The teaming of Johnny Depp and Christian Bale may be this generation's equivalent of Heat, where Robert De Niro and Al Pacino first faced off. Like the previous Michael Mann film, Mann's Public Enemies also keeps the two stars mostly apart. Depp plays John Dillinger and Bale plays Melvin Purvis.

"We don't know each other in the slightest," said Bale. "I met him at the script read-through. We chatted for 5 or 10 minutes. Other than that, I had two scenes with him, one in which he's in a jail cell. I have a tendency, and it seemed like he was happy to do the same, I have at tendency to not really wish to talk unless we're doing the scene. I enjoy it that way.

"Then it just happened that the other scene we were doing we were about 200 feet away from each other, he was a silhouette in a window and I was shooting at him. I was behind a tree and he was shooting at me, and that was the closest we got that evening. I'll get to know Johnny somewhere down the track because it certainly didn't happen on the movie."

In his own role, Bale enjoyed the opportunity to delve into research in the era of the 1930s crime icons: "It's just a wonderful period in every way. The clothing, the cars, the guns even. It was sort of to me the last dying breath of the guns that seemed to have some sort of character to them. The ones we have nowadays are absolutely fatal and have incredible precision, much more so than the others, but these are the last ones where there's the kind of wood and I would actually like to smell it after wards and kind of enjoy carrying it around with me.

"The era is so fascinating as well in the conception of Hoover's idea of the bureau and the birth pangs of that, and how two apparently very similar characters, I'm talking now about Purvis and Hoover, people who admired each other so much, could, with both of them doing their job incredibly well, come to have such animosity between the two."

"Public Enemies" opens July 1.



See more photos of Christian here!




Image © PR Photos

Story/Interview by Fred Topel

Starpulse contributing writer

(Starpulse in Hollywood): Every week, Hollywood's biggest stars are meeting in the hot spots and Starpulse is there.

Click here to follow @Starpulse on Twitter!