When Christian Bale was 13 he travelled to China to make his first film, Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987). The adaptation of JG Ballard’s book about life in Japan-occupied China during the second world war was shot in Shanghai. It’s an experience the 37-year-old Bale now finds difficult to relate to. “It was so long ago,” he says, sitting back in his seat in a Beverly Hills hotel. “I feel like it was a different person who made that movie.”
Bale, born in Wales to English parents, has gone on to become one of Hollywood’s most sought-after actors. His career includes challenging films such as American Psycho (2000) and The Machinist (2004), as well as an Oscar-winning performance in The Fighter (2010). Next summer he reprises the role of Batman in The Dark Knight Rises, the final instalment in Christopher Nolan’s phenomenally successful trilogy. No grand strategy underpins the jobs he takes. Actors, he says, “don’t really have the ability to plan everything they do”.
With this in mind, there is something apt about his latest film, Zhang Yimou’s The Flowers of War, in which Bale’s career comes full circle. The production took the actor back to China for the first time since Empire of the Sun but this time the setting is Nanking in 1937. The flowers of the title are a group of women and girls who, aided by Bale’s character, try to survive the brutal treatment of occupying Japanese soldiers.