Source: The West (Perth newspaper)
December 9, 2003
Captain Outrageous
By Mark Naglazas
My first interview with Russell Crowe, which took place at the time of the release of Virtuosity, went horribly pear-shaped when a junior colleague along for the ride agreed too vigorously with the actor's somewhat disingenuous statement "I'm just an ordinary bloke".
"Yes, I know what you mean," piped up the pert-nosed pipsqueak reporter. "If I saw you walking down the street I wouldn't pick you out from the next guy."
From the moment Lois Lane and I were unceremoniously frogmarched out of the Sheraton by an understandably peeved publicist through to my recent second encounter with Crowe, I have watched his rise to superstardom with a mixture of awe, admiration and increasing despair.
In those years, Crowe has marched Maximus-style from the outlands to the centre of the Hollywood empire, serving up a series of powerhouse performances - as a brutish cop in L.A. Confidential, as the avenging Roman soldier in Gladiator, as the cigarette industry whistleblower in The Insider and as a schizophrenic Nobel Prize-winner in A Beautiful Mind - that has seen him anointed the greatest actor of his generation.
Crowe's reputation both in front of the camera and as a box-office titan has been cemented with his role as an English naval captain in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Peter Weir's justly acclaimed high-seas adventure yarn that should earn Crowe an astonishing fourth Academy Award nomination.
Unfortunately, it's not been all smooth sailing for Crowe. Not a week seems to pass without the New Zealand-born Australian making a starring appearance in the tabloids, which delight in reporting on his boozing, his brawling, his skirt-chasing (until his recent marriage) and his egomaniacal movie star behaviour.
For a couple of chilling moments last week I thought I too would be on the receiving end of one of the hot-tempered actor's famous right hooks when, on spying an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts, I inquired if this was part of his training regime for his next role as the legendary Depression-era boxer Jim Braddock.
"You're from Perth, right? You're all cynical bastards over there," Crowe snapped as he aggressively stubbed out another cigarette, giving me the uncomfortable feeling I was not in Sydney's swanky Park Hyatt hotel but in the Colosseum facing an enraged Maximus. "We who are about to die . . . "
But then came the squinty-eyed, just-kidding grin, the warm handshake and, most generously, the offer of a cup of coffee as Crowe invited me and a couple of other journalists to pull up a pew as he started rabbiting on about Braddock, whose amazing comeback story is to be filmed by Crowe's Beautiful Mind team of producer Brian Grazer, director Ron Howard and writer Akiva Goldsman.
After an uninterrupted 10 minutes on the minutiae of the life and times of Braddock it became obvious that the image of Crowe perpetrated by the media and, indeed, the one I've been carrying in my head since the mid-1990s is a long way from the passionate, deeply committed, highly intelligent artist who kept grabbing my arm to make another point.
Sure, Crowe had a hugely expensive movie to flog and was clearly working harder than Master and Commander's intrepid Capt. Jack Aubrey to weather the media storms that have routinely threatened to shipwreck his career (even during the premiere all hands were on deck to manage the German strip club incident).
However, it was impossible not to be impressed by Crowe when the discussion moved into the waters in which he is indeed the master and commander - the art and craft of making movies.
The attention to detail that Crowe will no doubt bring to Howard's Cinderella Man has been a feature of his work for some time, which he says is a marked change from way he approached those incendiary early roles such as Hando in Romper Stomper.
"A few years ago I would have told you that the whole process of creating a character was internal," he said. "Then when I was playing Jeffrey Wigand in The Insider I realised just how much I needed to know, how much the external had to be in place before you could drive the internal.
"(Director) Michael Mann told me that I was his Wigand, that I didn't need to impersonate the guy. However, it was only when I got to put on a wig just like Wigand's real hair and put on the exact pair of glasses that he wore that the character fell into place.
"The same thing with Jack Aubrey's scars. We went through all of Patrick O'Brian's books up to the 10th so we could recreate all of the injuries suffered by Jack up to that point. You don't see them all but I know they're there, it's important in creating a believable universe."
In fact, Crowe doesn't simply stop at his own character when approaching any new project. Listening to him talk - and, boy, can he talk up a storm - you begin to realise that he will not take on a film unless the writer, the director and everyone understands that he is not a mere employee but very much a collaborator. While the pairing of Crowe and Weir would seem like the oddest of matches - the rugged, Brando-esque realist and the intellectual screen poet - what bound them together as close as Aubrey and Paul Bettany's proto-Darwinian sidekick Stephen Maturin was their perfectionism.
"Peter is one of the greatest of all directors in a new medium," Crowe said. "Even though I knew I would be spending a lot of time on the water and feeling very uncomfortable I couldn't turn up the opportunity to work with the man who terrified me with The Last Wave, thrilled me with Gallipoli, made me shed a tear with Dead Poets Society."
"It doesn't matter if the script is perfect when it arrives, there is still work to be done. What's typed on a page doesn't necessarily translate on to the screen," said Crowe, who famously demanded and got changes made to Gladiator (to massive box-office and Oscar-winning success).
"My fingers are in every crack in the ship's hull. That's why people hire me. I'm there to service the film. I will go on my journeys of discovery and bring back to them nuggets that the writer and director are free to use.
"It's not just a question of reading the lines and turning up on set. I have no patience for people who do that. Get involved in it, mate. It's a very expensive medium and it's a privilege to do it."
Crowe says that he has spent much of the past year not actually training for his boxing film but "cleansing" his body (not drinking, that is, as has been widely reported).
"You've gotta understand," Crowe explained. "I'm 39 years old and I'm carrying a lot of injuries. So spending a year training is only going to get me more injured."
So when Crowe does start training seriously in the next couple of months, who will be whipping his aged warrior's body into shape? None other than Angelo Dundee. "We don't fuck around," Crowe said, taking delight in explaining that Muhammad Ali's legendary corner man also carried buckets for Braddock.
Indeed, why should Crowe have to fuck around? When you're the world heavyweight champion of acting you can call on whoever you like before delivering another knock-out performance.
Let's hope he doesn't play the American president or George Bush may have to take some time off between wars.
Source: The Weekender
December9, 2005
Russell Rocks
By Elizabeth Innes
From Hollywood superstar to pub rock player, Russell Crowe is a man of many talents. Elizabeth Innes chats to the superstar before he heads to the Coast.
Is it hot in here? Surely it's a woman's right to melt just a little upon hearing that voice. You know the one. It gave cinema-goers the world over goose-bumps when declaring, "My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius ... and I will have my vengeance ..." in Gladiator. It's unmistakably Russell Crowe and it is just as captivating when it's coming from the man himself.
"I'm talking to you now from the farm but I'm just up here checking a fence-line and some stabling," Russell says, as I melt that little bit further into the telephone. Nothing like a rugged Australian voice that knows how to mix it in the bush.
"It looks fantastic at the moment 'cos we've had quite a bit of rain so everything's green and jumping out of its skin. We run Black Angus cattle and try and create the cleanest food source possible," he laughs, obviously enjoying time on his 1800-acre property, Nana Glen, in the Orara Valley near Coffs Harbour. It is also home to the chapel in which he married singer Danielle Spencer in 2003 and christened their son Charlie earlier this year.
Russell is clearly a loving husband and is absolutely besotted with his young child. He devised a plan for the christening to make sure Charlie, who turns two on December 21, enjoyed it as much as the guests.
"As everybody came into the christening I gave them an envelope with Plan B written on it. It's just something I'd discussed with Dani if he did get anxious because there were all these people around him and the chapel is quite an echoey space. I took him down there the day before and went over what would happen. I got some water and splashed it on his face and he looked at me like I was an idiot (laughs), but I was just trying to sort of let him know that certain things will happen and they were all connected so he'd have some type of experience of it beforehand," Russell says.
"So there we were in the chapel with 50 people standing around and he's a big game player my son (laughs). He got the whole thing, that everybody was there for him. It's circular so everyone's staring at him and so he just chilled out and when the Bishop put the water on his forehead for the first time, he looked at me and said, 'Gotcha Dad, I know what this is all about' (laughs). And he was just exemplary through the whole service.
"So we got to the end and we were all supposed to start walking out and I sort of said, 'Folks, you know, I'm a little disappointed we didn't get to Plan B 'cos Plan B's kind of fun' (laughs). Open your envelopes for Plan B'. So they all opened their envelopes for Plan B and it was the lyrics for Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head, which is just a song we've used as a lullaby for Charlie. So everybody stood around the chapel and sang the song, which he was very pleased about. He thought it was a wonderful show," Russell, the proud father, laughs.
There is no hint of Hollywood in his words, this is the real Russell Crowe, who is much more than simply a superb actor. But he doesn't just save this side for family and friends, you can hear it in his music and see it at his gigs. The songs he writes and performs, especially on his new album My Hand, My Heart, don't hide anything. The more you listen, the more you learn of the reality of this extraordinary man.
"For me, it goes with the territory of writing songs. I don't set criteria of what I should write about, I just write the things that are apparent to me. I don't necessarily mean it to be so raw, but that's just the way it's coming out these days," Russell says.
My Hand, My Heart certainly doesn't fit any criteria. It includes songs about cane-cutters in Queensland, a choral requiem for a dead friend, family tragedies and another of Charlie's lullabies. It's quite a mix, but for all their differences each song makes its own way into your heart. They are entirely honest and beautifully told by a man who makes a substantial living out of telling stories ... need I say more?
"I like these songs, I really like performing them too. They're significantly easier to perform because they're far more complete in the thought process behind them but also musically as well. So they fit me a lot easier. Even though it's kind of challenging playing this type of music in front of a pub audience, you've really got to try and get their attention. We don't have any big pyrotechnics to do that with, you know. We've found so far that if we just focus on the beauty of the songs then everyone comes along with us, so it's good."
That's everyone, even Sting and Billy Bragg have written to compliment Russell on his latest work.
"I didn't send songs to Billy and Sting expecting them to respond, it was just a normal part of our correspondence, but when they reacted the way that they did it was a pretty exciting moment for me. I'd never had that kind of response from people in the business, where they've had a truly emotional, cathartic reaction to something that I've written. That was really nice."
Equally, Russell has enjoyed the reaction from mates outside of the music arena: "I've got a number of mates that when I'm hanging out with them, because of where they were born or whatever, they go, 'Hey Crowie, play the Queensland one'," he laughs as he recalls their name for his song, Land of the Second Chance, about cane-cutters in Queensland.
"This guy I know who lives in Townsville put his arm around me once, we were floating in a boat off Cairns, and goes: 'Crowie, you wrote a song that mentions Queensland twice, you're a good bloke'." That's the thing with Russell's music, unlike his masterful movies, you actually get to see him as he is and hear his stories as he wants them told and that's just as captivating as his brilliant movie performances.
He's particularly looking forward to his Sunshine Coast gigs because he gets the chance to "hang out with Steve". That's Steve Irwin, a good mate who Russell says, "Has the same exaggerated sense of being Australian as me." Crikey, I can't wait for these gigs!
Source: Sunday Magazine
December 9, 2007
Straight Shooter
By Sandra Lee
Russell Crowe earns accolades for his intense characters and, when the cameras aren't rolling, he's equally ardent about telling it like it is - whether it's family, photographers or that phone incident
Russell Crowe is signing autographs and posing for diehard fans outside a fancy hotel overlooking New York's Central Park. It's late on a Sunday afternoon and the actor, who has spent the past two days promoting his latest film, is behind schedule. Still, somehow, fans knew he would be emerging at exactly that time. As soon as they saw him, they swarmed.
"It's like that in New York," he says later, adding that he doesn't get anywhere near as hassled back in Sydney, where he's on first-name terms with the paparazzi.
Five minutes of genial banter and scores of flashbulb flares later, we're cruising down a Manhattan avenue in a blacked-out four-wheel-drive. Crowe's window is down and he lights a cigarette. With his eyes hidden behind sunglasses and dressed in his Rabbitohs baseball cap and trackie gear, he's almost invisible.
A few blocks later, confident we've given anyone following us the slip, the car stops and Crowe and I are on foot, striding through Central Park.
"We're going to the best pub in town," he says. "It has beer and some great New Zealand wines." He's referring to his suite in an old, established and discreet hotel on the ritzy Upper East Side of Manhattan, where he says his wife, Danielle, will most likely be preparing dinner for their boys, Charlie and Tennyson. "I'm just going to pop in and say hello and then we can go up to the balcony and have a drink," he says.
Twenty minutes later, we round the corner to the hotel and, boom, flashbulbs explode as a herd of paparazzi who have been lying in wait yell, "Give us a smile, Russell," "Take off your glasses" and "This way, Russell, over here."
"G'day fellas," he says, and we keep moving. So this is what it's like to be famous? "Yeah," he shrugs.
Crowe is sanguine about the daily intrusion of the paparazzi, having worked out a strategy to deal with them: he wears similar clothes to reduce the value of his image and is pleasant to the photographers while not exactly stopping to accommodate their requests. "It becomes this thing where I am not running from you. I am not going to be aggressive towards you.
"You're not chasing me out of this fucking town, mate. You're not going to do a Heath Ledger on me - I feel for Heath because that sort of thing should never have happened. Quite frankly, I despise the people who set the agenda that created that situation - you know, paparazzi spraying water pistols at Heath Ledger. You deserve a kick in the arse, mate. Who are you to make a public humiliation out of him - the guy who is giving you your living? Anyway, that's all bullshit and not even worth talking about."
The suite where the Crowes have temporarily set up home looks like, well, home. Kids' toys are scattered over the floor and Danielle is indeed in the kitchen, preparing the boys' dinner. Crowe gives her a warm kiss. Seventeen-month-old Tennyson, strapped in a highchair, gets one, too. Charlie, who turns four later this month, is playing with a book and calls with excited enthusiasm, "Dad, you're home from work!" before making a joke about the name of the hotel where his father has just been flogging his film. "He has a great sense of humour," the proud father says.
Crowe is relaxed and visibly happy. Spending five minutes chatting quietly with Danielle, it's impossible to ignore their genuine affection and chemistry. Then we're out the door. "I'll be back to read the bedtime stories," he informs the boys.
Despite having a reputation for being a demanding, impatient, hard-to-handle perfectionist, and a history for being a Hollywood hothead who's not afraid of a bit of biffo when he feels slighted (as evidenced by the telephone throwing incident at another New York hotel, but more on that later), Crowe looks like, and is, a besotted husband and father.
"I love it," he says when asked about married life. "It has all its ins and outs, but some people you talk to always give you the negative end of the stick. The thing is, every week, every month that goes by, our connection is just deeper, and it's cooler and it's more complete. And when you have babies and you create that family of your own, the reason you do that is because it's symbolic of that closeness."
I ask if fatherhood and marriage have changed him. He pauses, and cracks open a Budweiser.
"I'm the same bloke, but things change within your life in terms of emphasis. Touring [with his band, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts] is probably in the past because, if I tour, I have to take time away from my kids. I have my job [acting] and I have my family, and I just don't have space for that any more. Doing a gig in San Diego as opposed to reading Charlie a bedtime story - I'll take the bedtime story, mate. Any day."
Crowe and Danielle Spencer met in a cafe in 1990, five months before they started filming the small Australian film The Crossing, in which both starred. The meeting was organised by the film's director. Crowe was 25, Spencer, 19, and he remembers it clearly. "It was just one of those odd things. She walked in and I was like, she's very interesting, a very interesting person," he says with one eyebrow raised and a faint smile.
It was more than a year before they got together, by which time Crowe's acting career was taking off. He was about to be cast in Romper Stomper, which would launch him in Hollywood. The relationship ultimately faded to black after a few years. "It was one thing to be away for 12 weeks in Adelaide, but it's a different thing being away for six months in LA. We never broke up, as such, it was just logical. We never really had the conversation that put brackets around it. But I remember saying to her on the phone one night that I felt I was being really unfair on her."
In the ensuing years, he famously hooked up briefly with his Proof of Life co-star, Meg Ryan, and reportedly dated several Hollywood ladies. But, it seems, he always held a flame for Danielle. "Yes. She was my friend, first and foremost. I had actually told her brother in 1994 not to take any sort of break-up seriously because this was the woman I was going to marry. And he's always remembered that."
Spencer and Crowe reunited in 2001 when his band was on tour in America and her first album, White Monkey, had just been released. "It was getting a lot of really good attention and I had seen her a little bit. I knew she was in a relationship, so I just used my influence to get her on the tour as a support act." By the time they hit the road, Spencer's relationship had ended. One thing led to another and, as Crowe recalls, "it was just so natural and simple" to get back together. They married two years later.
Crowe's latest role in American Gangster couldn't be any more different to his real life. He plays personally louche but professionally honest cop Richie Roberts opposite Oscar winner Denzel Washington. Washington plays real-life Harlem crime boss Frank Lucas, a heroin dealer who makes a fortune by running his death-peddling job as a smooth, unimpeachable small business, until he meets his nemesis. The Ridley Scott epic is already generating an Oscar buzz for its stars and director.
The gritty, blood-soaked film premiered at No 1 in the US last month. "I think what people actually like about this film - the reason they're comfortable coming out and liking it - is the big cat gets caught, and he gets caught on the weight of evidence through investigation," says Crowe.
Scott, who directed Crowe to an Oscar in Gladiator, is not backward in coming forward about his Academy Award aspirations for American Gangster. "These two guys [Crowe and Washington] - it could go either way," he tells me. As for his chances for Best Director, the Englishman is pleasingly straightforward: "I don't know, I live eternally in hope." Does it matter? "Yeah. It's similar to being a tennis player and never getting to Wimbledon. I've been to Wimbledon every year and I've never won. Of course it matters."
Gangster reunites Crowe with Washington, with whom he first worked in the 1995 science fiction thriller, Virtuosity. Washington says that in the intervening 12 years, he's noticed a change in his co-star that has nothing to do with acting.
"Between then and now, I've seen his work and, obviously, he's a brilliant actor. I knew that then. You know that now," says Washington. "The thing I like is the way he lights up when his children walk in the room. He hadn't become a father back then. He's a good man. He's a good father, I see myself in him - the way I related to my kids - and it's nice to watch."
While Crowe has a full year of acting ahead of him (including his fourth film with Scott, Nottingham), he's also about to roll into his second year as joint owner (with Peter Holmes a Court) of Sydney's rugby league Cinderella team for 2007, South Sydney. This year's on-field successes were a bonus and have had an unexpected result. "All [the players'] mates who play for other teams want to play for South Sydney. For however many years, Souths had to go out and drag people by the scruff of the neck and pay them double. Now we don't have enough people answering phones from player managers. And we're talking about the biggest names in the business."
Crowe is passionate about the club, which he sees as "a social responsibility - a community responsibility first and foremost". He is serious. When talking about the recent white-hot topic of recreational drugs in sport, Crowe is measured. "Let's step back from that question and talk about the prevalence of certain types of drugs in society. Sports figures are in the same percentages as everybody else," he says.
But, he adds, Souths' chain of command has laid down the law and introduced a tough testing system for players. "They are tested when we feel they should be tested - there's no warning. They're also swabbed in their cheeks on any given day. So no point playing Russian roulette in this particular squad - because you'll get the bullet.
"The way they train and the responsibilities we put on them, they don't have time for that sh*t. And they certainly don't have time to recover from it without it becoming obvious to their coaches and team-mates. And the thing is, if you want to do that, cool. Just go and play with somebody else because you don't deserve to be in this group of men.
"This group of men is a family club, we accept that we're role models to the wider society," he says. Whether they want to or not? "That's the thing, that's actual, that's real. I've said to them many times: what you have to realise is that [this] isn't about your comfort, it's part of your job. Straightaway, don't even ask me a second time, accept this - you are a role model. Everybody here, every single man who wears this jersey, who wears that blazer, is a role model - and not just for football."
Crowe knows about public expectations. He was promoting Cinderella Man, in 2005, when he was arrested for the notorious phone-throwing incident at the Mercer Hotel in New York. He was handcuffed and taken on a humiliating 'perp walk' from a jail cell to a police car in front of hundreds of reporters. The incident was "probably" his lowest point.
He doesn't make excuses but he questions the presence of "the 250 baying hounds" of media who were on hand for his court appearance, "trying to make me late for the court date, trying to make me react, trying to hurt Danielle to make me react. Not knowing, of course, that she was pregnant at the time. And I sit back and think about that and I think, you know, did I murder someone? I mean, what sort of action actually warrants that?
"The thing is, that bloke ended up getting fired from the hotel for insolence, so howdy doody. Has anyone ever come out and contradicted the way I said [it happened]? This is the thing that bothers me. People say, what happened? And I say, this happened," says Crowe, slapping his hand for emphasis. "And they say I'm only saying that to protect myself. Protect myself, what do you mean protect myself? I'm admitting that I lost my temper, right; I'm admitting that it was, in the big scheme of things, trivial, and I went too far.
"People want me to think it's a big deal, and it's just not - compared to what's going on in this world."
Crowe looks at his watch. It's storybook time for Charlie and Tennyson. What's he going to read them? He laughs. "That's not my call. They tell me what I'm going to read."
