Feature interview by Sian Thatcher
From bar brawls to incidents with phones, Russell Crowe
is no stranger to conflict, and his films reflect this: he’s
played a battle-hardened warrior in Gladiator, a boxer in
Cinderella Man, a whistle blower in The Insider – his trademark
heavyweight roles.
Comedy is not a place you would expect to see him, but in
A Good Year you get just that – Crowe doing light-hearted
comedy, romance and slapstick.
Meeting us at The Dorchester, Crowe told Close-up Film about
this apparent career change. “If somebody is familiar with
all the films that I've done, then they know there's a gay,
football-playing plumber in The Sum Of Us and there's the
ice-skating sheriff in Mystery Alaska. Comedy isn’t a place
I haven’t been to,” he says. “It’s probably a full third
of all the films I’ve done.”
Indeed, he has taken on comedy in some of his lesser-known
films, but it is the burly hard-men roles he is most celebrated
for, such as Maximus in the Oscar-winning Gladiator, which
he made with director Sir Ridley Scott.
He was once again reunited with Scott for A Good Year, based
on the best-selling novel by Peter Mayle, but this time they
swapped the chainmail for suits, and dusty Roman landscapes
for the luscious green vineyards of Provence.
Crowe plays Max Skinner, a City stockbroker who has just
inherited a vineyard from his uncle, played by Albert Finney.
Max goes to Provence and has to choose between continuing
his life in the fast lane of London, and enjoying a relaxed
way of life in the idyllic French village.
Scott and Crowe clearly have a great relationship. “It’s
an incredible privilege for me to be on a Ridley Scott set,”
says Crowe. “He is one of the greatest filmmakers ever to
exist and, for some reason, he likes the way I do my part
of the gig and keeps wanting me to be on a film set with
him, and that is a great privilege. So, if he keeps asking
me, I’m going to keep saying yes.
“And yeah, there’s a certain level of excitement with working
with somebody new, but just as the cuddles and kisses get
deeper the longer your marriage goes on, the depth of communication
with Ridley increases over time because we know each other,
there’s a shorthand. I can tell from 50 yards away if he’s
cranky with something and I can probably work out what to
do in the time it takes to cross the 50 yards.”
While Crowe is known for his Herculean effort in preparing
for roles such as the schizophrenic in A Beautiful Mind
or the boxer in The Cinderella Man, he didn’t feel it was
necessary in this case. He said, “I don't do stuff for
the sake of doing it. There’s a lot of stuff about Max
that I already knew. Certainly, I’ve met guys like him
when I was researching other films, particularly The Insider.
It’s only ever about fulfilling the character. I could
have spent x amount of time in Bloomberg but I didn’t do
that.”
And being the son of a publican, he has grown up with a
deep understanding of wine, which surely helped him prepare
for the role. Indeed, in the same way you wouldn’t expect
to see Crowe in comedy, you wouldn’t expect him to be a wine
buff, but he turns out to be quite the connoisseur. He is
so much the expert on these matters that he once took on
the sommelier in Marco Pierre White's exclusive eatery Mirabelle
over a £3,500 bottle of wine.
“I wanted to do something special, so I ordered a bottle
of Penfolds Grange Hermitage 1964, bottled the year I was
born,” he says. “It is an Australian wine that I have had
a lot of experience with, so when it was opened and brought
to the table, I could smell from two foot away that it had
been corked, it had gone off.
“I let it breathe, but when I took a sip I got a mouthful
of mould. The sommelier spent about 45 minutes trying to
convince us that it was the chestnut undertones and the wafts
of blackberry. I just turned round and went, ‘Mate. It's
off’. He refused to accept it was corked, but eventually
he did replace it. Very nice it was, too.”
So it seems the fights he gets embroiled in these days are
more debates with sommeliers than fistfights with concierges,
which his publicist, no doubt, will be pleased about. It
seems that Crowe has more in common with the character he
plays than you would think.
Indeed, aside from a love of wine, in the film, Max tries
to impress a waitress by acting as a waiter, and Crowe confesses
he has done similar things over the years to try to woo his
wife, Danielle. “We met in 1989, got married in 2003 and
I did so much over that time to try to impress her,” he says,
laughing.
The most spectacular stunt he pulled was when he hired a
boat in Sydney harbour for a romantic date. “The only boat
I could get sat 150 people, but I wanted a kitchen because
I wanted to cook for her. So this thing arrived and I thought,
‘Oh my God’. It was just massive. I had all this fresh scampi
and I was in the kitchen, but it was almost a three-minute
walk to get from the galley to where she was sitting on the
deck. It could be a comedy in itself. She thought it was
way over the top.”
But this must have worked as they are now happily married
with two sons, Charles Spencer, who will be three in December,
and Tennyson Spencer, born in July.
Crowe seems the devoted father and says that this has affected
his work in some ways. “Every decision I make now goes through
what's right for my wife and my kids,” he says. He tries
to make films with shorter shooting schedules so he is not
away from his family for too long, but this hasn’t stopped
the star being extremely prolific in his work.
He has just shot a couple of films back to back in the States:
the detective drama Tenderness, for which he was on set for
just nine days, and crime thriller American Gangster with
Ridley Scott again, which took him 11 weeks.
Next is the remake of the Glenn Ford classic western 3:10
To Yuma with Christian Bale, and that's an acceptable three-month
shoot.
With four films either in the cinemas or in the pipeline,
Crowe is showing no sign of slowing down – it’s certainly
going to be a good year for him.
A Good Year is in cinemas from 27 October.
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