December 6

Source: The Daily Mirror

December 6, 2000

Exclusive: Why Russell Crowe's female fans needn't panic yet
By John Hiscock

Los Angeles - Gladiator star Russell Crowe is Hollywood's testosterone-fuelled man of the moment. His passionate romance with Meg Ryan, one of the world's most beautiful women, has reinforced his reputation as the great seducer. But in an exclusive interview with The Mirror, Russell confessed that the stunning blonde actress is not necessarily the girl of his dreams.

"I'm still looking for the right woman," he said firmly. "I've been looking and I hope that when I find the right woman and I do get married that I can enjoy the sort of relationship my parents have. They celebrated their 39th wedding anniversary earlier this year and they are always off in a corner cuddling. I have a great deal of respect for marriage and hopefully when I find the right woman and the situation comes up I can enjoy the same sort of thing that they have. I hope I can find someone. I've never been engaged, I've never been divorced or anything like that."

Speaking calmly in his suite at a fashionable Los Angeles hotel, Crowe, 36, refused to talk directly about Meg. He explained: "It's absolutely inappropriate for me to comment on this situation because regardless of what I say it's going to hurt some people and I'm really not walking on this planet to do that. That's got nothing to do with who I am as a person, so any questions pertaining to the relationship at this point in time are inappropriate."

Then, with a shrug, he added: "Let me just say that I'm not getting married this year and I'm not having babies this year either, although sooner or later in life I will want to get married and have children."

"Romance is one of the most important things in my life. However much of a hard-ass you think I am, there is another side to me, and without romance my life would not be worth writing about."

America's sweetheart Meg, 39, fell for Crowe eight months ago on the set of their new thriller, Proof Of Life. Their relationship came out in the open in June when they attended a David Bowie concert together in London, but Crowe attended last night's Proof Of Lifepremier in LA alone. Ryan and Quaid are now in the process of divorcing and plan to share custody of their eight-year-old son, Jack.

Crowe admits his no-nonsense attitude and ironic sense of humour are often misunderstood, particularly in America, where he has a reputation for being "difficult". He said: "I'm going to be misquoted, misrepresented and misconstrued no matter what I do. I'm going to be the way I am and if people don't like it, well, that's just bad luck.

"It might not go on for too much longer, so who cares really? There's always the chance of getting hit by a bus, so I don't worry about that sort of stuff too much."

Bearded and chain-smoking, Crowe was talking for the first time since his affair with Meg hit the headlines. Veering from serious to light-hearted, his conversation was liberally sprinkled with four letter words and everyone, from publicists to parking attendants, was called "mate".

Born in New Zealand and brought up in Australia, Russell Crowe is so proud of his background that he persuaded director Taylor Hackford to change the character he plays in his new film Proof of Life from an Englishman to an Australian. Crowe plays a former SAS man now working as a 'K & R' - kidnap and ransom - expert for a London-based insurance company.

He is called in to negotiate the release of an American businessman captured by terrorists in South America. While doing so he falls for the businessman's wife, played by Meg Ryan. "I didn't see any reason why he should be an Englishman," he recalled. "I told Taylor to have a look at the SAS in England, knowing full well that a lot of Australians, New Zealanders and people from Zimbabwe make up the ranks. In the English-speaking world if you can make it through selection to the SAS it is the highest level of soldiering you can get to. Taylor was surprised, particularly by the number of New Zealanders in the SAS."

It was while they were filming in the steamy heat of Ecuador that Crowe and Meg began their affair, although the director claims he knew nothing of it until he read about it after filming was finished.

Although Crowe and the director locked horns several times during the long and arduous shoot - "I think I got the job because I was the only person who didn't know how difficult it would be to work with Taylor Hackford," he laughed.

He impressed Meg and the rest of the crew with his unfashionable macho attitude and willingness to do his own stunts.

In one scene he risked his life by hanging from a helicopter as it rose into the air surrounded by explosions. Before he did it he talked at length with his friend Tom Cruise, another star who likes to do his own stunts. "Tom and I talk on a semi-regular basis about how much of your own stunts you should do," said Crowe. "I was talking to him about the helicopter and he was talking about hanging off a rock in Mission: Impossible 2. I call it a hundred per center, which means it keeps people involved in the movie. If you force a director to shoot a situation falsely, it affects the film so I want to do as much of that sort of thing as I can. But I'm not insane about it. If I can get two strong hands on the skids of a helicopter, I'm not going to fall off."

"It's much better for me to do it rather than sit in my trailer and twiddle my thumbs while somebody else does the fun stuff."

The blood on his face in one scene is real, the result of what he calls "a hairy moment".

"The helicopter was over the centre of an explosion and I copped the full force of it. I had about 20 cuts on my face. That was pretty close."

Thanks to the extraordinary success of Gladiator, Russell is now one of the most in-demand and highly-paid movie stars in the world (currently pounds 10million a picture) although he chooses his projects carefully and insists he never has much money.

"I don't hang on to money for long," he said. "I've got a 10-lane freeway that goes out of my bank account into my friends' and family's hands.

"I've never made any choices based on money and I'm not going to start now.

"I've been choosy since I was six years old when I did my first TV show. And when I was in my twenties it was difficult finding an agent because I was that choosy. People didn't want to represent someone who had an opinion."

Crowe's parents and older brother, Terry, have moved from New Zealand to live with him on his 550-acre farm in the Australian outback, where he took Meg Ryan on a visit in September. "My family are looked after financially and my mum and dad have a nice place to hang out, although I think my family are really pleased when I'm not around," he said.

"Whenever I'm at home, we've got uninvited guests hanging out at the gate taking photographs and people trying to sneak through the bush and getting bitten by the dogs and then complaining about it. I'm expecting to come across a few bodies when I go home for Christmas."

Crowe is already preparing for his next film, A Beautiful Mind, in which he will play the schizophrenic mathematics genius, John Forbes Nash Jr, who in 1994 was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics.

The role calls for him to age from 25 to 72, and although shooting does not begin until March, he is already attending lectures on mathematics in an attempt to understand the character.

"It's way beyond me at the moment, but I've been focusing on it for a month already and it will come slowly, I hope," he said.

"It's a non-physical role so I don't have to run around or swing a sword or crawl under buildings with a shotgun or any of that stuff."

He sounded almost disappointed.

Source: The New York Times

December 6, 2003

Taking command
Patient, charming and obedient, Peter Weir discovered the inner Russell Crowe, writes Anne Thompson.

Every once in a while, a Hollywood studio throws out the hit-formula playbook and bets that smart movie-goers will go along for the ride. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is that rare case.

"It's a $200-million art film," says Russell Crowe, who is winning praise for his robust portrayal of Patrick O'Brian's seafaring hero, the captain of HMS Surprise, Jack Aubrey. "I'm confident the audience exists."

But while Crowe has a reputation for strongheadedness, it was evident who was commanding this particular vessel. In late 2001, when director Peter Weir first offered the role to Crowe, he was interested in playing the tough but benevolent Captain Aubrey but was already committed to Ron Howard's boxing film Cinderella Man. Any chance the director could wait a year? No, Weir firmly told him: "The ship sails with the tide." So Crowe made himself available.

Weir and Crowe worked closely for several weeks with the Oscar-winning screenwriter of A Beautiful Mind, Akiva Goldsman, to beef up the relationship between the violinist captain and the cello-sawing Dr Maturin, played by Paul Bettany. "I love the contrast and the contradiction," Weir says. "Russell was interested in adding Jack's confusions, metaphors and aphorisms."

Crowe lived in fear of seasickness and at one point climbed the 42-metre mast for a shot of the wind blowing through his hair. But his "most difficult stunt" - learning to play the violin. "I just made a pact with myself at the beginning of the shooting process that I had to at least know in my heart that I can make a beautiful sound out of the violin," he said recently.

He has also admitted that when Weir first mentioned the part, "I wasn't really excited about the project" - not having read the books didn't help, for a start. But Crowe, who had bumped into Weir in a Sydney bar in 2000 and discussed the possibility of working on something together, says he persisted with the project because of Weir's reputation.

If Weir hadn't taken it on, in fact, it is unlikely Master and Commander would have ever been made. Three years ago, Tom Rothman, then the production president of Fox studios, seized an opportunity. Weir was dropping by the studio to see what projects it might have for him. He had directed only 12 movies in 26 years, including Gallipoli, Witness, Dead Poets Society and The Truman Show. The director, who has received three Oscar nominations, was notorious for turning things down, including Gladiator, for which Crowe won an Oscar for best actor. Weir had even passed on Master and Commander seven years before, when Rothman was at the Goldwyn Co. Fox was now developing the project, so Rothman decided to try again.

"It's a rare property, and it took a rare director to do it right," he recalled. "Peter, for the length of his career, has been able to enliven a genre with character, which is exactly what Patrick O'Brian did."

At the end of their meeting, Rothman reached behind his chair. "What I really think you should do," he said, pulling out a mock captain's sword and presenting it to the director, "is take command of the Surprise." Weir asked if he could keep the sword.

It is not known whether he used it to persuade Crowe to take the role, but having seduced his leading man one way or another to accept the part, Weir then took on the studio, demanding several un-Hollywood-like concessions. He concentrated on the action from the 10th book in the O'Brian series, drawing elements from the first. He demanded enough post-production time to make the computer-graphic effects look so real as to be invisible, forcing the studio to give up a prime June slot and push the release back to November. Weir researched tall ships in England, then asked Fox to buy a reproduction of an 18th-century frigate, the Rose, which eventually was re-fitted as the Surprise for the movie, even before he had a deal to make the film.

Weir persuaded Fox to let him place the story almost entirely on the open sea. And he refused to make changes in the rough cut that were demanded by 20th Century Fox's financial partners, though it meant a daunting marketing challenge. Surprisingly, the studio's most powerful marketing tool turned out to be Crowe, who spent five weeks tirelessly campaigning in Los Angeles, Chicago, Texas, New York and at the world premiere in San Diego. To soften his bad-boy image, the studio booked him for an entire Oprah show, on which he provided a charming taped tour of his Australian cattle ranch and wedding chapel, and revealed his bookish nature.

Finally, Master and Commander eschews more Hollywood conventions than most such mega-budget epics. The film even goes so far as to leave a love interest out of the story; the captain looks longingly at one sultry native, but that's it. And the French captain, whom Aubrey is relentlessly pursuing, is not demonised. You hardly see him. He and his ship, the Acheron, are phantoms, the objects of fearful superstition on the part of the overmatched Surprise crew roaming the seas off South America in the age of Napoleon (a shift from the book's action, which was set during the 1812 war between Britain and the United States).

"This was quite something to push through the studio system," Weir says. "I look back and feel like I just stepped off a high wire stretched over the Grand Canyon."