Russell Crowe: Calling the shots

Russell Crowe makes his directing debut with The Water Diviner, a movie about Gallipoli from a new perspective. He talks to Russell Baillie in Sydney.

He's commanded armies and captained great ships. Or at least he's played guys who did.

He's been a leading man for nearly 20 years and pretty much grew up on film sets from the days his parents worked on them as caterers.

So you can't quite say Russell Crowe wasn't qualified to make the leap to director.

Crowe certainly thinks he's earned the right to have a go, he says sitting in Sydney hotel suite on the morning before the world premiere of his directing debut The Water Diviner.

It's a movie not just by Russell Crowe, it's a movie starring Russell Crowe.

The Wellington-born star - who remains a New Zealand citizen care of the Australian government's immigration rules, despite having lived most of his life across the Tasman - plays its titular character.

That's Connor, a New South Wales farmer with a knack for finding water underneath sun-baked fields.

We first find him and his wife in the years right after WWI, still grieving for the three sons they have missing, presumed dead at Gallipoli.

The story flashes back to the battlefield and the boys' young lives on the farm.

After the war, a quietly despondent Connor takes it up himself to travel to the Dardenelles to find what, if anything, remains of his boys.

At first fighting British military officialdom to be allowed on to the battlefield, he discovers more about the war and the country the Anzac troops invaded and the people they had in their sights.

Russell Crowe features on the cover of this week's TimeOut:

Crowe's views on how the Australian and New Zealand mythology surrounding Gallipoli doesn't take into account the Turkish perspective has already made headlines on both sides of the Tasman.

But that look behind the lines into the Turkish defence with its own mammoth casualty count, is what made Crowe want to direct the script by Australian television writers Andrew Knight and Andrew Anastasios, when it came recommended to him by two producer friends.

"I just felt and understood, yes, the central character but more so what it was saying in a broader sense about Australia and the grief that Australia and New Zealand had experienced post the First World War.

"But what I think was really galvanising for me, the thing that was both inspirational and fundamentally embarrassing at the same time, is I realised that for all the dawn services I had been to, I had never spent a minute thinking about the situation from the Turkish perspective. Never ever considered it. I was embarrassed."

When he read the script he felt something more than the usual visceral urge he gets when he wants to be in a movie, he wanted to make the movie too.

"This is a different thing altogether. This was having that reaction and just this other thing came over the top of it: 'This is mine. I am responsible for this'."

Crowe visited Gallipoli while preparing for the film and says he was surprised by how he was welcomed.

"It wasn't because I was a movie star. I was just another bloke walking around the gravesites and a guy comes up to me and says 'where are you from?".

"I said 'New Zealand' and straight away he wanted to have a chat - this was like a personal connection to them in a depth I just hadn't assumed."

Crowe, crew and a cast including former Bond girl Olga Kurylenko as a local hotelier with her own family connections to Gallipoli, shot some of the film in Turkey, including a scene inside Istanbul's Blue Mosque.

But most of the film was shot in the searing heat of South Australia last summer, a season which also marked the director-actor's turning 50.

Crowe makes it sound like he took directing in his stride.

After all, he's had some very good teachers over the years.

"It's been my favourite film set to be on in the last five or six years because it was operating the way it was operating and everybody was facing the same direction," he says.

"This is my tribe and I know this language and I know the information that is required to keep the day moving. I know what the actors want. I know how this type of army moves.

He laughs at the endorsements he got from his own former directors. Sir Ridley Scott, who directed Crowe in Gladiator and Robin Hood, offered a resounding "he'll be fine". Ron Howard, who helped Crowe to a second acting Oscar nomination in A Beautiful Mind apparently said "Oh good" when told Crowe was going behind the camera.

But the best advice he got was from directors who he hadn't worked with - Ben Stiller reminded him not to forget he was the lead character and if he didn't shoot enough of himself he would lose the spine of his story.

Horror master Eli Roth told Crowe it wasn't all those years of screen experience that was going to make him cope with the pressures of being a director - 10 or so years of being a dad would.

"[Roth said] there will be certain points during the day where only being fatherly and patriarchal gets you through this day," says Crowe.

"You are surrounded by a whole bunch of people and they all have 10,000 questions. 'You make your bed. You clean up your toys'... ."

"I steal from everybody. Every single director that I have worked with.

"Whether it's something that's good or I've learned something that I will never do.

"I've stolen stuff from Ridley, I've stolen stuff from [Master and Commander director] Peter Weir., I've stolen stuff from Ron Howard."

And what about that demanding actor Russell Crowe - what did he think about that demanding director Russell Crowe?

"Well we've never had any angry words," he chuckles

"And the actor never refused anything I asked of him."

Who: Russell Crowe
What: The Water Diviner
When: Opens Boxing Day

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