The Terminator Salvation star says that he 'takes the consequences' for his infamous on-set rant, but hits out at crew members for recording it

Christian Bale has attempted to explain the on-set outburst that turned him from star of the new Terminator movie into a byword for Hollywood egotism. Sadly, in so doing, he may only have made things worse.

Now engaged in promoting Terminator Salvation, due for release in the UK on 3 June, Bale told Total Film magazine that he "takes the consequences" for what he did on the film's set, but criticised crew members for recording the verbal assault on director of photography Shane Hurlbut, claiming it violated an "essential trust" .

"Hey, I did what I did. I'm not hiding from that," Bale said. "I went overboard. But there is an essential trust and it's not a tacit one, it's a verbal one, a spoken one, which is [that] every sound guy says, 'We are not only not recording, we're not even listening.'"

That Bale has a clear idea of how he expects crew members to behave will be clear to anyone who has heard his nigh-on four-minute-long shouting spree in which Hurlbut was lambasted for walking "a da da da dah" behind Bale while he was "in a scene".

Bale also has clear ideas about how much on-set activity the general public should be allowed to know about. In general, it's not a lot.

"It's not in anyone's interest to know that much ... I understand people are interested, I get that they want to hear about it, but to me I look at it as old-school movie magic and with magic you do not reveal your secrets.

"You really make people work to find those secrets and generally you just reveal it to people who are going to join your fucking magic circle and then you know about it. And you know, for me, I've never been comfortable with the revealing of those mysteries which I think are wonderful mysteries," he explained.

Bale will now be hoping that no more wonderful mysteries are exposed in the run-up to the release of the latest instalment in the Terminator franchise. Not that Bale likes the term franchise either. "Franchise just sounds so money-minded," he told Total Film. "McDonald's is a franchise." He would prefer people to call it the Terminator "mythology".

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