The on-set outburst that shocked Michael Caine: “I was stunned when I saw it”
Actors can often be a highly strung and volatile bunch, a camp Michael Caine vowed never to be a part of again after losing his temper for the first and only time on set.
Considering the two-time Academy Award winner made well over 100 pictures in a career that lasted 70 years, it’s an impressive achievement. After blowing his top in front of the assembled cast and crew, Caine immediately decided to never let history repeat itself.
The scene in question also convinced Caine that he would never ride a horse on camera again when the steed he was supposed to be wrangling in James Clavell’s 1971 historical drama The Lost Valley nearly killed him. By his own admission, the star “went apeshit at everybody” for the mishap, and for the next half a century, he was the embodiment of remaining cool and composed.
However, the same can’t be said of a three-time co-star of Caine’s, who made the mistake of unleashing a verbal tirade in the direction of a cinematographer. Back in the day, such heated disagreements never went beyond the confines of the set, but it’s an entirely different story in the age of technology and viral sensations.
Caine had never seen Christian Bale lose his cool even once when they filmed Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins and The Dark Knight together, leaving him shocked when the actor’s furious tirade launched against Terminator Salvation DP Shane Hurlbut became a source of embarrassment. He ended up apologising several times over for the incident, even if it’s about the only memorable thing to emerge from director McG’s turgid reboot of the classic sci-fi franchise.
“Yeah, that stunned me, that did, because he’s not like that at all,” Caine told Radio Free of Bale blowing his top. “I mean, I’m more like that than he is. You’re liable to get a volley off of me if you walk around during my takes! But I would never imagine Christian doing that. It’s completely out of character. I was stunned when I saw it on the news.”
Bale would like to forget the entire Terminator Salvation experience, and not just because he went viral. He had to be convinced to make the movie in the first place after voicing his entirely justified scepticism, only for audiences to be rewarded with one of the weakest and most disinterested performances of the actor’s career, directed by a filmmaker the leading man swore he would never work with again in the aftermath.
Caine was taken aback because he’d never seen that side of Bale before, which makes sense when the pictures they’d worked on together were decidedly less shitty than Salvation. When an actor knows they’re making a bad movie, it tends to leave them more highly strung than usual.
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