‘He has the gravity and masculinity that are disappearing from leading men.’
– Australian producer Al Clark
Romper Stomper was hailed as ‘the most important Australian Film of The Year’ in the Sunday Morning Herald – and Russell was fast becoming one of Australia’s most important young actors.
‘After Romper Stomper, I was immediately offered half a dozen roles with shaven heads and tattoos. I threw the scripts in the garbage. I hate typecasting. Repetition gets really bad for your head,’ he told That’s Life magazine.
It was clear he was fulfilling his potential but he wasn’t ready for Hollywood just yet. His next film was Hammers Over the Anvil, a coming-of-the-age drama about a young boy struck by polio. The boy becomes obsessed with horseman East Driscoll (Russell) – a popular figure in the town who gets embroiled in a passionate love affair with the English wife (Charlotte Rampling) of a wealthy landowner.
It was based on a short story by Alan Marshall, and the film’s producer Peter Harvey Wright had gone to see the author in 1982 in a bid to get the movie made. He said of their discussion, ‘I was aware of treading carefully – just a little uncertain of how Alan would respond to some of my suggestions. When you are inspired by a writer and looking to transform their work to the screen, you have a strong desire to be absolutely faithful – to both the writer and the work – yet at the same time fulfil your own requirements.
‘Then he leaned over to me and said most earnestly and with absolute resolution, “You know, you must remember that you are taking these words and these stories and you are setting them in another medium, another medium altogether. I used the medium and the form that I had at my disposal to gain the fullest effect that I could when I wrote those words, and you must feel free to do the same. Don’t worry about my words.”’
The film’s director, Ann Turner, said about Russell, ‘Russell was so right for the role – charismatic, earthy and extremely sensual. He’s an amazing horseman and brings a great sense of power to the character.’
Hammers Over the Anvil would give Russell the chance to play a dashing leading man while reacquainting himself with horse riding – something he hadn’t done in years. The Silver Brumby’s horse-riding consultant, Buddy Tyson, would later say to Russell, ‘You’re not an actor, you’re a horseman.’
Every Sunday on his day off from filming Romper Stomper, Russell would head over from Melbourne to Mansfield to be trained in how to tackle the 16.2 thoroughbred stallion by experts Bill Willoughby and Gerald Egan. In the film’s production notes, he said, ‘The first time I cantered the horse up a hill I was addicted – the adrenaline rush was extraordinary as the speed and rhythm of the horse’s body took control. We’re talking one big racehorse with his own ideas of what he wanted to do, so it had to become a marriage of wills just to survive.’
He certainly threw himself into the role and made sure it would look believable on screen. He could be shooting up to 12 hours per day on horseback and he wanted to make sure that it was always him rather than a stuntman wherever possible. This would result in Russell falling off the horse several times during filming, earning him a few scratches and cuts and a severely bruised backside.
Talking about working with Russell, Rampling said, ‘I found that he had a combination of being very outdoors and physical in one sense, but that he also had a very interesting sensitivity which would work beautifully with the role of East.’
The actress, who was 20 years his senior, added that he had ‘a wild sense of humour’.
He would return the compliment, adding, ‘She has a virtually perfect technical base, a big heart and a wonderful magic in her eyes. What you’ll see on the screen is as close to falling in love as possible – the trick is getting out of it again.’
Despite the fact that the film would later be more known for its first scene, which sees Russell Crowe riding nude through a lake – the film’s producer Ben Gannon was convinced at the time that Hammers Over the Anvil would confirm for good that his young actor was a rising talent. ‘Russell is without a doubt the bright new male star on the horizon. He’s passionate about his work and handles the complexities of the character’s relationships superbly,’ he said.
Despite fears of being typecast as ‘that horse-opera’ actor, Russell next agreed to work on The Silver Brumby – an adaptation of the classic book that has enthralled Australian children since it was published in the late 1950s.
Russell would play The Man – a loner who set outs to tame a wild horse. It was a script he had initially left untouched for weeks, but as soon as he read it he realised why the story was so cherished. ‘I felt like I was seven years old and I had been transported on this magical journey. I had to do the film.’
There was one sticking point, however. In the film, his one companion is his loyal canine. He wanted the dog, an Australian shepherd dog named Coolie, to be with him at all times, to make their screen relationship believable. It was a request that was met with stern dismissal from the animal’s trainer, Evanne Chesson.
‘She looked at me and said, “Listen, I’ve worked in the Australian film business for 30 years and I’ve never met an actor yet that I’d allow even to wipe my dog’s behind let alone live with him. So just forget it. I’ll be bringing the dog to work, you’ll get the dog at work, and I’ll be taking the dog home. You got me?”’
The dog was at Russell’s home within a week.
‘She tuned into the fact that I was someone who genuinely did love animals, and things were fine. The dog went everywhere I did for the whole film. He was a beautiful dog. It was really quite upsetting emotionally to have to leave him at the end of shooting. I know that sounds quite stupid, but that’s the way it was.’
Director John Tatoulis said about working with the actor, ‘He was very passionate and could get very angst-ridden and fiery at times, but then it was always about the work. I don’t mind a bit of emotion if it’s in the cause of doing your best. Russell was always trying to do the best performances he could.’
Russell, he said, was terrific to work with. ‘It was great to see how he related to the horses. One of the things I enjoyed about working with Russell in particular was that he really did live his character once he put on his costume. He really wanted to be part of that mountain environment and he truly got into it.
‘And watching that process and watching him get into character and be at one with the mountains, be at one with the horses, was very interesting. At the same time he was working with a lot of the local riders, lots of local high countrymen. They felt it odd that Russell wouldn’t take off his costume – that he wanted to be more of a high countryman than they were – but after a little while they really did embrace him as well. It was an interesting process.
As with Love in Limbo, the role stands out from the later intense roles that litter Russell’s filmography, but it is one that he is proud of. ‘It was a kids’ film made for pony club girls aged between eight and 12, and it was a great part of Oz history to document it on film. It’s a magical story and I’d love some 25-year-old to come up to me one day and say, “I saw you in that film when I was a kid.”’
In a 1997 interview, he added, ‘After Romper Stomper, I did this kids’ film called The Silver Brumby, because I thought, “I gotta do one for my niece.” I spent three or four months in the mountains in Victoria riding a horse, rounding up cattle, and cooking steaks at five o’clock in the morning in this little hut I was living in. I had maybe half a dozen lines of dialogue. It wasn’t like making a film – it was like experiencing a totally different lifestyle.’
It’s not a film that his own kids ended up loving, however. ‘I went to put on a movie for my kids because my son Charlie said, “Everybody tells me you make movies, but I’ve never seen any”. And I thought, “OK, what’s the most innocuous one I’ve done? Oh, Mystery, Alaska, about this ice hockey guy.” I put it on and in my first scene I’ve got two other sons who are not my sons.
‘Charlie starts laughing and I said, “Oh, OK. I’ll turn this one off.” The only film they’ve seen that I’ve done is The Silver Brumby. It’s a kids’ film and Charlie’s very confused by it because I’m galloping around on horseback chasing a horse, but when he’s with me on the farm, I just call and the horse comes. So it’s like, “Why are you doing all that? Why don’t you just call?”
‘I showed him 30 seconds of Master and Commander. It just happened to be the storm sequence, when I’m hanging off the side of the boat in the waves. I said, “What do you think of that?” and he goes, “Way too scary, Daddy.”’
As Russell was becoming more and more known in Australia, he began to think about the next step. ‘Very quickly in Australia I got all the recognition that there is to get there, in terms of awards and stuff. And so suddenly I had to look overseas and look at expanding where I was going to work. In Australia, once you get that level of recognition, you’re supposed to sit down for ten years and they’ll re-discover you in your forties, you know? But I wasn’t satisfied with that because I was only just starting to work.’
America would be calling, and it would be one of their biggest female stars who was making that call to get Russell into her movie. But that was before he found out the hard way that being a big fish in a small pond didn’t mean a thing in Hollywood.