STACK January 2016 Issue 135

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BY THE NUMBERS
W ho better to explain the 2008 financial
crisis than a naked Margot Robbie in a
bubble bath?
However, its Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Steve
Carell and Christian Bale who do the real heavy
lifting in The Big Short, making a comedy out
of the financial meltdown. Portraying real-life
investment fund manager Dr. Mike Burry, Bale
nailed every aspect of his personality, from
his obsession with numbers to his passion for
heavy metal drumming.
In real life, Bale hasn’t a clue about finances.
“I’m terrible with numbers, but a few years
back, I had to figure out some investments.
And I’m an actor, so I just pretended to be
somebody who adores numbers, and I would
go through and leave no page unturned, and I
actually did pretty bloody well with them. But it
didn’t last – I’m really somebody who couldn’t
be less interested in that world. Fortunately my
wife is very good at that kind of thing, so I leave
it to her.”
As ever, Bale relished
studying the real Dr. Burry.
“I love that part of the work.
You get to ask questions
and study people in a way
that you’d be considered a
creepy stalker under other
circumstances. We actually
sat together for about nine
hours; we didn’t get up from
Christian Bale learns the fine art of investment fund management
in the financial crash comedyTHE BIG SHORT.
our chairs, we just talked non-stop. And it was
fascinating, a really wonderful conversation, and
I liked his company a great deal.”
He did recognise some parallels between
himself and Burry. “In terms of brain capacity,
noooo. Not at all,” he smiles. “But what I
believe we share in common is that I do what I
do because I am obsessed with it, and I have a
passion and a love and a hate for it, and never
did I expect to really earn a living, let alone a
very good living at it, but it all came from that
motivation. And that’s what I see in Mike as
well; as opposed to a clichéd Wall Street guy
desperate for power and money, Mike came
at it from a point of view of an obsession with
numbers.”
The real Dr. Burry made a fortune for his
clients, despite the stress he endured when his
clients believed he was making a risky bet. “He
got very ill through that whole period, largely
because of some of these relationships where
people got furious at him, and even afterwards
when he had earned them a
fortune and he was proven
correct, they still remain
furious. It’s confusion beyond
belief. It really disillusioned
him,” says Bale. Gill Pringle
The Big Short
is in cinemas on Jan 21
visit EXTRAS NEWS
08 JANUARY 2016
EXTRAS
L uke Bracey can’t keep the grin off his
face as he chats with surf legend
Laird Hamilton, 51, his instructor on
the remake of action adventure movie
Point Break.
“To hang out with Laird and all these other
extreme sports legends was intimidating at
first,” says Bracey, 26. “People at the top of
their game in what they do – and what they do
is terribly exciting and terribly dangerous. I felt
very lucky to spend time in their company.”
Raised on Sydney’s North Beaches, he’s
looking forward to trying out some of his new
board moves when he returns home for the
holidays. “Not all the sports I learned for the
film came so naturally, like the rock climbing.
I did hours upon hours inside the gym but
then you get to Angel Falls and its 3000ft
off that ledge and they go, ‘Are you ready to
go over the edge, Luke?’ and you go, ‘Yup!’
And it really informs where you are, you can’t
fake that. As much as you can sit there and
visualise 3000ft, unless its actually there, you
don’t get that real sweat,” says Bracey, who
reprises the role of Johnny Utah first made
famous by Keanu Reeves 25 years ago.
Growing up, Point Break was one of his
favourite films. “It seemed to be on TV every
weekend during the '90s and me and every
single one of my mates can quote it from start
to finish.
“Being a surfer, it was a pretty seminal
film in my life. It’s all about going for it and
no cowards: Are we going to jump off this
thing or not? And I think it permeated how
we lived our lives when we went surfing – all
we wanted to do was surf a bigger wave. We
didn’t live in Hawaii so we didn’t get 40-footers
but when you’re ten years old and its eight
foot above you, it’s a bit bigger than you
thought it was from the beach. Point Break
represents a piece of my childhood that went
all the way through into adulthood until I got to
this position now.”
He received the audition notice while home
visiting family two years ago. “For the next
week, my friends and I lived our lives purely by
quotes from the original movie. My mum got
pretty sick of it after a while.” Gill Pringle
Point Break is in cinemas on Jan 1
SURF'S UP!