On the fourth day, the Oscar-winning actor Russell Crowe confesses his admiration for the Karlovy Vary festival, of which he is the main guest. “I had no idea it was like a fairy tale here, with such beautiful architecture. I will not keep it to myself and I will recommend everyone to come to Karlovy Vary,” he said this Saturday, when he presented the film Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World at the Thermal Hotel.
Crowe immediately after his arrival on Wednesday tweetoval “God, Karlovy Vary is so beautiful”. He walked around town, visited jewelry stores, signed autographs. On Friday, he received an award for contribution to cinematography from the festival president, Jiří Bartoška, and played in front of Thermal with his band late in the evening.
On Saturday afternoon, the actor known from the films Gladiator or Pure Soul arrived in the great hall and began a long monologue, twice even interrupting the interpreter. He praised the organizers for screening the film from a thirty-five millimeter copy instead of a digital version, and received a standing ovation. Later, he extended the press conference several times, speaking for over an hour in total.
Among other things, he joked about the “Czech obsession” with beer and wondered why it is such a topic for the Czechs. “My father was a hotel manager, so I’m relatively familiar with beer, but even though a lot of Czech beer is great, if I have to choose, I’ll choose Guinness, sorry,” he apologized.
Russell Crowe spoke for the longest time about the naval drama from the time of the Napoleonic wars Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World, directed by Peter Weir in 2003. “I have fond memories of him, although the first day of shooting was hellish. The director is a stickler and decided that we would always sail in one direction so that the position of the sun would not change in the shot. In practice, this meant that on the first day of shooting we ended up 40 miles from the Mexican coast and only then did we start the return voyage. We returned at half past four in the morning,” Crowe recalled. Because the crew needed to rest, everyone didn’t meet until sunset the next day, when they didn’t shoot anything.
Similarly, the director was initially convinced that the water was a different shade on each coast and that if the scenes set around Cape Horn, the southernmost point on the American continent, were shot off Mexico, the real sailors would recognize it and laugh at the film. “That’s why Weir sent the crew to all the places where our ship is moving in the picture. So when you see a shot from the edge of the ship down on the screen, you’re really looking at the sea shot in those places,” points out Crowe.
Russell Crowe as Captain Jack Aubrey in Master & Commander: The Other Side of the World. | Photo: United Archives / Profimedia.cz
In the film, he plays Captain Jack Aubrey, who is chasing a French corsair ship. Crowe was nominated for a Golden Globe for his role as the brave sailor and ingenious tactician, originally a fictional character from a series of books by the now-deceased English writer Patrick O’Brian.
“On the first day, we all came in uniforms with epaulettes, each in a matching color from light blue to red and white, and we all had to sew our name tags on ourselves. Everyone was given a needle and just enough thread to do it,” Crowe illustrates, as director Weir bonded the actors with extras.
Among other things, Captain Aubrey plays the violin in the film. It took Crowe “hundreds of hours” to learn, taking lessons from violinist Richard Tognetti, artistic director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra. When they wanted to play again after a few years, the actor found that he had forgotten everything. “I took the violin in my hand and didn’t get a note out of it,” he admits.
He also returned to Vary to receive the Master & Commander. The film, with a budget of 150 million dollars, took 212 million worldwide, turning only two of the ten Oscar nominations. At the time, academics preferred the third part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy: The Return of the King. “It was the studio’s fault that they promoted this art film as some kind of Gladiator at sea. We made people expect it to be an action spectacle, but that turned off Peter Weir fans and others were just disappointed,” admits the actor.
At the same time, he mentioned a few months old in Vary article of the British GQ magazine, whose critic analyzed the renewed interest in Master & Commander among today’s thirty-somethings on streaming services and social networks. The author attributes it to the fact that the period film, which takes place entirely on a ship and therefore does not feature a single woman, portrays masculinity as something “wonderfully healthy and positive”. Crowe likes that interpretation. “The film is a poem, an essay about men who understood what authority and order is, what you can achieve when you join forces. It’s about masculinity, but not the toxic kind that’s all over the place today,” he adds.
Russell Crowe presented the film Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World in Vary in 2003, in which he portrayed Captain Jack Aubrey. | Video: Miramax Films
Admiration for Ridley Scott
During Saturday’s press conference in Vary, the actor further recalled how he received the Oscar for the role of the Roman general Maximus in the historical film Gladiator from 2000. forget their wives’ names. I also had to take a deep breath,” admits that the sheer nervousness in acceptance speech mistakenly combined two names.
“But at the same time, I said something that young artists still approach me about,” says Crowe. He’s referring to the part of the Oscars speech where he spoke from the perspective of a New Zealand boy growing up in the Australian outback dreaming of a film career. “I guess it resonated because people still stop me today and say that this speech gave them the courage to follow their dreams,” says the actor.
Russell Crowe as General Maximus Decimus Meridius in Gladiator 2000. | Photo: Entertainment Pictures / Profimedia.cz
Recently, Russell Crowe and his band found themselves on the island of Malta, where the 85-year-old director Ridley Scott is currently filming the sequel to Gladiator. Because of that on the spot rebuilt replica of the Roman Colosseum. “When I saw her, for a moment I felt as if I had fallen back in time. Ridley and I had dinner a few times, but I’m not in the second part, in this fictional world my character has already died, so I don’t even know the details of the story ,” says Crowe.
“If Ridley Scott decided to make the second part of Gladiator after almost a quarter of a century, he certainly has strong reasons for it. It is typical for him that he constantly rethinks everything, returns to it and considers how to do it better,” adds the actor.
He made five films with this director, including Good Year, American Gangster, Labyrinth of Lies and the most recent Robin Hood from 2010. “For an actor like me, there is no better experience than being on set with him. I hope we will work together again,” he notes.
He refers to Scott as a role model even in terms of age. Crowe will celebrate his 60th birthday next year. “I got to the point a long time ago where you look at yourself in the mirror and you can’t believe your eyes. My brain and my heart don’t agree with what they see in that mirror. But as I get older, so does Ridley. The last time we were together was on the set of Robin Hood was looking at those giant sets and we had an inkling that something was changing in the movie world and that we might not be on the set of a big budget project like this again. And now he’s got another $200 million movie under his thumb at his age and he’s building gigantic sets again ,” Crowe adds admiringly.
Russell Crowe on the red carpet in Vary on Friday. | Photo: CTK
Cashe refused to play
Not only following Scott’s model, Crowe also tried to direct. He’s made two feature films, including last year’s Poker Face, a couple of documentaries, not all of which he’s released yet, and over three dozen music videos.
Crowe has been singing and acting since the mid-1980s. He also performed in Vary this Friday with a band called Indoor Garden Party. “Since 2011, I’ve been making a documentary called The Last Breath about our line-up and my relationship with music,” he mentions.
The film could also include footage from Karlovy Vary, where the band finished their tour. At the afterparty, Crowe then hugged his bandmates, some of whom he has known for decades. “When I was only in Australian films, a lot of people came to my concerts. Once I broke through in Hollywood, some people blamed me for not giving up music. They thought I was doing it for fame, and now that I’m famous, I can stop. But I have a deep creative relationship with music, I devote myself to it out of an inner need, and I want to emphasize that in the documentary,” he explains.
For the same reason, in 2005 he turned down an offer to portray country singer Johnny Cash in the film Walk The Line. His Gladiator co-star Joaquin Phoenix eventually took on the role and was nominated for an Oscar for it. “He played it amazingly. I had a specific reason for the rejection: it was clear to me that this was a role for which you would get a Grammy nomination, and I didn’t want to reduce my relationship to music to imitating someone else,” says Crowe.
He claims that many actors his age already approach work cynically, which is reflected in their performances. “I’m not like that, I still live by it. When filming starts, I think of people like all of you in this room. It’s the fiftieth day of filming out of eighty, and I get up at four in the morning again, but I always know why I’m doing it, why I he chose that project and what it means to me. The older I get, the deeper my relationship with the film,” he reflects.
Because of the recent role of the real exorcist Gabriel Amorth in the film The Pope’s Exorcist, which was also shown in Czech cinemas and where he speaks, among other things, Italian, Crowe spent three weeks walking around Rome and meeting those who knew the priest. Similarly, while filming the 1999 thriller Insider: The Man Who Knew Too Much, he met biochemist Jeffrey Wigand, a former executive at a major tobacco company, who exposed the cover-up of information about the negative effects of cigarettes on health.
“We played golf together, because Wigand kept stressing to the director what a great golfer he was. And he wasn’t, not even a little bit. This realization was very valuable to me: that he can’t play golf, but he really wants to be seen as a top golfer. it says a lot about the character,” thinks Crowe.
Al Pacino and Russell Crowe as Jeffrey Wigand in the 1999 movie Insider. | Photo: ČTK / AP
Recently, he drew attention to himself, among other things, by playing the role of the Greek god Zeus in the superhero movie Thor: Love Like Thunder. Although he previously avoided comic films, he praises the collaboration with New Zealand director Taika Waititi. In the picture he speaks with a Greek accent, which he established in spite of the producers. “They had me say each scene once in Greek and then with the British accent that they were promoting. But in test screenings, the audience responded better to the distorted Greek version, so Waititi kept his word and actually used it,” boasts the actor.
In the near future, he will appear in the Marvel superhero film Kraven the Hunter, the horror film The Georgetown Project, the action thriller Land of Bad and the film Sleeping Dogs, about a detective suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Last but not least, a film about the Nuremberg trials awaits Russell Crowe. “I will play Hermann Göring,” he revealed in Vary, referring to the Nazi politician and war criminal. He was sentenced to death in 1946, but before that he committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule. The film will be shot by the American James Vanderbilt.
Video: They kiss and hug me, says the interpreter of the movie stars
“It was always very pleasant to work with the movie stars who came to Karlovy Vary,” said interpreter Helena Koutná in the Spotlight program. | Video: Jakub Zuzánek
2023-07-01 16:14:22
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