October 29

October 29, 2005

Excerpts from a transcript of a Tribeca Film Festival panel, including the moderator Harry Evans, author of "They Made America" and Sylvia Nasar, author of "A Beautiful Mind".

HE: Did you ever imagine this story (ABM) could be a movie?

SN: When the story appeared in the Sunday business section of the NY Times I got calls from people wanting to make a movie. When I first heard the capsule of the story I thought it was a fairy tale. So, on one level of course I couldn't imagine, until Russell Crowe was cast, that anyone would make a movie about a crazy mathematician.

When my family and I saw the first directors cut, I was amazed. What was even more amazing to me, is that it made math, and people who have ideas, cool.

HE: In a sense, the hidden star of the movies we're talking about is the technology. And yet the star is the star.

Sylvia, you said a very revealing thing, I thought, at the very beginning of this discussion "oh yeah, once I knew Russell Crowe was cast." When you were writing about Nash, you weren't thinking about Russell Crowe for pete's sake?

SN: No.

HE: How close does the actor have to be to the real person? In other words, how close was Russell Crowe to Nash, who was alive? And how far is the actor so important today, whether it be Tom Cruise or Russell Crowe or Nicole Kidman or Liam Neeson? Was he Nash? In most people's minds, Nash is Russell Crowe.

SN: Yes, so much so that Ron Howard was on a panel at the NYU Film School and some professors who'd known Nash in the 50s, came up to him and said "by the way, we want you to know that John Nash really did look like Russell Crowe when he was young."

You know, when I heard that Russell Crowe was going to do it, I was so elated because, Russell Crowe completely inhabits the character - I'd only seen Insider, Gladiator & LA Confidential - you couldn't recognize him from one film to the other - but the other thing about him is that he has a fantastically high IQ, he's fantastically smart.

HE: But did he understand the mathematics?

SN: No.

SN: Ron Howard told John Nash to please not come by the movie set in Princeton because Russell Crowe was playing the young John Nash and Ron Howard thought it would be disconcerting to see the 70 something John Nash. One day John Nash appeared on the set, wearing a raincoat and carrying a briefcase, and Russell Crowe offered him some tea and they had a conversation that lasted maybe 5 minutes.

Well, Russell Crowe reproduced the whole exchange, it became a scene in the movie, and he absorbed in that very short exchange, the appearance, the clothing, the gestures, the speech and the conversation that he reproduced in the movie which was about different kinds of tea, really captured something about Nash's emotional makeup. And what it captured is, that at a moment of great emotion, that John Nash goes off into this abstract reverie, so in the movie when the old Nash is being invited into the faculty club, and the pen ceremony happens, he goes into a thing about different kinds of tea, Chinese tea, Indian tea - you know, Russell Crowe is a genius of an actor to recognize that this response captured the personality of this man.

Source: USA Today

October 29, 2007

'Gangster' stars worked as team on set
By Alicia Quarles, Associated Press Writer

There was no power struggle between Oscar winners Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe on the set of their new crime drama, "American Gangster." Instead, they worked as a team when filming their scenes together.

"It's not about a heavyweight fight," Crowe said in an interview with AP Television News. "What it is, is much more like two (guitarists) playing together, two people singing together."

"American Gangster" is based on the life of Frank Lucas, played by Washington, who became filthy rich in the 1960s by smuggling heroin into New York.

Crowe portrays a police officer who investigates Lucas and his dirty dealings.

"... If you can blend, if you can harmonize and you can sing together still from two completely separate points of view, now you are talking," said Crowe, 43, who won an Academy Award in 2001 for "Gladiator." He also received Oscar nominations for his roles in "The Insider" and "A Beautiful Mind."

Washington said he felt less pressure to perfect his role in "American Gangster" than he did for 1992's "Malcolm X" because the real-life Lucas put him at ease.

"In 'Malcolm X,' we were under a lot of pressure," he said. "There were a lot of folks showing up, like, 'You better get this right or it could cost you.' ... One might have expected it to be the case in this film. That wasn't the case with Frank. He was real cool."

Washington won Academy Awards for "Glory" and "Training Day," and received Oscar nominations for "Malcolm X," "The Hurricane" and "Cry Freedom."

The 52-year-old actor said he's trying to ignore the early Oscar buzz surrounding "American Gangster," directed by Ridley Scott, which has been getting positive reviews from critics.

"We don't even hear about it until you sit down and do interviews," he said. "First of all, the film hasn't even come out yet. Let the film come out and let the public decide how they feel about it."