A brief drive through Pittsburgh’s down-and-out steel mill borough of Braddock at the time of the economic downturn in 2009 was all it took, and Scott Cooper knew where he wanted to set his next film.
The problem: he didn’t have a story.
Now, the distillation of the time spent among Braddock’s working-class single-family homes and rusted-out iron furnaces has delivered the elements Cooper needed for Out of the Furnace – a tale of brothers and revenge starring Christian Bale and Casey Affleck.
“I was struck by how cinematic [it was] and how it dripped with atmosphere,” said Cooper of Braddock. The borough reached its economic peak in the 1950s and 1960s but went into a steep decline in the early 1980s, when the area’s major blast furnaces closed. Braddock has lost more than 80 per cent of its residents since 1960.
“I knew that I wanted to shoot a film here and I wrote it specifically for Braddock,” Cooper added.
Out of the Furnace tells the story of the steel mill worker Russell Baze (Bale) and his younger brother Rodney (Affleck), an Iraq War veteran haunted by his tours of duty, who would do anything to avoid working in the mills like his brother and father.
What struck Bale about the Russell character, a good man to whom bad things happen, was the change in Braddock’s fortune and how Russell was determined to stay despite the odds.
“It was someone who feels so connected to their own land,” said the Welsh-born Bale, a self-described rootless person who grew up in Europe and the US. “Even if something disastrous was to happen, they would rather stay there.”
The film – which also features Willem Dafoe, Woody Harrelson, Forest Whitaker and Sam Shepard – adds a working-class quality to the recent spate of Hollywood fare that touches on the social anxieties and financial insecurities wrought by the recession.
“I wanted to shine a light on what we, as Americans, were experiencing in these past five turbulent years: economic distress, fighting wars on two fronts and having those soldiers return, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and having a very difficult time assimilating back into life,” said Cooper, whose 2009 debut Crazy Heart earned a Best Actor Oscar for Jeff Bridges.
The methodical thriller is set in motion when the heavily in-debt Rodney becomes enmeshed in an underground boxing scene run by the local bookmaker John Petty (Dafoe).
But when Rodney and Petty disappear after a fight run by the diabolical New Jersey drug dealer Harlan DeGroat (Harrelson), Russell takes matters into his own hands to find DeGroat as police drag their heels in pursuit of the hillbilly kingpin.
Bale said he was unable to shake the story of Russell avenging the loss of his brother from his mind after he read the script.
“He’s a man of incredible stoicism and patience … who, when everything is lost, allows these impulses to come through that he had always had,” the actor said.
But it was also Braddock, its boarded-up houses and vacant lots, seeking its own retribution to lost jobs and lost hope that resonated with Bale.
“Something about the extreme change of fortune in the town,” he said. “The notion of globalisation and outsourcing of the American heartland and manufacturing, and this character who stayed.”
Out of the Furnace is out now in UAE cinemas
