‘I always wanted to play that laid-back Aussie male who has an emotional outpouring.’
– Russell Crowe
It had only been a small part in Blood Oath, but all actors have to start somewhere. But Russell’s real movie debut should have been The Crossing.
The 1950s coming-of-age movie would in fact be Russell’s second picture. It was originally due to be made before he secured the role in Blood Oath, but the shooting dates were pushed back.
Russell remembers of the audition. ‘George Ogilvie sat 16 young people in a room, eight girls and eight guys, and said, “It’s nine o’clock in the morning. At the end of the day, around five o’clock, I’m going to know who’s going to play the lead role in my film.”
‘I got home and I get a phone call and it’s George and he says to me, “I think you have a great career in the cinema ahead of you. Which role would you like to play?” I chose Johnny because I felt his journey had far more emotional turns.’
Explaining the day-long workshop auditions, the director said, ‘If you spend 15 minutes with an actor you can get only a superficial idea of what they can do. So a whole day workshopping relaxes them, and finally you can see what they can do.’
Russell was understandably delighted. As he put it, ‘I started in the business at six and I didn’t get that role in The Crossing until I was 26. So in between, even though I was working continuously in the theatre, that represents thousands of failed auditions for movies. It was just a huge thing.’
Faith Martin, who was casting director on the film, recalled to the Sydney Morning Herald in 2001, ‘Russell was very intense, highly intelligent and he drew you to him.’
Ogilvy added, ‘This is not specifically in looks but Russell reminds me of James Dean in the way that he has the charisma Dean had. He’s the sort of actor you watch work and you have no idea what he’ll do next. That’s rare, that mystery about him.
‘There was a sort of hunger in Russell’s eyes. Most young actors want to please. It can be a barrier. Russell didn’t want to please. He wanted to be that role.’
The film tells the tale of a love triangle set in the Australian outback in the 1950s. Robert Mammone plays Sam – a young man who leaves his home town to make a life in the city. He returns a year and a half later to persuade Meg, the girl that he left behind, to come with him to the city. Complications arise from the fact that she has since embarked on a love affair with Sam’s best friend, Johnny (Russell Crowe).
Talking about his character, Russell said, ‘Johnny’s simplicity is part of his complexity and he has an ability to communicate his feelings to her, which is so Australian. He’s a product of his environment and he wants to progress within it, to marry Meg and have a family, with all the stability that represents. He’s tied to the town through his mother and his dead father.’
Mammone said, ‘I didn’t think I’d have a chance of getting it. I didn’t see myself in that role. I was just going for a supporting role. I was in the workshops and I was the oldest person there. They were trying to work out whether they wanted young actors or to get older actors to play younger roles. They decided on actors who were a bit older because they felt the young actors didn’t have the life experience.’
Russell’s leading lady would be Danielle Spencer, an actress with whom he would have an early relationship, rekindle their passion many years later and go on to marry.
‘I knew it was a great role and I was determined to get it,’ she said at the time. ‘I liked the story, the fact that it was a love triangle, and my character has a lot of strength. On the one hand she was a real farm girl, an innocent leading a simple life, but emotionally she’s more complicated – decisions, especially when it comes to Johnny and Sam, are not cut and dried for her.
‘Johnny’s lovable and Sam’s exciting, so it’s a difficult choice for Meg. For Johnny, things are simple. He wants to marry Meg and that’s it. He knows what he is about, but Sam is attractive because he is a dreamer.’
Ogilvie made sure his three main cast members spent time together. ‘We had three weeks rehearsal,’ Russell explained. ‘Instead of blocking out the scenes, we just discussed things and played games, but in that time we had every single part of our character indelibly printed in our minds. We became the characters without having to speak the dialogue.’
Mammone added, ‘We talked to each other throughout the shoot, questioning certain aspects of our character and how they affect one another.’
‘The director of The Crossing introduced us and then the film was postponed for about three months but we kept in touch during that time,’ Spencer remembered. ‘The three of us would do things like go to the gym together, so we formed a bond before we even went on the set. I thought Russell was great fun and we really have him to thank for us all becoming so close because he was the one who initiated most of the outings. It’s always important to him to try and establish a good, solid relationship with people he is working with.’
Russell also did some research for the part, heading over to a farm in New South Wales, where he learnt how to shear sheep. He also made sure he had a say in what the character would wear. ‘When I did The Crossing the costume people wanted me to wear a leather jacket and pretend I was James Dean. I said, “It’s in the bush, right? I’m a shearer, I’ve never been out of this town. How the fuck did I get a leather jacket?”’
One of the early scenes, of the pair making love in the hay in a barn featured a passionate clinch that would be repeated off camera. Afterwards, Danielle was said to have told a member of a crew, ‘I didn’t know a man could kiss a girl quite like that.’
It was to be the start of something special between the pair, although she glossed over it at first. ‘I had a boyfriend back in Sydney and when you have a crew around it’s very difficult to get involved in the sexual aspect of the scene because it’s sort of embarrassing. It was a closed set, but it was still very nerve-racking – we were both very nervous and self-conscious. Russell is obviously an attractive guy but I wasn’t thinking along those lines at that point because it was a big movie for both of us and we were very focused on that.’
During the making of The Crossing, Ogilvie told Russell that he had to replace his missing tooth – the result of a rugby match at school when he was 10 years old. ‘He was very nice about it,’ Russell recalled. ‘He listened to it all, and said, “All right, let me put it this way, Russell. You’re playing the lead character in my film, right? The character of Johnny has two front teeth.”
‘I told him that I just didn’t want anything false going on here and I went through my whole teenage years, how I failed these auditions, never got a TV commercial, and how all the jobs I got were with this gap in my teeth. George just said, “Well, I think it’s good to grow out of that behaviour. Let’s have two front teeth when we play Johnny Ryan, shall we?” So I got a new tooth.’
He would add later, ‘The truth is, I don’t know very well why I was so stubborn about not fixing them. It was like losing a hand – you have to get used to life’s losses and scars. Those broken teeth were part of who I was. But the funny thing was that I’d been acting in theatre for 12 years, because back then I didn’t think about becoming a movie actor. My ambition was to make a good career in theatre, and I had been working, like I said, for many years with a broken mouth and I had even done some movies by the time I had the teeth fixed.
‘And from then on, my movie career took off. Which doesn’t say much for the movie industry, of course. But later I thought about it a lot and I think it was a real blessing for me being scarred until I was 27, because that allowed me time to grow, to learn to act.’
Ogilvie now admits, ‘I wasn’t immediately taken with him. He had a very “I’m Russell Crowe, who are you?” attitude. He was very polite, very gracious, but he made no efforts to please me at all.’
However, in Ogilvie, Russell had found a director who gave him the sort of freedom that he needed. ‘In The Crossing, George let me take risks. He let me be wild and go for it because he trusted me. Other directors frame a shot and say, “Don’t bloody move!” If you move outside the script they say, “Cut!” I think once you’re inside the character, let it come out. People try to stop you and that’s hard. George said right from the moment we met he trusted my instincts.’
Russell has been at great pains in the past to clear up misconceptions about him – about his reputation for being difficult on set. He rationalises that he’s difficult in terms of making sure the film is good as can be – something that is backed up by actors and directors he has worked with. One actress confided to this author privately that during filming of one of his biggest movies, ‘He would ask to re-do scenes over and over again, sometimes doing more than 40 takes unnecessarily and there was a feeling that [the director] was letting him direct the film.’
However, Russell has always insisted that it’s the ‘director’s medium’. Talking to Inside The Actors Studio, he said, ‘I make movies and I’m working for that particular person. So if I can’t find common ground with that person on a particular subject, or aspect of the character, then I let it go. Because I’m making his movie. Yes, I’m playing the character and all that sort of stuff, but you’ve gotta allow for the fact that it isn’t your gig. You know, you’re just lucky enough to be on the bus. It’s his gig. His or her gig.
‘Many times you have a situation where something that you said wasn’t listened to or whatever, and then you get a call from the editing room going, “Fuck, I wish I’d listened to what you said, ‘cause that’s exactly what’s missing,” you know? So you have those kinda conversations but they’re – they’re pleasant.
‘It’s not, not, not a fight. I’m not there to have arguments of that nature with a film director. So, your choice of who you’re gonna work with is very important on that level. I like to work with directors who are really confident about their point of view.
‘If they’re confident on who they are as a director and what and how they approach the medium then they’re not threatened when you come up with an idea as an actor. You gotta be fluid enough to correct yourself. If something you assumed about a character early on is wrong and you find yourself out, just let the fucking thing go! Let it go! Drop it, you know?
‘Wasting time on a film set is not your privilege. Being on the film set is your privilege.’
In The Crossing, Russell was allowed to trust his instinct, and the instinct in Russell is feral and visceral. He digs deep and is not frightened by what he discovers there. ‘I get really passionate about what I do,’ admits Russell. ‘Some people get threatened by that, threatened by the passion. George doesn’t. So you pump it out for George and all he says is, “Give me some more.” So you do. You reach in and pull it out.’
The advantage of having three relative unknowns as your leading characters is that it gives the film an edge – a blank slate for the audience about who they are watching. There are no pre-conceived notions about who these actors are, so it’s easier to get into their characters and the world they live in.
The disadvantage, of course, is their lack of experience being on a movie set. It’s a sink or swim environment. And that’s why Ogilvie, who was an actor himself, was a calming and authoritative presence on set – always at hand to offer advice and the experience but knowing when to leave them alone to work it out for themselves.
During one difficult scene, Russell recounted, Ogilvie took him aside. ‘And at this point I really didn’t know his history and then I find out later that he was this fabulous actor and when he became a director he decided he was going to make a 100 per cent switch. So he goes, “I can’t explain it so I am just going to do it.” So we are just standing in this car park and he just, on a dime, bang! The most radiant, deep, emotional series of information coming at me and that was an incredible lesson.’
Reviews of the film were generally positive, with Russell receiving the majority of the praise. Sydney Morning Herald thought the film was ‘too eager to impress’ but reserved praise for Russell’s performance.
‘But the true revelation is Crowe, in his first major film role,’ the review read. ‘In most movies like this one, the boyfriend/fiancé/husband is usually either an overbearing jerk who causes the heroine much unhappiness, or an annoying sap whose constant declarations of love sound laughingly hollow. But when Johnny professes his love for Meg, it’s clear that he means it. And when he is threatened with losing her, he reacts not with physical violence or menace, but instead seems to unravel at his own emotional seams. Crowe takes a character that could have been one-note and creates one who is masculine and practical, yet sensitive enough to know that his way of life is in danger and there’s really nothing he can do about it.’
It was also a role for which Russell received a nomination for Best Actor at the AFI (Australian Film Institute) awards. It had taken him years to get there but Russell had starred in a film and he had passed with flying colours.
‘When I first saw it, I thought it was a very beautiful film and I am very proud of director George Ogilvie and his achievements,’ he said of his first leading role. ‘I don’t think it worked commercially because, despite its universal themes, a lot of people couldn’t relate to its rural setting.’
However, it’s one that meant a lot to him – and he has stayed friends with both Mammone and Ogilvie. In fact, Mammone was one of Russell’s groomsmen at his wedding to Danielle, while Ogilvie was a guest.