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The UK Times 8/20/05 Saturday
Magazine
Russell
Crowe - by Martyn Palmer
He took method acting to extremes for
his latest role as a boxer, and his efforts have paid off. But such professionalism
has its downsides, from physical injury to charged emotions “You are aiming to miss, you are aiming for it to be a stunt,
but because of the speed you work, So far, his hit list has included Under Pressure by David Bowie and Queen, Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s version of Born to Run and Cold Hard Bitch by Jet, revealing not only catholic tastes but also a mischievous sense of humour. And perhaps some mind games, too. Crowe and Bierko have not exactly become bosom buddies during this long shoot, and maybe that’s what Crowe wants. The Baer/Braddock fight is the climax of Cinderella Man and the authenticity of the sequence is crucial to the success of the film, which tells the remarkable true story of Braddock’s Depression-era comeback against all the odds. If there’s a whiff of genuine animosity in the air, it might hurt the players now and again, but certainly not the film. “Russell has a very intense way of working, so by design he kind of separated us,” says Bierko. “I didn’t deal with him at all until we stepped into the ring together. It’s as close to a real fight as possible, given that we are not really trying to kill each other. When we started on the first round, we were pasting each other pretty good.” Boxing movies have made reputations in the past – from Rocky, which turned Sylvester Stallone into a star, to Raging Bull, which confirmed Martin Scorsese as one of the very best directors, and more recently, Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby. Cinderella Man’s director, Ron Howard, has a lot to live up to. The 250 or so extras gathered at ringside, all dressed as mid-Thirties New Yorkers, sense the fun is about to start. For the past half-hour they have lounged around amid thousands of plastic dummies dotted throughout the arena (a rather spooky but surprisingly convincing rent-a-crowd), drinking coffee and reading the papers. Now that Crowe has arrived there’s an expectant buzz: it’s fight time. Crowe disrobes to reveal a body that, once again, he has radically altered for a role. For his last film, playing the beefy Captain Jack Aubrey in the Napoleonic sea saga Master and Commander, he was 228lb. Now he’s down to a chiselled 178lb. “The basic principle is energy in and energy out, count the calories and do the miles,” he says, which hardly captures the months of painful training he endured. At its peak, he would start the day with a 3km walk, followed by a 1km run on the sand of Sydney’s beautiful beaches, then into a skipping and stretching “warm-up”, followed by 15 minutes of shadow-boxing, on to the speed bag, pad work and then a further session of stretching and stomach work. That would be followed by another walk, this time 6km. This was supplemented by burning up endless miles on the bicycle, swimming and, of course, countless rounds of sparring in the ring. Plus the extra games he invented, just to keep things interesting – like a wood-chopping contest. “Not just any old wood chopping,” he protests. “It was the double-handed saw world championship. And do you know who won? Yep, that’s right. Me and a mate. And we beat two Olympic boxers at the highest level of fitness into second place.” There must have been one or two nervous film studio executives who worried that Crowe wouldn’t make fighting weight. Crowe says he knew that everything was riding on him being in shape. “I said to Ron at the beginning, ‘There’s only one thing that could screw this up and that’s if I don’t achieve it physically.’” But the fact that there were those who doubted he’d do it would have spurred him on even more. No one should underestimate his competitive nature. “I need a high level of motivation,” he smiles. “I’m a very old combustion engine – you need to give me a good kick to get me going. But once I’m going, I’ll go for ever.” He relishes the physical transformation, which he has done plenty of times before, piling on the pounds to play a paunchy tobacco executive 15 years his senior in The Insider, then turning it into muscle for Gladiator, dropping down again for A Beautiful Mind and going up for Master and Commander. The cost of pushing himself to the physical limits has been a high one. He’s suffered numerous injuries on film sets over the years, and Cinderella Man had to be postponed after he dislocated his shoulder sparring in a Sydney gym. “I felt it go in the second round. I’m driving to the surgery to get an MRI scan and I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s serious. I’m calling Ron [Howard] and the producers and I’m saying, ‘Boys, I want to let you know what’s going down. We’re in deep shit.’” Two days after surgery, on February 1 last year, he was having physiotherapy
on the shoulder. “By the end of week three we did ten rounds
on the hand mitts,” he says. “I was sparring again by the
end of week four.” He now believes that the extra time – the
start of the production was pushed back two months – was beneficial
for the film. “Frankly, because of the injury it extended the
time we had to prepare, and the skill level, the body, the choreography,
everything moved forward, everything was given more space and as a
result everything was more successful" When the filming starts he retreats from the ring to a bank of monitors. Inside the ring, another cameraman is in close with a hand-held camera. Howard yells “Action!” and the two men circle each other, close in and jab. From where I sit, it looks violently convincing. Sweat glistens on their faces, the grunts and the screech of leather boots on canvas are loud, and the gloves seem to make contact with vulnerable flesh. Russell Crowe making a boxing movie has a certain irony about it, of course, and he knows that. “Yeah, but you know, regardless of certain reputations, I’m not into boxing at all. All that is tedious. You know, the process of it all, it smells and I smell and the person you are boxing with invariably smells, too,” he laughs. Crowe has a reputation as a hot-head – a man with an explosive temper that has landed him in trouble in bars and even at a Bafta party in London where he held BBC producer Malcolm Gerrie, who had cut his acceptance speech, up against a wall. That temper flared again in New York earlier this year, when he allegedly hurled a telephone at a receptionist in a plush hotel (more of which later). Where better to channel that aggression than in a boxing ring? According to Angelo Dundee, who has trained 15 world champions, Crowe is a natural in the ring. “He could have been a fighter, sure,” says the 84-year-old. “He’s that into it, he loves boxing. See, you have to like it, and he loves it. He’s got the sweetest left hook.” But choosing Cinderella Man wasn’t about showing his prowess in the boxing ring, argues Crowe. “I’m not saying that there isn’t something in the cliché about finding some truths about yourself when you step into a ring with a guy. The boxing in Cinderella Man is the thing that takes up most of your time and preparation, but to me it’s the least important thing. For me, the most important part of the story is that it’s about a family, his [Braddock’s] buoyancy with his kids, and the battle with two people who love each other but have completely different views on boxing.” James J. Braddock, who grew up in an Irish immigrant family in New Jersey, was a promising fighter who was doing all the right things – investing in a taxi business, taking care of his wife, Mae (played by Renée Zellweger) and being a good father to his three children. Then it all went spectacularly wrong. Through a combination of injuries, bad luck and ultimately the Depression taking away every cent of his savings, Braddock found himself virtually on Skid Row. But he refused to let his family become another casualty of the great crash. His determination led, ultimately, to a ferocious showdown for the heavyweight championship of the world in 1935 with the defending champion, Max Baer, a brutal fighter who had already killed two men in the ring. Many feared that an out-classed Braddock could be a third. By then, the writer Damon Runyon had already given Braddock the nickname that had lodged in an adoring public’s psyche – a public desperate for a folk hero to lift their trampled spirits. Braddock was, quite simply, the Cinderella Man. “I always loved it,” says Crowe of the story he first read some eight years ago. “And it kept coming back to me in different guises, different drafts, and I’ve probably read it 24, 25 times by now and it still holds true. It still gives me goosebumps.” Over the years there were various other directors attached, before Crowe convinced Ron Howard to take on the film. It reunites the Oscar-winning team who made A Beautiful Mind – Howard, Crowe, producer Brian Grazer and writer Akiva Goldsman. For Crowe, Cinderella Man is all about one of his watchwords – passion. “It’s the only reason I do what I do. I was passionate about Cinderella Man because it’s a great story about an honourable man.” Along with that passion comes a certain code that Crowe has tried to use as a template for his career. You take the role because you believe in it – not because of the pay cheque. Easy to say when you are one of the biggest earners in Hollywood, of course, but he’s always been like that, he insists. “I never had a period when my decisions were based on commerce – they were always about what was the best, most challenging job offered to me at the time.” Crowe served his time – playing in bands in his native New Zealand, stage and television roles in Australia – before breaking into films, first Down Under and then in America. Did he never take a job purely for the money? “I did three commercials and when I did them it wasn’t ‘Russell Crowe’ doing a commercial, it was a young actor taking on a role. Yes, they represented money, but they also represented work in front of the camera.” Recently, he has been critical of rich A-list stars who do commercials for multimillion-dollar pay-outs. Has he been offered highly lucrative ads himself? “Are you kidding? There are four or five fortunes far greater than I may have amassed thrown into the wind because I don’t believe in that stuff. My career is still the epitome of what I learnt as a young performer in relation to credibility and what my original aspirations were – don’t use it and don’t abuse it. Certainly don’t do something criminal like cigarette ads in Japan and get five million for it while being an anti-smoking advocate in America. F*** whoever does that.” This uncompromising stance has upset some in the business (George Clooney, for one, has publicly sniped back at Crowe’s former band). And it’s that side of his personality which can sometimes boil over and get him into trouble. But if Crowe isn’t out to win a popularity contest, ask any of the top directors working today who they would cast as a leading man and Crowe would almost certainly come out top. Ridley Scott, who directed him in Gladiator, will work with him again later this year when they make A Good Year, based on the Peter Mayle book, a romance set in Provence. “I think Russell has become the finest actor of his generation,” he says. And Scott’s not alone in this view. Three times Oscar-nominated – he’s won once, for Gladiator – Crowe could well be nominated a fourth time for Cinderella Man. Since I visited the set, the film has been released in America. It received almost unanimously rave reviews but the box-office – $60 million at the time of writing – has been lower than expected. Some industry experts suggest that the film was released at the wrong time in the States – going head-to-head with the summer blockbusters like Batman Begins and War of the Worlds was a mistake for a serious drama, which traditionally would do better in the autumn. Mostly, though, they are baffled. In a summer of declining audience numbers, if a film that picks up such great reviews and word of mouth – cinema-owners even offered an unheard-of money-back guarantee – doesn’t do good business, then what will? Crowe is equally mystified. “People are always lamenting the quality of movies. If you judge Cinderella Man by its reviews, this was more positively reviewed than A Beautiful Mind and Gladiator – and they were critics’ darlings. But I’m hopeful that there’s some fight in Jim Braddock yet. There’s the international release, and the studio in the States is indicating they may re-release it in October.” Early next month he is due at the Venice Film Festival to promote Cinderella Man, and he’s hoping that his wife, the actress and singer Danielle Spencer, and their son, Charlie, who will be two in December, will be with him. “It’s even better than I imagined it would be,” he says of fatherhood. “And I always imagined it would be bloody great. My life with them makes me feel complete.” If there is a downside to family life, it’s that he’s
now prone to suffering from terrible loneliness when he’s on
the road without them. After visiting the set of Cinderella Man, I
was invited to the film’s New York premiere, where Crowe was
already missing his wife and son, who had flown home to Sydney a few
days earlier. Sitting in his suite at the Mercer Hotel, we chatted
about the reviews for Cinderella Man and his family. At one point he
asked to be excused while he tried, unsuccessfully, to put a call through
to Sydney. “You just can’t get an international call out.
It’s driving me f****** nuts.” Sixty hours later (after
a trip across the Atlantic to Manchester to watch his friend, Australian
boxer Kostya Tszya, lose his light welterweight title to England’s
Ricky Hatton), he was back in that same suite trying, unsuccessfully
again, to get a call through to his wife. He has already publicly apologised to Estrada on American television, describing it as “the most shameful situation I’ve ever gotten myself into”. He tells me later: “I was trying to call Dani and we’d had trouble with the phones there all week. I know people don’t understand why I was calling at that time in the morning, but if I call then it’s Charlie’s dinner time in Australia, so I get to talk to my son before he goes to bed. And you know, it’s my obligation to let my wife know where I am and who I’m with and that I haven’t drunk too much and that I miss her. And I do. And it’s just so ridiculous not to respect that and that’s what this guy was doing. Because I wasn’t hanging on him like I was a movie star. I was basically begging him to help me out. I was tired. I’d been in England and flew back and then, you know, jet lag all day, unable to sleep, and now I’m ready to sleep and all I’ve got to do is make my call home. “We had already been communicating for 15, 20 minutes and he has been trying for me and he was like, ‘Stay on the line, I’ll keep trying but if you hang up I’ll stop.’ And I’m like, ‘Dude, I want to go to the bathroom, if you get her on the line, just call.’ And he’s like, ‘No, no, I’m only going to call if you stay on the line.’ And I thought that was a little unreasonable, so I made a speech about being a long way from home, I’ve got a wife and a little baby who will be sitting down for dinner right now, and how he should be really helping me out, and he goes, ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever,’ and hung up on me. “So then I call him back and ask him his name and said, ‘I’m coming down to talk to you.’ So I went down there to talk to him man to man, you know, like, ‘Give me a reliable outside line…’” After Venice, Crowe is due in court in New York to find out what awaits him there. “I’m not sure what is going to happen,” he says. Back on set at the Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, such concerns were a long way off. Crowe was musing over the music to play next morning. How about Eye of the Tiger, I suggest, the theme to Rocky III by Survivor? “Very funny,” he says. “Actually, I was thinking more of Amore by Dean Martin. We need a bit of love around here.” Craig Bierko, for one, would surely have been pleased. n Cinderella Man opens in London Sept 9, nationwide Sept 16 © The London Times |
now and then you will connect, and
with some angles you can’t get away with not connecting,” says
Crowe. “It’s all about making it look real. And sometimes
it is real.” Each morning, after Crowe has warmed up in his changing
room deep in the bowels of this former hockey venue (doubling as Madison
Square Garden) and listened to stories from Muhammad Ali’s entertaining
former trainer, on-set adviser Angelo Dundee, he selects a song to
put on the sound system and get him in the mood. And then he heads
off down the corridors and into the auditorium. 
It was 4am when Crowe went down to the reception desk to complain,
and is alleged to have thrown the phone at night clerk Nestor Estrada,
nicking his cheek. Crowe has been charged with assault and possession
of a weapon (a phone). It’s been reported that Estrada’s
lawyers are seeking substantial damages in a civil action.