The 2007 co-star Christian Bale was warned against: “You’re going to be in for a tough ride”
Imagine you were a casting director on a movie, and although you’d listened to Christian Bale have his famously sweary rant on the internet on the set of Terminator Salvation, you’d decided that was a long time ago, and he’d probably be OK as long as nobody walked into his line of vision. Who would be bottom of the list of other actors you’d pair with him?
Well, if you shouted ‘Russell Crowe!’ then that would be entirely understandable as a suggestion. Surely there can’t be two other leading men you’d be less likely to put together if you wanted a quiet film set without any volatility, with the possible exception of throwing Tom Hardy into the mix as well?
But back in 2007, that’s exactly what happened on a movie called 3:10 to Yuma, a throwback western on which the producers presumably hid anything breakable, strapped themselves in and decided to pitch Bale and Crowe head to head in a big-budget adaptation of an Elmore Leonard short story from the 1950s.
To be fair to them, at that point Bale had probably not displayed the combustibility for which he would later gain ‘do you want me to trash your lights’ notoriety, but Crowe certainly had.
The New Zealander had a fearsome reputation at the time after a string of temper-related bust-ups, like his 2002 row with a producer at the Baftas, a brawl in London restaurant Zuma the same year that had to be broken up by Ross Kemp of all people, and the 2005 incident in New York when he launched a telephone into a hotel concierge’s face and was promptly locked up by the ‘Big Apple’s’ finest.
Bale himself was well aware of what he might be getting himself into in doing the movie, and what he’d be facing in his co-star. He recalled working on the film, which also starred Hollywood legend Peter Fonda, to Collider, saying, “We’d never met before at all. Whenever people asked me what I was doing next, and I said I was going to be working with Russell, they kind of looked like (oh no), ‘You’re going to be in for a tough ride with him’.”
But miracles do happen, and it seems rather than flinging stuff about the place and screaming outlandish demands at cowering key grips, the pair actually got on very well, other than in the film, obviously, in which they wanted to shoot each other.
Bale added, “A lot of actors, they sort of complain and winge and do everything to avoid actually getting on with the work, you know, so it’s nice when you’re working with somebody like Russell where you can just get to the point, and you can have blunt conversations about the scenes, and it just makes it easy. He’s obviously, you don’t have to be told, he’s a bloody good actor, and it’s a pleasure to work with somebody as good as that.”
The film itself was a moderate hit on release, making a reasonable profit, but the production was not without issue; in fact, on the first day of filming, a horse ran straight into a camera vehicle, leaving the rider hospitalised and the animal having to be put down. Nevertheless, the movie scooped two Oscar nominations, although they were for music and sound mixing rather than any of the actors’ performances.
