“I don’t analyze myself, or what people think about me,” Christian Bale says, pretty much any time any conversation with him even hints at turning “personal.” He doesn’t

know how much his profile changed after he landed the lead in the Batman/Dark Knight movies. He can’t say if his actor’s actor reputation was burnished by adding an Oscar (for “The Fighter”) to his mantle. He isn’t self-reflective that way.

“From my own experience of watching movies, I don’t want to know too much about how it was made or much about the person acting in it,” he explains. “It depresses the [bleep] out of me to get into an actor’s head. Completely unnecessary. It’s a distraction, a thorn in the side of any performance.”

He doesn’t want filmgoers thinking about this bit of gossip or that snippet of viral audio about him. Obliterate his brooding take on The Dark Knight from your memory. He wants us to attempt what he himself shoots for, with every new film — to think about only “the work.”

And after his raw, moving and yet bemused Oscar-winning turn in “The Fighter,” maybe that’s his due.

The great directors, from Terrence Malick (“A New World” to Werner Herzog (Rescue Dawn”), Christopher Nolan (“The Dark Knight”) to David O. Russell (“The Fighter”) have long been eager to get his attention and land him as their lead, even before “The Dark Knight” movies put him in the ranks of Hollywood’s elite leading men. And now that he’s in that top tier, he’s more than happy to let them use his name to get their visions on the screen. He has become that “rare…bankable star” willing to help get a movie made, as New York Observer critic Red Reed put it.

It’s how Bale came to star in his latest film, by the great Chinese director Zhang Yimou. “The Flowers of War” is set against the Rape of Nanking, the murderous, weeks-long rampage that Japanese soldiers went on after capturing the capital of China in 1937.

“The event was well-documented by Westerners who were there at the time, people supposedly safe in the international zone of the city,” Bale says. “I wasn’t going to play one of the real people — John Rabe, Minnie Vautrin, the missionary John Magee — who wrote the famous accounts of this massacre. But when Zhang Yiimou reached out to me, he said he wanted to acknowledge those Westerners in his movie. But plainly, in a practical sense, in wanting to relay this story to the rest of the world, engage the rest of the world, he wanted a Western face near the center of his movie. So I was a practical consideration, too, and happy to be one.”

Bale put a Western face on the front of a $100 million Chinese production, a film whose sets were built “out of concrete — they’ll last 100 years” — outside of present day Nanking. He would work with a director who speaks little English on a huge production in a foreign land, “because why wouldn’t you make a movie that’s something of an adventure?”

The English actor, who turns 38 on Jan. 30, got the sense, working with the mostly-Chinese cast and crew, “that this story is something that carries great poignancy for many Chinese. And the fact that it is surprisingly little known in the outside world, the States, bothers them.” He had heard of the Rape of Nanjing and had even read Iris Chang’s best-seller about the atrocity, in which as many as 200,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were murdered, and as many as 80,000 women and children raped by the Japanese Army. Bale was drawn to the idea that a down-on-his-luck American, a cynical, hard-drinking mortician, could be moved by what he saw to act out of character and try to help a convent school full of young girls escape the horror.
“The phenomenal thing about human nature is how surprising we can be, how we can surprise ourselves by being that person who will stand up and be counted,” he says. “You can’t simply predict it based on who a person has been. It’s not often clear who that will be. I wanted to be able to play around with this idea that the movie’s story is told through the eyes of Shu [Zhang Xinyi ], the twelve year old convent girl. She’s seeing my character through her eyes, and sees who I was and who I become.”

True to his nature, Bale pays no heed to reviews — notices for “The Flowers of War” have been mixed. And he won’t confess to any “grand strategy,” to collect credits from as many of the world’s greatest filmmakers as possible.

“You either enjoy getting to work with people you’ve had a good experience with in the past, or you get to enjoy having a whole new experience with someone you admire and have a great deal of respect for,” Bale says. No, he wasn’t revisiting his childhood (He starred in Steven Spielberg’s Chinese-set WWII drama “Empire of the Sun” when he was 13). No, he didn’t do it “just the see the country. But you know, all those things played into this — liking the story, admiring the director of ‘Raise the Red Lantern,’ making a big budget picture in China with a Chinese cast and crew, and being intrigued by the adventure of it all. It’s not every movie that offers an actor all that.”