kind of role that grown men win Oscars for pulling off. Throughout it all, he must maintain the innocence of a child while working against the biases that come with World War II movies, where the morality is objective and the outcome is a foregone conclusion. Whether he sung the song or not, Bale makes a very convincing choirboy.____________ They give 1st place to ET's Henry Thomas for capturing the quintessential childhood.
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 7, 2017 15:07:50 GMT
This The New York Times review by Janet Maslin is glorious. Quotes / Excerpts: - the sweeping story of Jim's wartime exploits after he is separated from his family, is set forth so spectacularly in Steven Spielberg's ''Empire of the Sun'' that the film seems to speak a language all its own. In fact it does, for it's clear Mr. Spielberg works in a purely cinematic idiom that is quite singular.
- That first glimpse of the choirboys will prompt audiences to wonder which of these well-groomed, proper little singers is to be the film's leading man. Mr. Bale, who emerges from the choir by singing a solo, at first seems just a handsome and malleable young performer, another charming child star. But the epic street scene that details the Japanese invasion of the city and separates Jim from his parents reveals this boy to be something more. As Mr. Bale, standing atop a car amid thousands of extras and clasping his hands to his head, registers the fact that Jim is suddenly alone, he conveys the schoolboy's real terror and takes the film to a different dramatic plane. This fine young actor, who appears in virtually every frame of the film and ages convincingly from about 9 to 13 during the course of the story, is eminently able to handle an ambitious and demanding role.
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 7, 2017 15:20:59 GMT
An early article focused on the young Bale and his performance: BOY IN 'EMPIRE' CALLS ACTING 'REALLY GOOD FUN' By ANDREW L. YARROW Published: December 16, 1987 Excerpts follow: Awards speculation: ''I thought it was really good fun, and it looked easy,'' said Mr. Bale, whose critically acclaimed performance in Mr. Spielberg's new $30 million movie has made him an odds-on favorite to join the very select group of child actors ever to be nominated for an Academy Award.Performance: ...this leather-jacketed waif begins to look and act like a young Harrison Ford.Producer's comments: ''We realized that it's extremely difficult for an actor who is 13 to carry a film, and that the span of years from about 10 to 15 is a very tough time for a child to be able to convincingly portray a character,'' said Kathleen Kennedy, who produced ''Empire of the Sun'' with Mr. Spielberg and Frank Marshall. ''But Christian was remarkable. He showed a real, natural spontaneity as well as many levels of concentration and a great deal of attention to detail.''Production Scale: During 16 weeks of filming this year, Mr. Bale shuttled from England to Spain to China for a production that was monumental even by Steven Spielberg's standards. The streets of Shanghai were cordoned off for several days of shooting, and more than 15,000 extras and 500 crew members were recruited for the film, which is the first major Hollywood feature to be shot in China since the 1949 revolution. Despite the historic, larger-than-life scale of this undertaking, the young actor was nonplused by China. ''There was nothing to do, and everything is very dusty and crowded,'' he recalled. ''There's no color anywhere and the Chinese are always coughing.''
California, however, was another story. Like Jim, who finagles his way into living in the American barracks in the internment camp and is ecstatic at the appearance of an American bomber squadron, Mr. Bale was very much taken by the United States. ''I really like working in America, especially California,'' he said. ''I like the weather and the beaches, and the people are more friendly than in England.''Bale on his future plans: ''I enjoyed doing film more than the stage,'' he added. ''Ideally, I'd like to do a couple of films and a TV series over the next few years.'' He said he had received several film offers, and Ms. Kennedy confirmed that Mr. Spielberg ''would very much like to cast him in another film,'' but because of British child-labor laws, he cannot work again until the spring. _______________________ This interview must have been done before the promotion horrors kicked in for the young Bale, hence the intention to continue in films. As for Spielberg's intention to cast him again, well, he still hasn't found the right project, I suppose... :-(
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 7, 2017 15:26:08 GMT
''Empire of the Sun.'' Steven Spielberg's high aspirations come very close to realization in this very moving, grandly staged adventure-epic about a boy and his war. The boy is Jim, played with uncanny presence by Christian Bale, 13. The war is the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, where, until Dec. 8, 1941, Jim has lived the comfortable colonial life with his English parents.
The movie is big in all the right ways. The scenes of civilian chaos preceding the occupation of Shanghai are stunning. It's also so intimate that it makes comprehensible Jim's admiration of his Japanese captors, during his crucial, harrowing years in the internment camp. Tom Stoppard did the excellent adaptation of J. G. Ballard's autobiographical novel. Supporting the star-performance by Mr. Bale, in whom Mr. Spielberg discovers the wit and guts of the young Jean-Pierre Leaud, are John Malkovich and Miranda Richardson, among others.
The movie appears to have been edited in a hurry - there are awkward gaps in the narrative line - but it's still a large winner.From FILM VIEW: THE YEAR'S BEST; Bull Market for Movies and Screens By VINCENT CANBY @ The New York Times
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 7, 2017 15:39:45 GMT
This essay featuring Spielberg's thoughts on this film cast the film as a seminal point in Spielberg's professional aging. Excerpts follow:
FILM; Spielberg at 40: The Man and the Child By MYRA FORSBERG Published: January 10, 1988
- ... while the story offered Mr. Spielberg another opportunity to collaborate with a young actor -and embodies many of the director's own childhood obsessions and traumas - it has helped him make a transition to what he calls ''grown-up stories.''
Acknowledging that turning 40 recently ''ain't been so easy,'' he says it has forced him to reassess his work both as a director and producer: ''I suddenly realized that, 'God, maybe I should please a part of me I haven't pleased before - that 'Empire' has just started to please, which is a side that doesn't necessarily think of the audience with every thought and breath, but thinks about what I need to be satisfied.' ''
- ''I was attracted to the main character being a child,'' says Mr. Spielberg, sitting in a spacious office at Warner Bros., which is distributing the $35 million film. ''But I was also attracted to the idea that this was a death of innocence, not an attenuation of childhood, which by my own admission and everybody's impression of me is what my life has been. This was the opposite of 'Peter Pan.' This was a boy who had grown up too quickly, who was becoming a flower long before the bud had ever come out of the topsoil. And, in fact, a flower that was a gifted weed.''
- ''From the moment I read the novel, I secretly wanted to do it myself,'' admits Mr. Spielberg. ''I had never read anything with an adult setting - even 'Oliver Twist' -where a child saw things through a man's eyes as opposed to a man discovering things through the child in him. This was just the reverse of what I felt - leading up to 'Empire' - was my credo. And then I discovered very quickly that this movie and turning 40 happening at almost the same time was no coincidence - that I had decided to do a movie with grown-up themes and values, although spoken through a voice that hadn't changed through puberty as yet.''
- Another attraction was the plethora of images the work invoked. ''Ever since 'Duel,' '' says Mr. Spielberg, referring to his seminal television film about a sinister truck, ''I've been looking for a visual narrative - a motion-picture story - that could be told nearly exclusively through visual metaphors and nonpretentious symbolism. And nothing had come along until 'Empire.' And the book was so much from the point of view of this very confused child who becomes a thoroughly indoctrinated young man - it's such a character journey for him - that I said, 'This is wonderful. It's like a large coffee-table-picture experience. The images say more than nine pages of dialogue ever could on stage.
But there were other attractions - attractions that symbolize Mr. Spielberg's own childhood. For example, there's Jim's fascination with planes. ''As a child I used to build model planes,'' the director recalls, ''and I was attached to flying the way Jim is.''
- And in depicting the dawn of the atomic age, Mr. Spielberg says, ''I wanted to draw a parallel story between the death of this boy's innocence and the death of the innocence of the entire world. When that white light goes off in Nagasaki and the boy witnesses the light - whether he really sees it or his mind sees it doesn't matter. Two innocents have come to an end and a saddened world has begun."
About Christian:
- ''There was something about Christian that was purely intuitive, and that's how I work too,'' Mr. Spielberg explains. ''We really got along on that level. We didn't do a lot of intellectualizing. I found the best way to work with Christian was just imitation. I would get in there and play the scene myself and we would mix it up and become friends... I bought him a radio-controlled racing car so every lunch hour we would go out with our cars and have races.''
- "I bought him a radio-controlled racing car so every lunch hour we would go out with our cars and have races.''
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 7, 2017 15:49:05 GMT
From a 1988 essay reflecting on child performances in film and the directors who are good with them: FILM VIEW; Evoking Childhood Isn't Kid StuffPublished: February 7, 1988 - ''Empire of the Sun'' is a grand adventure movie. It's also the best film ever made about childhood by a director born and bred in this country, where movie makers tend to take a safely revisionist view of childhood, one that's limited by expectations of what audiences want to believe about themselves. In the work of Christian Bale, the English actor who ages from 9 to 13 in the course of the story, ''Empire of the Sun'' has a performance that sets the standard of achievement for this season's exceptionally ambitious group of performances by children. - In a recent interview with a New York Times reporter, Mr. Spielberg said that although ''Empire of the Sun'' was one of the most complicated movies he'd ever done, it was also one of his most efficient. The reason: Mr. Bale, who's in virtually every scene, was inclined always to do his best work in the first take, and to grow increasingly artificial as the takes were repeated. Though Mr. Bale has had some training as an actor, the director relied less on the boy's conception of the role than on his ability to imitate the performance initially acted out by Mr. Spielberg. This doesn't underrate the child's contribution, including his intelligence, wit, looks and natural mannerisms, but it does explain why a handful of directors consistently obtain better, richer performances from children than do other directors. - In the history of movies, the best, most memorable recollections of childhood have been evoked by children either who made their marks in one or two films (Henry Thomas of ''E.T.,'' Bobby Henrey of ''The Fallen Idol'') or who quickly graduated to careers as adult actors (Elizabeth Taylor, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Roddy McDowall).
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 7, 2017 15:53:02 GMT
From a 1989 letter to the Editor at The New York Times: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has again snubbed Steven Spielberg and those associated with him in its Oscar nominations. ''Who Framed Roger Rabbit'' did not earn any major nomination, though it broke more cinematic ground than any other movie last year. Those who think this is simply an oversight should remember: In 1982, the Oscars for best picture and best director went to ''Gandhi'' and Sir Richard Attenborough, though ''E.T.'' and Mr. Spielberg were the most highly praised movie and director that year. In 1985, ''The Color Purple,'' which Mr. Spielberg directed, received 11 nominations, including best picture; yet he was not even considered for best director. The movie won only a couple of minor awards. In 1988, ''Empire of the Sun'' was completely overlooked, though many critics considered it a tour de force for Mr. Spielberg, and he was compared to Sir Richard Attenborough and David Lean. In addition, Christian Bale was overlooked for best actor, despite an exceptional performance. It would seem the Academy is more interested in back stabbing and promotional politics. I find it unbelievable that ''Fatal Attraction'' -which is, at best, good entertainment - received best picture and best director nominations, while ''Empire of the Sun,'' a superior movie in every respect, was completely overlooked.
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 7, 2017 21:52:04 GMT
From a New York Times essay, c. 1990, on J.G. Ballard, the author of Empire of the Sun: In 1987, Steven Spielberg made ''Empire of the Sun'' into a movie, starring John Malkovich, Christian Bale and Miranda Richardson, that garnered several Academy Award nominations. That Spielberg and Ballard, two men who made their careers in science fiction, should meet in a project that fell quite outside the genre was only one of the lesser paradoxes. The scenes set in Shanghai were actually shot there, since the city has, remarkably, maintained its prewar skyline (seeing it again on film was ''an eerie sensation,'' says Ballard, who has not returned since moving to England in 1946); but the scenes of Jim's family home could not be filmed in Ballard's childhood residence, now a ruin. Instead, Spielberg and company decided to use a house of the same general age and type, familiarly known as ''stockbroker Tudor,'' in Sunningdale, not far from Shepperton.
Many of the village's residents work as extras in the local film studios. Since Ballard lived nearby, Spielberg asked him to play a small role in a party sequence shot in the Sunningdale house. Thus, Ballard enjoyed the distinctly odd experience of collaborating with his present-day neighbors as bystanders in scenes of his own childhood. ''It was like a sort of waking dream,'' he says. ''The mind recruits material from the day, nearby houses and neighbors, and assigns them the parts of people last seen across the water 40 years ago.''
The conclusion of the party sequence saw the guests emerging from the house into a driveway where 1930's Packards and Buicks driven by Chinese actors costumed as chauffeurs were waiting for them, a tableau that dislocated Ballard entirely: ''I thought I'd step into a car and be driven back to the Shanghai of 40 years ago. I've lived here for over 25 years. Why pick Shepperton? Did I unconsciously know that I would write a novel about Shanghai, which would be filmed in Shepperton, with neighbors and ambiance brought into it?'' He laughs.
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 17, 2017 6:02:49 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 19, 2017 21:13:16 GMT
An archived interview from BBC:
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Post by RhodoraO on Apr 10, 2017 13:40:26 GMT
From a review in The Village Voice on Molly Haskell's book on Steven Spielberg's filmography in which she asserts that he is closest not to another filmmaker but to Charles Dickens in many of their themes and styles. www.villagevoice.com/film/molly-haskell-follows-spielberg-from-boyhood-to-responsibility-9549941Haskell's Spielberg book is at its most interesting when Spielberg is, too. As with Dickens, the works that prove most rewarding as time passes are often the ones that weren't epochal, the ones that darkened and interrogated the assumptions underlying the hits. Her chapter on 1987's Empire of the Sun, the film she cites as the director's best, offers an illuminating celebration of a movie too often considered a sort of dry run for Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan. An adaptation of J.G. Ballard's autobiographical novel, Empire follows British schoolboy Jamie/Jim (Christian Bale) through World War II after he's separated from his parents when the Japanese attack Shanghai; Jamie witnesses and escapes countless brutalities, but still comes jollily of age in an internment camp, dreaming of fighter planes, befriending through the barbed wire the Japanese pilots who take off one hill over. Jamie likes the end of the world just fine, thank you very much.
Upon the film's release, many critics found the candied scenes of the boy's adventure at odds with the prevailing themes of loss and death and the apocalyptic third act. But, as Haskell notes, that contrast is the point: "The zest for war is alive in every fiber of [Jamie's] being, a reminder of feelings sublimated in adult men and rarely acknowledged in the antiwar theme of most war films." Empire of the Sun is honest about boys' — and the movies' — yen for action. Seven years before Empire, making Raiders of the Lost Ark, Spielberg took Harrison Ford's advice and let Indiana Jones "just shoot the fucker"; the flip death of that Arab swordsman brought the house down. Empire crashes that gee-whiz zeal for violence into the abattoir of history, revealing the sickness at the heart of both our fun and our "serious" war films.
Bale's Jamie dreams of gunning down planes, carries a magazine copy of Norman Rockwell's Freedom From Fear around with him, and at one point, in his adolescence, has to choose between watching an air-raid bombardment out the window or peeping on the beautiful woman in the throes of passion one bunk over. It doesn't get more Spielbergian than that.
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Post by The Low Dweller on Oct 6, 2018 19:49:15 GMT
frank marshall, one of the producers of empire of the sun:
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Post by RhodoraO on Dec 26, 2018 4:49:47 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Dec 26, 2018 5:14:00 GMT
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