‘I don’t think the Americans really understood him at first. They put him in a lot of stupid films. I think he bullied a lot of American directors. I think they were frightened of him.’
– Geoffrey Wright
It was an early morning when Russell woke up, his head thumping from the night before and his mind as empty as his pockets. It only took him a brief moment, though, to piece back together what had happened. Frustrated at countless visits to Los Angeles with very little to show for it, he had headed out of Los Angeles on a whim on a road trip to Las Vegas. Cue much drinking and a shrinking bank balance. Unknown to him, however, he was being proposed for a role in a Hollywood blockbuster – and it was the film’s leading lady who was desperate to have Russell in The Quick and the Dead.
Sharon Stone was big news at the time. After a series of underwhelming roles throughout her early acting career, she was propelled into the limelight after her breakthrough performance in Basic Instinct. The equally erotic Sliver’s box office success proved that she wasn’t just a flash in the pan. Now she wanted to produce.
A Western starring Stone as the heroine may have seemed a somewhat risky choice, but her stock had never been higher. Gene Hackman was drafted in to play the mayor of Redemption – a corrupt man who rules the town with a ruthless fist. His annual shooting contest, which weeds out the opposition, attracts a group of misfit gunslingers including The Kid (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Ellen (Stone). She arrives in town to plot her revenge against the mayor for a past injustice.
If a female lead in a genre that hadn’t done too well at the box office of late was risky, so were her choices of director and leading man. Despite a shortlist of potential directors lined up, Stone only had one name in mind – Sam Raimi.
Raimi would go on to become a hugely successful director with the Spider-Man films and win critical acclaim with the thriller A Simple Plan, but at that time he was best known for directing the cult horror Evil Dead series. He was a bold choice – albeit one who was already successful thanks to his trademark highly stylised visuals and inventive camera shots. ‘He was the only one who could make this film,’ she said. ‘He’s a true visionary and I knew he could turn The Quick and the Dead into his own kind of film. Sam is his own genre. This isn’t a Western; it’s a Sam Raimi film.’
While the studio bosses agreed on Raimi and were delighted to get someone of Hackman’s stature, they were less keen on Stone’s choice to play Bud Cort, the former gunslinger turned preacher. He was a heroic character – a really iconic gunslinger Hollywood archetype. The studio were convinced they could get a big and recognisable name for the part, so they were less than pleased to see that Stone and Raimi wanted Russell Crowe.
Raimi had seen Russell in Romper Stomper and was hugely impressed with what he saw, as was Stone when Raimi showed her the film. ‘We must meet him,’ she told her director.
‘When I saw Romper Stomper, I thought Russell was not only charismatic, attractive and talented but also fearless. And I find fearlessness very attractive. I was convinced that I wouldn’t scare him,’ she said.
Certainly, Russell was not someone who would ever feel overshadowed by other actors. But he and Stone share very similar traits. They are both feisty, strong-willed and talented individuals who believe they have come through to be movie stars through hard work and perseverance.
Stone certainly saw something of herself in Russell – someone who wouldn’t say what the other wanted to hear. He was forthright and opinionated. On their first meeting, after hearing her talk about the merits of a pre-nuptial, he said, ‘If you’re going to have a pre-nuptial agreement, isn’t there something wrong with the person you’ve selected for your marriage partner for life?’
It was a remark that pleased her – and with that, coupled with their earlier meeting that day which saw him as far removed from his Romper Stomper character as he could be, she knew she had her leading man. ‘He wasn’t this cold, isolated tough guy,’ she recalled. ‘He was a funny, vulnerable goofball, with this beautiful head of hair and beautiful blue eyes. I thought, “Wow, this guy’s going to be a movie star.”’
She would also say later, ‘Russell Crowe is the sexiest actor working in movies today.’
However, the studio bosses wanted Irish actor Liam Neeson for the role of Cort. And with Raimi having previous working experience with Neeson on the superhero tale Darkman, it looked as though Russell would lose out. He was also hampered by the fact that he was contracted to work on The Sum of Us, and if he were to get the part it would mean filming would have to be pushed back until he had finished work on that.
‘Basically the studio said to her, “We don’t know who’s going to play the role but it’s not going to be that guy, some unknown fella from Australia.” And she just went, “Oh really?”’
During his screen test, he found out exactly what pressures Stone was facing in her bid to cast him in the film. ‘An executive at TriStar rang Sharon in the middle of my screen test and demanded that she come off the soundstage and take the call,’ he told Vanity Fair. ‘So she said, “Come with me.” We went into this room, and she put him on speaker phone. And he just spewed this fucking bile about, “You may be the producer, but you’re stepping over the line, and I’m gonna get a great actor for the role, and I can tell you one thing – it won’t be some fucking Australian with dubious credits.” When he rang off, she said, “I just wanted you to know what I’m up against.”’
The constant battles would take their toll on Stone. ‘By the time we were ready to make the movie, I didn’t want to make it. I was worn out. We did all the fighting before we got here.’
As a result, the environment wasn’t exactly a happy one – and it was different from other sets that Russell had worked on. ‘I had never been on a set or stage show surrounded by people with so much fear,’ he told the Sunday Times. ‘They feared for their jobs because it has become traditional that the director fires some of the crew in the first couple of weeks. That is not how you should deal with creative people. It was a strange environment, and I felt very much like the meat in the sandwich between Gene Hackman and Sharon Stone, plus a whole bunch of actors who had never heard of me and didn’t know what the hell I was doing there.’
While Russell enjoyed working with Raimi – who would later call him a gentleman – and Stone, he had a less than cordial relationship with Hackman. ‘Here’s this young Australian guy coming in to play what, on paper, is the third lead in a $35 million film and nobody’s heard of him except for Sharon. So I wouldn’t say it was easy for any of these guys to accept that they should give over any kind of respect or consideration at all.’
Another reason for Hackman’s reported indifference towards Russell could be attributed to Crowe making light of his veteran co-star’s hairstyle. ‘I think I made a joke about the permed hair,’ he revealed.
Unfazed, Russell also said that it wasn’t a bad thing that the pair weren’t the best of friends, considering they play sworn enemies in the film.
Talking about Russell, Raimi admitted, ‘He’s a tough bastard to get along with. The problem with working with Russell is that he always has a good idea. And he has no tact! He tells you. Sometimes he stood the whole scene on its head. It’s not easy by a long chalk to work with Russell. But it’s exciting and it pays off dramatically.’
Russell has defended his process, saying, ‘People accuse me of being arrogant all the time. I’m not arrogant, I’m focused. I don’t make demands. I don’t tell you how it should be. I’ll give you fucking options, and it’s up to you to select or throw ’em away. That should be the headline: If you’re insecure, don’t fucking call.’
An extra on the set of the film, who only wanted to be identified as a citizen of Redemption, said, ‘Russell Crowe was an interesting character. His thick Australian accent virtually disappeared when he was on camera but would instantly return when they stopped rolling.
‘He was a bit more temperamental than the others – although not excessively so – but I believe that was because he was very dedicated and worked very hard.
‘Case in point: he spent many hours learning the art of gunslinging. Those twirling tricks he does in Kid Fee’s gun shop were actually done by him. He got very good at it and often practised between takes.
‘We spent 16 hours in the saloon “hanging him” during one very long night. He worked harder that night than anyone, since he had to be at the brink of strangulation most of the time. He was wearing a safety harness with a hidden wire, but he still had to keep the rope tight against his neck, while on tiptoes, through the shooting of that entire scene. I have a lot of respect for him.’
During filming Russell struck up a relationship with a young actor by the name of Leonardo DiCaprio, who recalled of their time together: ‘I was 18 at the time… I had done Gilbert Grape and Russell had done Romper Stomper. We were both hand-plucked to do this big-budget film. We were both very bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.’
The pair would work together again on 2008’s Body of Lies, but at that moment, they were just newbies on the Hollywood scene. ‘There was a difference in our ages but we were both in the same sort of position,’ said Russell. ‘The people “above us” in the cast were Gene Hackman and Sharon Stone, and everyone “below us” were all these really famous character actors like Keith David and cats like that, and they’re looking at the two of us going,“Who are these guys?” And that naturally put us together.’
Citizen of Redemption remembered of DiCaprio: ‘He seemed to take his role less seriously than the others. The extras even helped with his lines on several occasions.
‘Leo often bummed cigarettes from the extras, including several from me. I went to see Titanic right after it was released. In that film, at one point Leo goes up to someone and asks if he can bum a smoke. I was the only one in the crowded theatre who burst out laughing aloud at this line. Leo still owes me some smokes.’
Russell had a lot of time for his leading lady – at first. She not only represented for him someone who went out of her way to give a young actor a break in Hollywood, but he admired her for her professionalism at all times. The dual strain of producer and star was taking a toll on her but still she would arrive on set on time and joke with the cast and crew.
The pair spent Christmas Day at the Salvation Army at Stone’s request after hearing that Russell was going to spend the day alone. ‘So we spend Christmas morning serving food at the Salvation Army. And from there we went to a home for battered children,’ recalled Russell. ‘We just played with the kids, gave them presents. You look into the eyes of a woman like that, what she could be doing on Christmas Day, and you realise what she is doing on Christmas Day and she is still in that single percentage of actresses who know what glamour is and what being a movie star is all about. I’m a big supporter of hers. I think she’s a great person.’
However, he would also say in another interview, ‘She was instrumental in me getting my first American job. Absolutely, without her support, it would not have happened. At the same time, however, was it really about me or her wanting to flex her producerial muscles? I don’t want to sound ungallant about the situation. But I didn’t find that in working with her, that we clicked on any other level.’
It was a bittersweet Hollywood debut, and done for low pay. Russell returned to Australia in debt and smarting from comments by some Australian actors who said they would never work for so little money. ‘What are you doing now?’ he would retort.
‘And it’s something like public theatre in New South Wales. They don’t realise it took two years out of my life to get that role, for which I got no money. Nothing you want to do is ever easy.
‘I got paid less than anybody who was an extra for the whole film. Finally, the only thing between Sharon getting me in the movie and me doing it was money.
‘She pushed so many studio requisites out of the way in order to have me in the movie, based on the fact she thought I was good. It was like, well, there’s no consideration there. Forget about money. It’s not about that, I’m coming for the work.’
Just as Stone had had with The Quick and the Dead, director Brett Leonard faced a difficult task trying to get studio approval for Russell to be in his sci-fi movie Virtuosity. Like Raimi and Stone, Leonard had been hugely impressed by Russell’s work on Romper Stomper, and even sent the actor a letter urging him to join his cast.
Russell remembered, ‘It took him seven months to convince the studio that I should play the role. He had two or three meetings a week where they would put a sheet in front of him with five blank spaces on it and say, “Just write your top five.” He would write my name five times and hand it back to them.’
The studio were unsure, but after seeing a screen test with him and the main star Denzel Washington, they reluctantly agreed. Not that his audition went perfectly – he accidentally spat in the face of Washington. ‘Now I’m horrified,’ Russell recalled. ‘I’m thinking, “Great, I just (messed) this up.” But Denzel, he’s such a professional – such a stand-up guy, he just keeps going like nothing happened.
‘[He] turns back to me and says, “I love the taste of saliva in the morning.”’
The film stars Washington as a former cop turned convict, who will be granted a full pardon if he can stop a virtual-reality serial killer – in a police training program that incorporates some of the world’s most notorious serial killers. Sid 6.7 (Sadistic. Intelligent. Dangerous) was played by Russell in fine devilish form.
Talking about his character, Russell said, ‘It’s pretty far out. As is revealed in the movie, Sid is totally interactive so he’s just playing with what he’s got. He’s come out of the machine, he’s looked around, he’s examined humanity in the one half of the millisecond it takes him to work it out, and he realises that human beings couldn’t possibly go around doing what they do if they didn’t want to die. He’s just trying to help them out. He’s a very generous guy!’
Denzel said about his co-star, ‘Russell is wild. He’s very intense, a very excellent actor. An actor who really comes in prepared but at the same time likes to have a good laugh.’
The film’s producer, Garry Lucchesi, raved, ‘Russell is absolutely fantastic. He’s a rock ’n’ roller. He’s a movie star. So often you see stereotypical villains, and that was one thing we really did not want Sid cast as.
‘I’ve loved the idea of casting leading men to play villains as opposed to character actors, and I think Russell is a true leading man and is going to be a great star. Ultimately the movie became quite elevated by having an Academy Award-winning actor like Denzel and a really talented actor like Russell.’
This was the film where Russell believed he was finally there as an actor. ‘I knew when I was doing Virtuosity, when I was working opposite Denzel, that I had the things that I needed and I could communicate the things that I had constructed intellectually and physically.’ In fact most reviews would claim that it was Russell’s performance that lingered most.
After his scene-stealing performance in Virtuosity, he was soon being offered more roles. The underwhelming kidnap thriller No Way Back was first, followed by romantic comedy Rough Magic alongside Bridget Fonda. The latter, a spiritual tale based on the novel Miss Shumway Waves a Wand by James Hadley Chase, tells the story of a world-weary reporter falling in love with a magician’s assistant.
Russell admitted he was keen to play a parody of film noir tough guys, as he put it. ‘When I first read the script, I loved its wit and pace,’ he said. ‘It’s about a lot of different things. It’s about, in a broad sense, the spirituality and magic we all contain and whether or not you can tap into it and whether you can open up enough to believe in it.’
But it wasn’t a hit at the box office nor was it a favourite with the critics, although the esteemed film critic Roger Ebert noted: ‘Russell Crowe is steady in the Mitchum role, as a guy hired to do a job who falls in love with the dame.’
Russell next went on to star in the comedy-drama Breaking Up – a quirky look at a couple’s on-off relationship. About Breaking Up, he said, ‘Well, what I’ve tried to do since being invited to make movies in America is not just take safer large-studio and budget options. I’ve tried to make smaller films as well as the larger ones, because I’d like to look at the American film industry from many different levels and not just from the big one.
‘Breaking Up had a small budget and it was a very complex script in terms of what it asked from performance. Mainly, it was a series of really late nights – just trying to cram those lines into my brain, you know? Because of that low budget there was no real rehearsal period. It was like, “Here’s the script” and you’re off. At the time we made it I was coming off Virtuosity with Denzel Washington, which was a very strange filmmaking experience in itself because of all the blue-screen work involved. I mean, you’re in this blank room grabbing stuff out of the air that doesn’t exist, and then three or four months later you’ve got a rose in your hand or you’re playing the piano or something like that.
‘So Breaking Up was about getting down and doing something a little bit more basic and real and performer-aligned. It was a really fast shoot, something like 28 days, really intense. Part of the shoot was in New York City, and we were there at the same time as the Pope and the chess championship and the president, you know? I mean, there’s bad enough traffic as it is, but when you bring all those clowns in … it was pretty rough.’
Salma Hayek would say of her time working with Russell – who she would describe as one of the two best actors she’s ever worked with – ‘He’s a little difficult. But we ended up bonding because we both fell in love with the film.
‘It was a tough shoot. We were overworking, we were gong crazy and you don’t want to see Russell Crowe in these circumstances.’
She recalled one incident that found them turning up for filming and finding a makeshift dressing room – essentially a towel lying on the floor. Because Russell had arrived first, she asked, ‘Did you throw a fit already?’
‘He said, “Yes” and I went, “OK then, I won’t say anything.” Because I knew he must have killed them.’
Talking about his time making his first Hollywood movies, Russell said, ‘I was always feted and patted on the back in those L.A. meetings. You think you’re loved and respected, but that is bollocks. The job is not real until you are in front of the camera, doing it.’
And he would be certainly be doing it in his next film. While he felt the backslaps weren’t sincere, it was also probably down to Russell’s own assertion that he hadn’t earned them. Luckily, he was to land a part that made Hollywood sit up and take notice.