Academy Award-nominated director David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook, Joy) has a reputation for being a hot head on sets; he and George Clooney reportedly got into a physical altercation on the set of Three Kings, and that’s just one of the stories. Amid reports of his other controversial behavior (his niece accused the filmmaker of sexually assaulting her in 2011), one of his frequent collaborators, Christian Bale, has opened up about the difficulty of working with him on set, revealing he even had to step-in and mediate between he and Amy Adams. Speaking withย GQ, Bale opened up about how this went down on the set of American Hustle, alluding to his own head-butting with the filmmaker.
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“I genuinely love the films that David and I have made, you know what I mean?” Bale revealed. “It’s the process of doing that because I’ve got no control over the rest of it. So it’s the process with David. Even though we’re not always having what people would term a pleasant day, but we both are absolutely there knowing that we’re totally clued into each other. And so we’re either sort of running down the beach, hugging, or it’s just not talking for weeks on end….If I can have some sense of understanding of where it’s coming from, then I do tend to attempt to be a mediator. That’s just in my nature, to try to say, ‘Hey, come on, let’s go and sit down and figure that out. There’s gotta be a way of making this all work.’”
From there the interviewer brought up how Bale’s co-star Amy Adams had been vocal about not having a good time on the set of that film, bringing up reports that Bale intervened between she and David O’Russell on the set, or as Bale puts his role in it all: “Mediator.”
He continues, “You’re dealing with two such incredible talents there. No, I don’t let that get in the way whatsoever. Look, if I feel like we got anywhere close-and you only ever get somewhere close to achieving; our imagination is too incredible to ever entirely achieve it-but if you get anywhere close to it, and when you’re working with people of the crazy creative talent of Amy or of David, there are gonna be upsets. But they are fucking phenomenal. Also, you got to remember, it was the nature of the characters as well. Right? Those characters were not people who back down from anything, right?”
Bale reunited with O. Russell for his next movie, the upcoming Fox Searchlight release Amsterdam. Adams does not appear in the film.
