Counting Crowe

Russell Crowe says he is first and foremost an actor not a Hollywood film star. Larry Schwartz reports.

BETWEEN films, Russell Crowe is a singer in a rock ‘n’ roll band called 30 Foot of Grunts. Their new single has the line: “The photograph kills and your fame will destroy you”. No wonder he’s taken his time making it big.

Biggish, that is. Just when the 31-year-old New Zealand- born actor has finally tasted some of the international success critics have been predicting for years, he lets you know he has no illusions that this is the big time.

He may be getting roles in movies alongside the likes of Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman or Denzel Washington, but says: “It’s very hard for me to explain to people over here that I’m not a movie star in America, you know, I’m an actor.

“Certainly I’m very lucky in that I’ve worked myself into a position where I get the same scripts as quite an elite group of movie stars. But they are not offers to me. The only time I get a job is when all these movie stars are distracted and not looking in the right direction.”
In town to promote `Virtuosity’, in which he co-stars with Washington and Kelly Lynch, Crowe mouthed a gruff, American- inflected Strine.

In polar-bear festooned flannel shirt, he looked more Beat bohemian than the sleek, computer-generated killer he plays in the new movie. He was lank-haired and partly bearded. Crowe removed his oval shades and smoked another cigarette. And spoke. And spoke.

In the not-so-futuristic `Virtuosity’ (set in 1999), Crowe plays Sid 6.7, a composite of 183 of the worst criminals ever created by Los Angeles law enforcement authorities as an ultimate training device. Sid is the villain police using a virtual reality simulator come up against to test their skills.

But he becomes more knowing than intended and devises a way to escape the boundaries of cyberspace. In a riveting film that extends a well-worn cinematic structure while exploring the worst-case scenario for technological advance, Sid wreaks havoc in a gleeful killing spree. Crowe revels in the role.

To track him, authorities release a prisoner, an ex-policeman played by Denzel Washington, in jail for murder.

Tensions are heightened when Washington’s character, Parker Barnes, discovers that one of Sid’s 6.7’s components is the man who had killed his wife and daughter. A man for whose killing he himself has been jailed. The deal is early release if he stops Sid.

Director Brett Leonard (`The Lawnmower Man’, `Hideaway’) had seen Crowe play the neo-Nazi skinhead leader, Hando, in `Romper Stomper’ and suggested he play Barnes. The Australian actor preferred the part of the villain.

Once a big-name star, Washington, had come on board, a modest $14 million film became a bigger budget $40 million venture and Crowe’s chances of playing Sid diminished. Leonard had to fight hard to get permission to keep the relatively unknown Crowe in such a prominent role.

“It took him seven months to convince the studio that I should play the role,” Crowe says. “He had two or three meetings a week where they would put a sheet in front of him with five blank spaces on it and say, `just write your top five’. He would write my name five times and hand it back to them.”
Finally, as he disembarked from a flight to New Zealand last Christmas Eve, he took a call from Leonard to say he had the role. “Which made Christmas pretty cool,” he grins, “thanks Santa”.

Despite his own success and that of the established stars of the calibre and appeal of Nicole Kidman and Mel Gibson, Crowe says Australian actors are not held in high regard in the US.

“You bump into a lot of Australians in LA who I call Lotto- ticket buyers. They think that even without achieving anything here, they should go sit there and wait and one day, just like Marilyn, they might win the lottery.”
Inundated with offers from American agents impressed after seeing him in `Proof’ in Cannes in 1991, he had decided to remain in Australia until he had what he considered to be a solid body of work.

“It was years before I actually got a job in America when I got a job she was the big one.” He laughs at this.

RUSSELL Crowe has had a long involvement with the entertainment industry. His parents were caterers on film sets and he travelled with them to locations from Narrabeen to Patonga and beyond.

He was never the awed observer, he was acting as a child.

“I was never a child star. I never had a lead role. I was an extra. I’d do the odd line of dialogue every now and then.

” He first acted with Jack Thompson in `Spyforce’, then joined him 23 years later as the gay son in `The Sum of Us’.”
He has played opposite Sharon Stone and Gene Hackman in `The Quick and the Dead’. Forthcoming films include `Rough Magic’, with Bridget Fonda, and `No Way Back’ with Michael Lerner.

Was `Virtuosity’ a big moment? “To me it was nowhere near as significant as getting `Proof’ or even `The Crossing’.”
The audition for the latter was the toughest he’s endured.

“George Ogilvie sat 16 young people in a room eight girls and eight guys and said, `It’s 9 o’clock in the morning at the end of the day around about 5 o’clock, I’m going to know who’s going to play the lead role in my film’. ” Through the long day, they acted and acted, at one point required to ad lib; another read “a set of dialogue which was just ridiculous. It was about apples and something and we had to do it in umpteen ways”.

By the end of the day, Crowe’s head was aching and he was torturing himself with misgivings about his efforts. “I get home and I get a phone call and it’s George and he says to me `I think you have a great career in the cinema ahead of you. Which role would you like to play?’ ” This then was the big moment. “I started in the business at six and I didn’t get that role in `The Crossing’ until I was 26. So in between, even though I was working continuously in the theatre, that represents thousands of failed auditions for movies. It was just a huge thing.”
Crowe received an AFI nomination as best actor for `The Crossing’ and went on to win the best supporting acting award for `Proof’ and best actor for `Romper Stomper’.

Denying elitism, he nevertheless distinguishes between films (“entertainment that engages you emotionally and intellectually”) and movies (“a bit of entertainment”).

“You go into something like Sid knowing that you’re going to make a movie and you’ve got to be big and flashy and broad with what you do.”
Yet you sense a teeny bit of snobbery when he tells of a disclosure by director Robert Greenwald while filming a yet- to-be-released film called `Breaking Up’ that he had also made `Xanadu’. “I’m sitting there going, `Wow, Man! How did I get on to this set?’ ” So much depends on the director. “Everytime you do a movie it’s a total leap of faith, totally . . . I didn’t know that (`Romper Stomper’ director) Geoff Wright was going to be the genius and the kinetic energy centre that he turned out to be,” says Crowe.

CROWE, who played the leader of a group of Neo-Nazi skinheads in `Romper Stomper’, speaks passionately against critics who have questioned its portrayal of violence and bigotry.

“What Geoffrey was doing was illustrating an ugly part of our society,” Crowe says. “He didn’t begin it. The spotlight was turned on to an area of our psychology that exists. Luckily we live in a society that’s open enough to still have that sort of discussion.

“Now you know not everyone who walks on Terra Australis has a balanced and opened mind. But hopefully the majority do and hopefully we can keep being an open society and still keep examining ourselves . . .”
The film is also generally credited with winning him a part in `The Quick and the Dead’. But he says that he has heard otherwise that Sharon Stone had approached him on the basis of newspaper photographs.

“I know for a fact that she hadn’t seen a whole film of mine. She only saw 20 minutes of `Romper Stomper’ and rang me up and said, `Look, I know you’re very good and very powerful and everything but I can’t watch that because it’s making me sick’.”
He found Hackman more difficult. “He’s a very hard man, ” Crowe says, “hard in that he has spent his life working in an industry full of liars and bullshit artists. It takes a lot of effort for him to focus on you as an actual individual.

He doesn’t give you any space at all . . .”
Midway through our conversation, he was talking about the many tests an actor must achieve in beating others to roles.

Later, he stopped and gestured at the notebook. “I notice you jumped up on the (word) `victories’ there. Why?”
He wanted me to understand the precariousness of a career where, however much the fanfare, there was never a guarantee of the next job. “It still takes only 45 minutes after I have shot the last thing on a film for it to go through my mind `Will I ever work again?’ ” he says.

“It just happens. I can’t help it. I’m a working-class boy.”

THE SUNDAY AGE, 17-Dec-1995