Christian Bale is the man in the mask for the new Batman movie.

Christian Bale is the man in the mask for the new Batman movie.

Christian Bale is about to swoop into cinemas as the Caped Crusader in Batman Begins. But little over a year ago, he wondered if he even had a career.

"I wasn’t in demand," he recalls. His last memorable role had been as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, way back in 2000. Since then, he’d been filling his CV with mediocre fare that included Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Shaft, Reign of Fire and Equilibrium.

Personally disappointed by some of his recent work, he was trying to raise his game. But he needed the right material and didn’t like anything he was being offered. Though time was not on his side, he was determined to hang on. "I needed money because I had just bought a house, but I just kept saying, ‘I really can’t do another movie that I know is not going to turn out the way I want it to, and that I have to make a lot of concessions in my head for."‘

Bale attributes some of his mistakes to his risk-taking approach to work. However, not everyone has the same idea of what constitutes a risk. While American Psycho was presented to him as one, he says he never saw it that way; same with Velvet Goldmine, Todd Haynes’ esoteric take on the 70s British glam rock scene.

"These are films I love," he enthuses. "For me, there’s a bigger risk trying Batman. Ultimately, the big point was that Chris Nolan [Memento], who you would not expect to be doing that kind of movie, was going to direct it, which is exactly what I was looking for, because you want to do something totally different from the other Batman movies.

"I always thought there could be a really good movie made about Batman and when I heard that Chris was doing it I thought, ‘Well, he’s not a director that you would expect, therefore you’re going to get the unexpected from him.’

"I think there’s a great potential for going very dark with it, it’s a fascinating character, very complex psychologically, which I’ve never seen done. You know, you have the two extremes, which are both very good. You can either go the very camp Adam West TV series thing, which was great in its own way, or you can go more the way of the graphic Dark Knight novels which delve somewhat deeper."

It was not the man in the rubber batsuit that rescued Bale, though, but a skinny lathe operator named Trevor Reznik, and a little existential thriller called The Machinist. When he read Scott Kosar’s script, Bale felt he had finally found something he could throw himself into, body and soul. Actually, he would throw a lot of his body out, shedding an incredible 28kg in order to transform his 1.9m frame into the living skeleton that Reznik, the film’s haunted protagonist, has become after suffering insomnia for a year. The film arrived not a moment too soon.