Yuku free message boards

Quote:

---

Russell Crowe eases back a cog or two, on screen and off, writes LAWRIE MASTERSON.

GIVEN the subject matter of his light-hearted, new film, A Good Year -- the picturesque vineyards of Provence, fruity reds, a beautiful French woman -- Russell Crowe admits he must be feeling romantic.

"And potent," he adds with a high-pitched giggle, as a reminder that he and his wife, Danielle Spencer, welcomed two-year-old Charlie's little brother, Tennyson, as recently as July.

Certainly Crowe, 42, judging from his demeanour at an interview to promote A Good Year, is mellowing and not only on screen, where his latest character is probably his most affable since he played the gay son of Jack Thompson's character in The Sum of Us a dozen years ago.

By his own admission, his "level of intensity" has dropped, compared with a few years ago when he played career-defining roles in The Insider, Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind in fairly quick succession, earning consecutive Academy Award nominations and winning an Oscar for Gladiator.

"The thing I used to apply to my work now doesn't get to my work until it's been filtered through the needs of my family. So, my work I look on with a different eye," he says.

"There was a certain thing I needed to get out of the work while I was doing it and I don't need that any more. I just enjoy being on a set, making a film, problem-solving with my friends like Ridley (director Sir Ridley Scott). But it's not the most important thing any more, not even in the top 10.

"Whatever my wife and children need is where every day begins. Then I have the rest of my family to look after and very close friends and animals.

"Then I've got to make sure we've got the right non-chemical fertilisers to use on the soil at the farm. These things are much more important. In certain ways there are some other things I just don't care about any more.

"For a long time the whole thing about being pursued by people down the street and stuff like that would really bother me, you know? Now if it happens, it's just part of the day and I don't worry about it."

Crowe makes the shooting of A Good Year sound like something of a romp, which probably is just what he needed after the nasty publicity surrounding his infamous phone-throwing incident in New York last June.

It is his second film with Scott and seems an unlikely choice, following their collaboration on Gladiator.

"What most people would expect is a lot of death and buckets of blood and stuff," Crowe agrees.

"But, I mean, it's just healthy to work against those kind of expectations, to neutralise those kind of expectations.

"I don't think either of us has ever indicated in our work that we believe we're limited. Alongside (Scott's) Blade Runner and Alien, there's Thelma and Louise and, in my own work, alongside Romper Stomper is The Sum of Us."

Based on the novel by Peter Mayles, who also wrote A Year in Provence, A Good Year is the story of brash London investment banker Max Skinner (Crowe), who learns he has inherited a small vineyard from his Uncle Henry (Albert Finney, seen in flashbacks), who raised him, but from whom he had become estranged.

At first determined to sell the place, Max finds himself more and more drawn to it -- and a beautiful neighbour, Fanny Chenal (Marion Cotillard).

Then a young Californian, Christie Roberts (Australian Abbie Cornish), arrives, claiming to be Uncle Henry's daughter from a brief affair. Under French law, she would inherit the vineyard.

"It just felt like the right thing to do," Crowe says of his decision to star in the film.

"I wanted to take my family on to a location and I knew my wife would enjoy being in Provence. I wanted to work with Ridley. I wanted to get our schedules back on the same tack, because we were supposed to do X amount of things and it just ended up that we were always off working on other things."

Then there was the French custom of drinking wine with meals, including lunches on film sets.

"I just think it's such a wonderfully sophisticated thing to do," Crowe says with a smile.

"Everybody relaxes. It's good for your digestion, but you've got to get the work done in the mornings."

Crowe and Scott are working together again on American Gangster.

"I hope he never loses the bad boy in him, because that's what makes the clock tick," Scott says in a separate interview. "I think he's just learned to keep it under control."

In American Gangster, Oscar winner Denzel Washington, the star of Crowe's second American movie, Virtuosity (1995), plays Frank Lucas, who used US military transport to move huge shipments of heroin between Cambodia and New York in the late 1960s and early '70s. When he was arrested in 1975 by New York detective Richie Roberts (played by Crowe), Lucas had about $375 million in cash holdings, plus businesses such as restaurants and hotels. He served 17 years in prison.

Both Lucas and Roberts have visited the set of the film.

Despite the more intense nature of the film in comparison with A Good Year, and the responsibility of playing a living person rather than an invented character, Crowe says he and Scott are enjoying themselves.

"This thing is set in the 1970s, so, I've got David Cassidy hair," he says, laughing again.

"We're just dashing around the five boroughs of New York and trying to create a movie that feels like somebody was right there with these real people and a documentary was being made."

Crowe also has completed the drama, Tenderness, again playing a police officer, for Australian director John Polson. It is scheduled for 2007 release.

---