Actor is riding high after L.A. Confidential

By BRUCE KIRKLAND -- Toronto Sun
Sunday, January 18, 1998

Somewhere way Down Under, a young Australian filmmaker's ears must be burning. Because the star of his first major movie is talking about him in a brusque, brutally honest, no-nonsense manner.

"Personally," says rising star Russell Crowe about director Craig Lahiff's violent cross-cultural road movie Heaven's Burning, "I thought the movie was much more of a political statement (in the script and shooting stage) than the film you people get to see. The script was heavier. It was very obvious what it was trying to say about the mortgaging of the culture (in Australia), the disrespect shown to that culture by its own people."

Instead, when Heaven's Burning, Crowe's 17th feature film, opens Friday in Toronto cinemas after making its debut here in last September's Toronto International Film Festival, the public will see a crazyquilt cross of Madame Butterfly, Bonnie & Clyde, Pulp Fiction and Mad Max.

Crowe is cast as an aimless drifter who gets caught up in a botched bank heist, is forced to kill one of his colleagues to save the life of an innocent female hostage -- a Japanese 'tourist' who is already in the midst of a personal crisis -- and then finds himself on the run with her in a reckless plot that careens into giddy romance and possible tragedy. Japanese and other foreign influence in Australia is a racially explosive undercurrent in the story.

Crowe, as deadly honest and critical about himself as he is about his directors, shrugs it off. "What Heaven's Burning is is a generic genre-specific road movie with bad music in it. It is nothing like what my vision was of that film when I read the script. You have to live with it. That's fine. If all you're in it for is entertainment, then there's no argument."

Crowe, a New Zealand-born, Australian-based actor who is equally adept at shedding his broad accent and playing North Americans, is a man with an agile mind, a sarcastic sense of humor and a deep-rooted sense of reality.

"Entertainment is a huge part of working in the cinema," says the actor who played a sardonic Los Angeles cop in Curtis Hanson's adaptation of James Ellroy's novel L.A. Confidential, the most highly acclaimed film of 1997 and a guaranteed Oscar nominee next month.

"L.A. Confidential is just entertainment," says Crowe of the funny film noir set in the midst of sex scandals, crooked cop deals and tabloid journalism exploits in the 1950s. "Entertainment, yes," continues Crowe, "but it's full of details and it's a great collaboration of a number of unique artists, Curtis Hanson and James Ellroy being but two of them."

Crowe, now 33, is coming to movie stardom as a mature actor, his occasionally impish outbursts of puerile humor notwithstanding (he likes to have a good time verbally, although he's never mean). He is a chain smoker who good naturedly butts out for the interview.

Crowe, whose family emigrated from New Zealand to Australia when Russell was four years old, started acting 'professionally' when he was only six, in a TV show. But he had already been hanging around TV and movie sets for a year because his mother was working as a caterer.

It took another 20 years before his own career took shape, a transition period that included 415 performances as Frank N. Furter in the stage musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Even then his Australian film career did not come into focus until he played the psychotic neo-Nazi Hando in Romper Stomper and then the mixed-up 'other' lover in the aching drama Proof. The two roles demonstrated that Crowe is a master chameleon, able to melt into each role with seeming effortlessness. Before leaping into Hollywood, Crowe made a Canadian film, playing a rambunctious Australian flyboy in the World War II air force film For The Moment.

In Hollywood, Crowe was a cyberspace-created villain in Virtuosity and a sarcastic gunslinger in the spoof The Quick And The Dead.

"The experience is always different every time you do it," Crowe muses. "It's a director's medium. I work towards the vison of whoever is the captain of the ship. He can shoot something and, in post-production, it can be turned on its head. Not everything you do is going to turn out to be what you think it's going to be because it has nothing to do with you, really. You're just playing a role."

Which is precisely why Crowe has ambitions to direct his own films sometime in the future. At some point, he wants and needs control.

"Funnily enough, working with Curtis Hanson on L.A. Confidential is far less of an inspiration for me to be a director myself than working on Heaven's Burning. The paradox is that Curtis Hanson allows me, requires me, needs me or desires of me to be an expert in my character and provide him with all the detail, all the nuances, and be an equal collaborator. So my job was full as an actor.

"On the other hand," he says, referring to working with the relatively inexperienced Craig Lahiff on Heaven's Burning, "you might need some help, mate!" Crowe laughs ruefully.

"When I work with someone who totally understands, then I'm totally satisfied with my job. On other occasions, it's different. On L.A. Confidential, I went to the salt mine, I did my job, it turned out okay.

"Satisfaction is something that's very difficult for me because I'm not sure if I'll ever reach that level. And, if I do, it'll probably be the last film I ever do. As for a body of work, when I'm 50 and we sit down and talk again and I've done 40 or 50 films and I've managed to keep the same level of intensity and I've managed to discover even more parts of the human condition that I come to at different ages, then maybe I can kick back and have a cigar... (pause, a mischievous grin erupts on his face) ... and cough my lungs out and go have a lung transplant operation."

THE RUSSELL CROWE FILE

BORN: New Zealand.

RAISED: Australia, from four to 15, before moving home to the Land of the Kiwi.

DEBUT: At six in the Australian TV show Skyforce.

MUSIC: Played in rock bands from 15 to 21, segueing into the road version of the musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

MOVIES: Include The Silver Bumby, Love In Limbo, The Crossing, Blood Oath, Spotswood, Romper Stomper, Proof, For The Moment, No Way Back, Rough Magic, The Quick And The Dead, Virtuosity, L.A. Confidential, Breaking Up.