Who is Trevor Reznik?: An Introduction
"One day, I had this image of a sleepless, intensely private individual trapped in his own personal hell," recalls screenwriter Scott Kosar (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Amityville Horror).  "Meanwhile, there is an area in my neighborhood that I always found poetically desolate - an industrial park lined by railroad tracks.  Passing a machine shop, I looked inside and saw workers laboring at their tasks like extensions of their machines. I had to wonder what stories were cooking behind all that protective headgear and those greasy coveralls.  Suddenly these two ideas collided and left me with a question: do machinists have existential crises?"
That query kicked off Kosar's own dive into the dark, swirling abyss of THE MACHINIST and its thematic meditations on identity, guilt, loss and knowledge. It was a frightening process even for the writer, but fortunately, he had some support along the way, looking to other artists who had gone down similar roads.  "Some of my strongest influences include Roman Polanski's The Tenant and Wim Wenders' The American Friend," says Kosar, referring to Polanski's surreal psychological thriller about a man who believes his landlord and neighbors are trying to drive him insane; and Wenders' tale about an ordinary man's descent into a nightmare world when he is recruited as a killer - both richly metaphorical works that pit one man against a seemingly out-of-control outer world. 
The story of THE MACHINIST turns the very nature of fright inside out, and exposes its inner workings, drop by drop, bit by bit, until a startling mystery is solved.  Joining a tradition of psychologically probing thrillers such as Vertigo, Repulsion, Peeping Tom and Memento, this dreamlike story of a man's waking nightmare is not so much about external events - though it has its physical thrills - but the far more shocking and unsettling horrors that can boil over inside a man's own fragile mind.   
Directed by Brad Anderson (Next Stop Wonderland, Happy Accidents and the cult hit Session 9) THE MACHINIST  drops the film audience directly into the reality (or is it?) of a man who appears to be losing his mind.  At the center of this uncanny world is Trevor Reznik, portrayed by a physically transformed Christian Bale, who has been suffering from an insidious form of ceaseless insomnia for a year.  His nerves frayed, his body so gaunt he is accused by those around him of starting to disappear, it is all Trevor can do to make it to his job each day, toiling away in a grim, gray, dangerous machine shop where saw blades chatter rhythmically, men wear iron masks and electrical sparks are always flying through the air.
"THE MACHINIST is one of those classic stories in which a man goes out on a quest to solve a troubling mystery that ultimately leads right back to himself," says Anderson.  "I wanted to tell Trevor's story in such a way that it would bring the audience directly into his head, and give them a glimpse of the nightmarish way he perceives his world."
This is no place to be hallucinating, but Trevor Reznik cannot necessarily trust his own bleary eyes anymore.  When he meets a new worker at the shop, the brutal-looking, bald-headed Ivan (John Sharian), the man appears to come and go at will.  It is while staring at his frightening new acquaintance, that Trevor makes an unforgivable mistake, resulting in a gruesome accident befalling his co-worker Miller (Michael Ironside). Despite his protestations, Trevor is clearly to blame for Miller's career-ending amputation. 
Trevor's private hell now deepens.  Ostracized by his fellow workers, eaten away by a devastating guilt, and increasingly paranoid that someone will try to exact revenge for his error, Trevor begins to suspect that nothing that has happened to him is a coincidence.  Someone is clearly behind these terrible events, causing them to unfold, someone who wants to harm him, someone who has been leaving him mysterious notes, including an unnerving Hangman game that seems to taunt him, on his refrigerator door.
No one is exempt from Trevor's suspicion.  The only two people Trevor trusts are a gritty call-girl (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who has fallen in love with him, and an alluring waitress and single mom (Spanish actress Aitana Sanchez-Gijon) with whom he carries on an almost fairy-tale romance, even as his life disintegrates. 
Yet even when they begin to threaten him - with talk of mysterious exes and private phone calls that only stoke the flames of his apprehension - Trevor finds himself alone, hunted, without options.  He loses his job, and all hope of love.  He becomes obsessed with cleanliness, obsessively bleaching the floors and washing his hands with lye.  Desperate for a rest, for a peace he simply cannot find, he is no longer sure what is up, what is down, what is real and what is imagined.  All has turned to sheer madness.
It seems there is no way out of his spiraling descent, until Trevor uncovers a hint that is perhaps the key to what is happening to him. It lies not among the suspects he has been investigating, but is buried in his disquieted psyche.

Mystery, Paranoia, Urgency:  About the Film's Creation
At the heart of THE MACHINIST's wild ride through a man's ultimate nightmare is the idea that memory is the worst treachery. For Scott Kosar, the nightmare world of THE MACHINIST was born from his own personal struggles with grief and memory - and spiraled outward, becoming an inquiry into the very question of whether hell exists or is simply a place we create in our own heads.  Kosar's haunting first vision of Trevor Reznik came to him while he was attending the Graduate Screenwriting Program at UCLA and looking for screenplay ideas.  At the time, Kosar was still reeling from his mother's death the year before, and knew whatever he next wrote, it had to, as he says,  "be completely from the gut, dealing with the grief and loneliness I was feeling."  Yet, he was unprepared for the full impact of the character that came to him.  "Something about those films spoke to me like soul mates," continues Kosar.  "Dostoyevsky's The Double was another powerful influence, with its story about a man who is psychologically unhinged by encountering his double.  These works were the thematic ancestors of the story I wanted to create, rife with obsessions, unpredictability and doubt.  And stylistically I envisioned THE MACHINIST as 'the last Hitchcock film ever made.'" 
To assure that the film would stand up stylistically to its carefully crafted structure and telescoping themes, Kosar's script ended up in the hands of Brad Anderson, a young director who first came to attention with the romantic comedy Next Stop Wonderland.  Since then, however, Anderson has been exploring his life-long interest in one of American film's most daring genres:  psychological thrillers and horror films, from the B-movie shockers to the sleek, sleep-interrupting classics. For Anderson, THE MACHINIST seemed to present an extraordinary tale from which to explore the very edges of the form, a story that would cause audiences' minds to race at the same feverish pace as the main character.  It was also his first chance to direct something written by somebody else, focusing purely on the visual storytelling. 
Anderson explains,  "The film's style and structure aren't meant to be gimmicky.  Rather, I felt this was the best way to tell this story in which you have a man whose conscience is literally consuming him alive, yet he's not even aware of the crime he's committed.  This sense of mystery, lack of knowledge, paranoia and urgency to understand had to permeate every moment of the film the same way they permeate every moment of Trevor's existence."   
Anderson and Kosar were committed to making the film exactly as it was written, without compromise.  Yet when they first brought the completed script to various Hollywood producers the main response was (somewhat ironically) fear.  "People didn't know what to make of it.  They were drawn to it, but many felt it was too bleak. Some wanted to lighten it up," recalls Anderson.   "I didn't want to do that.  I was looking to tell the story the way Scott had written it."
To find the financing, Anderson kept going farther afield, ultimately finding what he was seeking in Spain, which not only has a dynamic and burgeoning film community, but is the center of a new renaissance of sophisticated, layered horror films, such as Alejandro Amenabar's The Others.  The atmosphere of support and artistic openness in Spain's film industry allowed the filmmaker to go places rarely seen in American films.  In Barcelona, Anderson found himself collaborating with Julio Fernandez, Carlos Fernandez and Antonia Nava of Filmax International, one of Spain's leading film production companies, which has a reputation for innovation. 
Filmax immediately saw THE MACHINIST as an exciting project right up their alley, albeit a dark alley.  "It is a film that we could really see making in Spain but that would be universal in its interest to audiences," says Carlos Fernandez.  "We also truly believed in Brad's visual abilities to tell this complex story, and felt that he could bring the movie to life just as we had all imagined it." 
Indeed, as Anderson now prepared in earnest to make THE MACHINIST, it became clear that his task was to turn a man's most secret and troubled imagination into an actual cinematic world.

An Actor Willing To Disappear:  Christian Bale and the Cast of THE MACHINIST
The first and most essential mission was to find the film's Trevor Reznik, and it was no easy task.  Brad Anderson knew he needed something nearly impossible to find:  more than just a performance from a talented actor, but a total immersion into the physical and psychological dissolution of Reznik as he fades from the inside out.  The question remained, how many actors would be willing to go that far for a role? 
Anderson discovered the intensity and commitment he was searching for in popular young star Christian Bale (American Psycho), who lost an astonishing 63 pounds off his already fit frame in preparation for the film, in a process of severe asceticism that gave both the actor and everyone around him an unexpected scare. 
"When I first wrote the character, I assumed Trevor's shocking weight loss would be done with CGI or cleverly designed costumes," admits screenwriter Kosar.  "Never in my wildest dreams did I think an actor would go so far as to actually starve himself.  But Christian Bale made an astonishing transformation, at great personal risk, to properly capture the horror of Trevor's life.  His commitment to the film was as breathtaking as his portrait." 
Adds Brad Anderson:  "In Scott's script, Trevor is described as a walking skeleton but Christian went well beyond the call of duty realizing this character. I could make a whole other movie on the subject of guilt just from my experience of watching this man reduce himself to 120 pounds.
Yet Bale simply sees the physical metamorphosis as what he had to do to truly inhabit Trevor Reznik.  "I've always admired the idea of total immersion," he says.  "But I don't believe in doing it just for the sake of doing it.  You do it in the service of telling a great story, and THE MACHINIST called for behavior at the human extreme. I had to go there to understand this character.  It also really helped me to portray Trevor, because when you're that skinny, you don't have any energy.  You're exhausted by just walking a few feet across the room, and I think I was able to authentically convey that this is the state in which Trevor is maneuvering through a very dangerous world."  (Asked about his diet for the film, Bale simply says:  "I didn't eat; that was it.")
Bale was drawn to the character of Reznik because he is a man stripped to the barest bones, not just in his appearance, but also in his everyday life.  Nothing is really left for Trevor but the ringing, unceasing questions of "who are you?" and "what have you done?"  He has little in the way of furniture, friends, hobbies, and the usual means of identity in our society, and eventually he loses his job, companionship and even his hold on reality. For most of the film, he is a literal bag of bones desperately floating through empty apartments and industrial landscapes, a kind of postmodern ghost looking to make its peace. 
"Trevor is imprisoned in his own mind," observes Bale.  "He's consumed with anxiety and lives with this intense fear that something awful is always just about to happen.  He fears he's the butt of some great cosmic joke.  It's a terrifying place to be but I think we all have been there to a certain degree.  We all know just how powerful a combination sleep deprivation and suppressed emotion can be.  It takes him to places that are terrifying and monstrous, but also incredibly revealing." 
For Bale, becoming Trevor Reznik was filled with travails but also a sense of triumph.  "Ultimately, the role felt like a victory because I did really succeed in evaporating my physical body and stripping myself down to the point that I was sort of 'the man who wasn't there.'  It left very little to explore except the world of the innermost soul. Ultimately, I feel it was a movie worth suffering for, because it's exactly the kind of challenging, mind-bending movie I would really want to see." 
Although Trevor Reznik is increasingly alienated from the real world, he does for a time maintain a few relationships, albeit unconventional ones.  His strongest human connection is with Stevie, a street-smart call girl who calls him "my best customer," which does not necessarily bode well for her business.  Playing Stevie is one of independent film's most consistently surprising actresses, Jennifer Jason Leigh, who has played a vast range of characters, from junkies to sophisticates, in her prodigious career.
Brad Anderson always saw Leigh in the role.  "She has that certain vulnerable quality," he muses, "and she has always been at her best when she's exposing the most tortured, fragile souls.  I thought of her and knew she could get right to the heart of the character of Stevie." 
Part of the attraction for Leigh was working with Christian Bale, and watching him take on the role of a lifetime.  "Everyday, I was astonished by him," says Leigh.  "I think Trevor Reznik is really a classic character because he sees the world the way we all do when we don't sleep and everything is slightly altered and off-kilter.  It's a really fascinating human study.  Meanwhile, I think Stevie is interesting because she's a touchstone for Trevor.  She gives him one of the few places he can relax at all.  At least for a little while, because in the end, there is no rest for Trevor." 
The counterpoint to Jennifer Jason Leigh's Stevie is the airport waitress Marie played by Spanish actress Aitana Sanchez-Gijon (I am Not Scared).  Stevie and Marie are as night and day, although in Trevor's addled state it is hard to say which is which.  Whereas Stevie is tough, war-weary and raw, Marie is enchanting, sweet, and to use a word Trevor applies, dreamy. Yet there is always something a little too perfect about Marie, as if something so beautiful and bright could not possibly fit into Trevor's dark reality. 
Brad Anderson had first seen Sanchez-Gijon in one of her earlier English-speaking roles:  Alfonso Arau's A Walk in the Clouds, in which she starred with Keanu Reeves.  "I thought she was very good and also very endearing, which is the quality I wanted most for Marie.  With Aitana, you can really understand why Trevor would go out of his way to come to this same café every night at the same time for the same coffee and pie: because he gets to see something so lovely, so radiant." 
To Aitana Sanchez-Gijon, having a foreign actress play the part - a part that is also a primary clue in the film's psychological mystery - was a great idea.  "Of course, the film is made in Spain so it's good to have a Spanish actress," she says, "but it is more than that.  I think speaking in a language that is not your own changes things in an interesting way.  The way you move, the way you express yourself, it's all a little bit different.  And in this case, I think it adds to the sense that Marie is part of a dream, something easy that Trevor cannot really have." 
Rounding out the cast as Trevor's workmates is a group of actors that includes Michael Ironside (Scanners, Top Gun), often cast as the tough-guy villain, but here playing the ill-fated Miller, whose traumatic amputation haunts Trevor's every move; and John Sharian as Ivan, the mysterious, menacing rebel who seems to show up in Trevor's life at all the worst moments. 
Yet perhaps the film's most pervasive and revealing character is the visual atmosphere itself.

The Look of Inner Fear:  Creating Trevor Reznik's World
Music That Enters the Psyche:  Roque Banos' Score
Insomnia:  What it Really Does
Brad Anderson  (Director)
Scott Kosar  (Screenwriter)