Posted on: Monday, November 17, 2003
Crowe's Burtonesque range brought big role
By Jack Garner
Gannett News Service
One of Peter Weir's tricks as a movie director, he says, is to cast his movies from the dead, especially if he's stuck for ideas. He considers all the actors of the past and then picks his ideal for a role. And then he considers who's around today that's a close match.
"For Captain Jack Aubrey (in "Master and Commander"), I cast Richard Burton," he says. "And that led to Russell Crowe."
The late Welsh actor with the booming voice was adept at the period characters and larger-than-life heroics of "The Robe" and "Becket," but could also play the stark drama of a "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Indeed, Crowe is among very few actors today with similar skills. (Witness "Gladiator" and "A Beautiful Mind.")
"Russell has his own remarkable range," Weir says. "He's a rare figure in the world of movie stars. Without the movie-star quality, whatever that is, he'd be one of the actors of his generation anyway. To combine the two is exceptional."
Weir says he especially likes Crowe's "unpredictability," which Weir calls "a building block of a movie. In that lies tension, especially in a predictable story like this. You're never quite sure what he might do or say in any situation. It takes such dexterity."
Weir, a respected veteran of such gems as "The Year of Living Dangerously," "Witness" and "The Truman Show," has always been a fan of the Patrick O'Brian's sea-going adventure stories. But he knows they also present challenges for filmmakers.
"You have to inhabit that world (of early-19th-century naval life)," Weir says. He was determined to present it in straightforward fashion, with the right details and dialogue, but without undue explanation.
"I react badly to the didactic school of filmmaking," he says. Instead, he pretended his film company was "the admiralty film unit."
"We imagined we were making a recruiting film. I didn't want to patronize the past, or to instruct or admonish. It's a unique way to revisit the past."
