by MATTHEW HAYS

By and large, it's an actor gaining weight for a role that gets attention. It's just seen as so dang gutsy for a movie star, in the town where Cher once famously argued no one could ever be too thin. Renée Zellweger is called courageous and committed to her craft for putting on the pudding for the Bridget Jones sequel. De Niro, perhaps most famously, gained believability as an ageing Jake LaMotta, getting thicker as he grew older in Raging Bull. It even works in documentary; Morgan Spurlock pulled off a stunt of Michael Moore proportions when he put on 30 pounds in his anti-fast-food tome, Super Size Me.

Given this, it's even more jarring to watch as the stunning and talented Christian Bale peels off some clothing in The Machinist, his latest film. Underneath his shirt, we see what seems to be very little holding skin to bone; indeed, to commit to screenwriter Scott Kosar's disturbing script - with nods to Kafka and Dostoevsky - Bale went on a gruelling diet of no more than a tin of tuna and an apple a day. The actor lost a third of his weight - dropping from 190 to 130 lbs. - giving him a creepy skeletal quality. Some have already charged Bale and the film with using this bit of near starvation as a visual stunt, saying it evokes images of genocide and thus somehow enters the realm of the exploitative and unethical.

Not so, says the director behind The Machinist, the New York-based Brad Anderson (Session 9). "Christian's performance is so much more than just his weight loss," says Anderson. "On the one hand, it's not just a stunt. On the other, we did want his appearance to be shocking. The script does call for the character to be like a walking skeleton, and Christian was responding to that. From the moment you see him on screen, the audience knows something terrible has happened. But in terms of the experience for him, Christian actually described being that thin as euphoric. He didn't have a lot of energy, but he said he was in a Zen-like state while on the set."

Anderson adds that, if anything, Bale's post-Machinist weight gain, of about 60 pounds in three months, was probably more dangerous - but the actor had to beef up for his leading turn in Christopher Nolan's prequel, Batman Begins.

A Russian hue done it

Audiences certainly won't find themselves in a Zen-like mood while sitting through The Machinist. In the movie, Bale plays a factory worker who is racked with paranoia about the people around him. In true Russian-novel form, his suspicions about his co-workers, lovers and landlady grow, with dire consequences. It's a terrifically dark descent into madness, and one can see Bale throwing himself into the role, perhaps a bit too deeply.

Anderson captures the coal-black essence of the film magnificently. There are no bright colours, only shadowy hues of brown and grey. "I didn't want to hold back," Anderson confirms. "It's about pathological characters, after all. It's not a typical horror movie, in that it really doesn't conform to the genre rules. And though some have called it a thriller, I don't think it's that either. So many horror movies now seem to be comedies dressed up with the odd scary bits. I didn't want to simply shock with the film, but rather build the sense of dread. I thought of films like Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby and Repulsion, as well as Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now."

As well as squeezing all the sex appeal out of Bale, Anderson was also left with the daunting task of making his location, Barcelona, look like industrial-wasteland L.A. "Yes, this film was about seeking out the uglier side of things. We were having trouble finding financing in the U.S., but Session 9 had done extremely well in Spain. So a production company wanted to come on board, but we had to shoot in Barcelona. It's a beautiful city, full of incredible architecture, but basically, almost anywhere in the world now, all you have to do is drive and you can find industrial ugliness. After that it was just a matter of changing the signs and finding huge gas-guzzling cars like so many people drive in the States.

"Shooting in Barcelona, though a challenge, gives the film an added dimension. We were trying to create America in a foreign place, so there's a sense of it all being eerily generic, of being placeless, timeless. It was a perfect reflection of a person who is paranoid about his attachment to the world."

The Machinist opens Friday, Nov. 19

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