Again, it's an end-of-month archival expansion here at
Shared Darkness, ergo
this 2001 interview/feature with Russell Crowe about
A Beautiful Mind, originally published upon the film's theatrical release. To wit:
A lot of entertainment journalists — a sometimes scurrilous
bunch, I confess — don’t really like Russell Crowe. I think he’s a hoot. They
take umbrage with his don’t-give-a-damn-style, occasionally curt replies and
get-stuffed demeanor, or maybe the occasional salty asides (after a few
questions about his youth, Crowe asks, “Why are we always talking about when I
was younger? Am I looking like shit, people?”) But basically Russell Crowe just
doesn’t (maybe can’t) suffer fools or foolishness. He wants you to bring it. So
if he figures you’re lazy in your questions or haphazard in your reasoning,
he’ll let you know it.
Take this response to a question about the “schizophrenic
nature of acting,” particularly in relation to his latest film,
A Beautiful Mind, in which Crowe plays
schizophrenic mathematician John Nash.
“Can we just do something?” he asks
after taking a healthy drag on his cigarette. “Schizophrenia is a really,
really serious disease. The social misunderstanding about schizophrenia is that
it’s about split personality, whereas in reality it’s about thinking on totally
different planes of reason. And this film is not a medical statement about the
disease, but at the same time I wouldn’t want to think that we were at all
stepping away from treating it as seriously as it needs to be treated. …I made
a quip to the
New York Times that was
taken as kind of a smart-alecky thing: they said, ‘So what are you doing for
research?’ I said, ‘I’m living in
Manhattan,
I go for a walk every Sunday.’ Saying that and getting a gag out of it is one
thing, but it also had a very serious statement behind it: most of the people
you find on the streets in New York in that situation are there because there
isn’t the same percentage of people being hospitalized for the same diseases
that there were 20 years ago, simply because there’s too much reliance on the
drugs.
So when we’re using the term schizophrenia, let’s keep to a serious
tone, stop alluding to it in terms of the job of acting and taking on a
character, because that’s a completely separate thing.”There you have it, folks. Such straight talk has earned
Crowe a reputation as an intense, maybe…
misunderstood
guy? (“I don’t think I’m misunderstood, but I definitely think I’m
misconstrued,” retorts Crowe. “I think it’s very easy to offend people with the
truth… for some reason.”) Not a problem, according to director Ron Howard.
“I was impressed with not only him but also what he had to
say about the movie,” says Howard of his first meeting with Crowe. “And I also
perceived something very, very important:
Russell has an intense and ambitious
intellect, and that maybe surprised me a little bit. In talking to him about
the story, the questions that he was raising, the observations that he was
making, told me there was that spark there. A person who’s going to portray a
genius, the actor isn’t going to be able to fake that intelligence — that’s not
a matter of just saying the lines and standing in the light. You have to
believe it, and I was believing it as I was talking to Russell and just
beginning to discuss the movie” in the loosest terms. “I also loved the
creative collaboration that can be so stimulating when you get an actor who has
smart ideas and [you] feel like [you’re] on the same page.”
“That intensity is definitely there,” admits Howard of his
charge.
“I don’t quite know what occurred [on his other films], but I don’t
think I quite got the uber-intense Russell. Now, there may be a couple of
reasons. I’m not contentious, although I an dogged and thorough. So is he. I’m
not loud about it, I’m very trusting and not frightened of conversations with
actors. I have a lot of patience for them — in fact I sort of nurture those
discussions. Finally we have to go make the movie and I make that clear, but we
had a great rehearsal period where we were able to sort through the material in
a fairly thorough way. …By the time we were shooting I think Russell and I knew
how to communicate with each other and there was a real mutual trust.”
Though he did get a chance to meet the real Nash (the
mathematician popped by the set unannounced the first week of filming at
Princeton),
Crowe didn’t have a lot to go on. There was in fact no tape of Nash, and only
18 or so still photos. Add the erosion of time and the effects of disease, and
the big question, Crowe says, becomes “is he going to be a true witness to his
life or is he going to bear false witness? I had Ron ask very simple questions
on videotape to actually see which way he was going to be: Did you ever smoke
cigarettes? Did you ever wear a beard?”
Nash answered no to both counts, despite photographs and
other evidence to the contrary. But Crowe is quick to come to his defense. “To
add to that,” he says, “we all realize our motivations after 10 or 20 years and
tend to forgive ourselves for certain decisions we’ve made and that sort of
stuff. This is just a more intense version of that.”
With little period source material, Crowe mainly crafted his
performance from Akiva Goldsman’s script and workshops with Howard, both of
which he has high praise for.
“I read a large amount of scripts and make a
small number of movies,” says Crowe. “I wouldn’t want to put a figure on the
ratio, but it’s a really uncomfortable hundred-and-something-to-1. …
When it’s
the one that I’m going to do, I just start playing the character — my
imagination will start making decisions of behalf of the character and perhaps
adjusting sentences almost immediately, making notes.” Akiva Goldman’s script,
he says, “had devices such that it was clear to see that if you had a filmmaker
of the right caliber and could get that device onto the screen, it would be a
really fascinating film.”
“And Ron Howard,” Crowe adds, “it seems to me has got
everybody in the world fooled that he’s some kind of simple bloke, [yet] he’s
one of the most intense filmmakers I’ve ever worked with. But he does it in a
gentle fashion, and that’s because he’s organized and he knows what he wants.
And that is a great platform for me to start working from.”
The other platform, of course, was the biography on John
Nash by Sylvia Nasar, a book whose film rights were hotly contested even before
it was published. “I like stories that remind us of our freedoms, human stories
that remind us how fortunate we are,” says producer Brian Grazer. “I think
A Beautiful Mind is about a man who has
everything and loses everything, and then gains something that he would have
perceived to be very small, but then becomes his biggest victory in his life:
surviving and having a family.”“With this particular story, the Nashs didn’t want to sell
it at the time when I pursued it about three years ago,” Grazer continues.
“Their agents notified the industry that they were willing to, then people did
come out of the woodwork and bid and auction for the project — and you have to
sort of audition. It’s hard, it’s a drag and it creates a lot of stress. I
remember getting incredibly mad at the agent because I bid
exactly what he asked me to bid to get it and then he wanted more.”
A price was eventually agreed upon (in the “million-plus”
range, says Grazer), along with the stipulation that Grazer would not produce
Laws of Madness, another mental illness
book that he owned the adaptation rights to. “Sylvia Nasar’s book is a
wonderful biography, a great read, but again it’s a singular opinion, not
necessarily absolute truth,” says Crowe, who read both the book and the script
before signing on. “But within the book you’d find little gems, like Nash’s
mode of speaking was olympic and ornamental, and you apply those to West
Virginia (where Nash was from), you look at every sentence in the script and
say, ‘Does this sentence meet that requirement?’ So if there’s a simpler way of
saying something, that’s probably not going to be the way that John Nash would
go — he would choose a more complicated way of saying a simple thing, because
that was his bent.”
“You realize by looking at contemporary case studies the
physical change that takes place in people because of the use of that medication,
and with the onset of the disease. Small gestures that are in place and
habitual prior to the onset of the disease become physical manifestations of
the disease,” continues Crowe. “You can take everything in and… understand it
from an objective point-of-view, but to sit here and truly say that you’ve
examined every bit of it and you understand the process off John Forbes Nash’s
mind would be an absolute oversimplification. …What attracted me to doing this
script was not only did you have what I thought was a great, personal, human
story of triumphing against the odds, but you had a magnificent romance that
spanned five decades and is still in existence.”
And what about his off-screen reputation? “I do wish it was
seen in context more,” says Crowe.
“The fact that I’m an actor doesn’t mean
that I’m a spokesperson for anything, and shouldn’t be seen that way. …I
sometimes think that there’s way too much emphasis placed on it, just as I
think there’s way too much emphasis placed on people’s physical looks, on
beauty,
magazines that give you 25 tips on how to give a blowjob so your
husband won’t leave you. I think this is ridiculously crass and fills people’s
minds with rubbish. But in giving me the opportunity to answer that question,
you’re also putting me in a position to make a statement that’s the kind of
statement that I would never usually elect to make.
There’s a lot of things
about the world that I don’t agree with, mate. I’m just a person.” 
