Shared Darkness

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.

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.”

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 create
s 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.”