On the promotional trail for American Gangster (reviewed below), The Void’s Julia Collins met up with the all drinkin’ all fightin’ Russell Crowe.
“Lock these doors,” says Russell Crowe. “We’ll just press a button. You’ll smell something in the air for a while but after that it’ll just be a long sleep.”
I look up, slightly disconcerted. It’s not quite the start I was expecting. Crowe notes my reaction and grins. It’s the end of a long day of press interviews to promote his latest role as New York detective Richie Roberts in Ridley Scott’s American Gangster and I’m relieved to find that he’s in a cheerful and expansive mood.
Having established that I’m not about to be overcome by anything unexpected, I regain my concentration. It’s the third collaboration with director Ridley Scott after Gladiator and A Good Year. So does the experience of working together change over the years?
“It just gets easier really,” the Oscar-winner says. “We knew when we worked together on Gladiator that we communicated really well. It took probably longer for us to realise that in any given roomful of film people that each other was the person that we’d each rely on and I think that’s the thing that gets stronger every time that we work together. He has no problem in throwing responsibility my way and I really enjoy that. I think Ridley is one of the greatest visual artists of our time and I feel very privileged that he wants to work with me so I just go with that flow.
“But I’ve never met a director who doesn’t need some help. But that’s my gig. I’m there as a lieutenant for the bloke who’s running the show. And Ridley’s the governor, you know, he’s a very organised filmmaker, he’s got everything sorted out. He creates time for the actors and some other directors forget that that’s what they should be doing so I just love the style, the way that he works. You don’t finish a day on a Ridley Scott set thinking ‘Oh god, I wish that I had one more opportunity to run up those twelve flights of stairs.’ You get done what you want to get done and you get the time to focus on all the details.”
Does he appreciate there might be occasional clashes in the way an actor thinks a character should be?
“We don’t clash any more. I mean, we have differences of opinion but it’s not a clash. We’re perfecting the art of the wordless argument. It can take place across a crowded room. I know that some of the people will assassinate me for saying this but what Ridley and I know about each other is that we’re both very kind and generous people. That’s why we get on.”
It’s the second time you’ve worked with Denzel as well. Was it a useful thing to have a certain rapport from before?
“Well we wouldn’t have needed it necessarily. The fact that we’re mates made it enjoyable that we were going to work together again. The thing is that twelve years ago it was probably easier for both of us just to simply have fun and enjoy ourselves and that was always the basis of our friendship, that when we worked together we enjoyed each other’s company. And we’ve kept up that friendship over a time.”
The film started life after an article called The Return of Superfly appeared in New York Magazine seven years ago. It focused on a heroin smuggler called Frank Lucas, who built an empire worth millions of dollars in the late 60s and early 70s by importing purer heroin than anyone else at the time and selling it cheaper than anyone else. He ran his enterprise with the help of his brothers and essentially ruled Harlem for a number of years. He is probably best known for his unusual and highly controversial method of smuggling the drug into America – on American military planes, in the coffins of the war dead of the Vietnam conflict. This method was effective for a number of years, until the police caught up with him and he was jailed.
One of the key themes of the film is the contrast between the Lucas, the violent gangster who pushes a deadly product but has an ordered and happy family life and Roberts, the honest cop with the chaotic personal life who devotes himself to tracking Lucas down and eventually succeeds. But the original magazine article doesn’t mention Richie Roberts. In fact Roberts was just one of a large number of police who worked on the case. So at what point was his story fleshed out? Was it when they knew they’d got Russell Crowe for the job?
“No I think that both the previous directors knew that they had to have another side to the story. You can’t have such a glamorous and compelling bad guy without bringing them to task because as much as audiences enjoy watching a bad guy do his thing, when the body count starts to rise they want to know that justice will prevail. And I think that Steve Zaillian, when he originally wrote it, he wrote it quite balanced but over time it had been affected one way or the other and you’re talking about an American Jew from New Jersey who, at one point in time was going to be played by Benecio del Toro, so changes had been made to affect the character that weren’t necessarily based on truth so it was a matter of going back through all the various drafts and all the reasons why certain changes had been made and then seeing what that template was and what parts of Richie’s history really needed to be brought into the story so you could understand a little bit about who Richie was.
“He’s very humble and reticent man, for me talking to him is quite difficult. I’d ask him a very complicated question and get a one-word answer. But at one point in time I’d made the decision that I was going to wear a Star of David. Because all the photographs that I had of Richie Roberts he did and he had since the late 60s always worn the Star of David and he, probably because of the current political climate or whatever, saw courage in that and then he started to answer my questions but he’s one of those sort of blokes who, once he does start talking, he can condemn himself at the same time as he’s trying to help you out. And he would say to me, ‘I don’t really wanna be seen as a womaniser’ and then in the next breath he would tell you about the time he fucked the stenographer in the broom cupboard of the Supreme Court during the course of a really important case.”
So did the conversations with Richie Roberts help to shape the character?
“I didn’t know anything about Richie, he wasn’t a big feature in what we knew of Frank Lucas so I wanted to know about him and who he was. And the thing I found out about Richie is that he was what I’d describe as a true patriot. He’d come out of school and looked around a little bit and decided to become a Marine. He’d gone into the Marine corps and whatever he’d discovered it didn’t really satisfy him. So he went into the police force and what he discovered there didn’t satisfy him either so he went to law school and became a prosecutor and that didn’t satisfy him either. Every one of these American institutions that he went into in the country that he believed absolutely in was affected by some kind of active or benign corruption. So he ended up becoming a criminal defence attorney because he could still be a patriot from that point of view. He could be an advocate for people without defence, stand up for people who required defence and he could stand on the outside of the castle and shut the box. And he could say I don’t care if you’re the president, it is my duty to ask you what the fuck you’re doing mate. So he stuck to his guns, he stayed an idealist and he is still a patriot and I really respect him for that.
“Richie is still pretty much a dysfunctional bloke. The first day that we met, he was going to drive from where he was in Jersey to see me and he thought to himself. I’ve gotta make a good impression so he borrowed a friend’s Jaguar. About halfway, with about 30 or 40 miles to go, he got a flat tyre. But he thought well I can’t stop to change the tyre because then I’ll be late, so he drove 35 miles on a flat tyre. So by the time that he arrived the rim was completely bent out of shape to the point where it had been pushing the back panel of the Jaguar out and now had done a serious amount of damage to the back part so he didn’t make the impression he was intending to make. And he explained to me his reasons for not stopping while driving with a flat tyre and I didn’t buy any of it. But I would have liked to have been involved in the conversation with him and the mate he’d borrowed the Jag from, explaining why he’s now done umpteen thousands of dollars of fucking damage to his friend’s car. Anyway, it was important to him at the time. He’s a complex chap as, I suppose, everybody is in their own way.”
The friendship with Frank is kind of intriguing though, isn’t it?
“Yeah, still is. Richie and Frank are still mates today. They’ve been friends longer than they’ve been adversaries. I asked Richie about that quite a lot, I pumped him about it and he said ‘Look, the way I have to explain it is that when a criminal decides to turn against his brother criminals, they do so in a rush and they do so with a certain energy and then no stone will be unturned, everybody’s going down’. And I had to just sit in a room with the guy for six months going through point to point, detail to detail, and we begin to achieve things together and one by one we arrested these guys and you start seeing the guy, the criminal, and Frank Lucas going ‘Yeah, get that motherfucker, let’s go for this guy’ and it becomes a sport.
“And the two engage like that so at the end of the day they incarcerate 75 per cent of the Special Investigations Unit specifically set up in New York City to combat drugs and three out of every four of those men were building their lifestyles based on drug money. So that’s a massive achievement and that’s the thing that they did together and if you think about any way of bonding between people, male or female, whatever and you have that kind of achievement that you share and that’s going to be a strong bond and in their case it’s lasted all their lives. And when Frank was released from prison and required defending, Richie stepped up and was his defence attorney. So he was the cop that tracked him down, the prosecutor who put him away, the bloke who took all the information off him and the guy who defended him when he got out of prison. I think these guys are in love.”
Is there any bonus in playing a character that’s based on a real person?
“It’s not a bonus. It’s a responsibility. That’s cool, as long as they answer your questions. As long as they tell you the truth. There’s a couple of things I pulled Richie up on, that he didn’t quite tell me the truth about. The thing with a fictional character is that it’s your imagination so then you’re looking at the setting and you’re looking at what takes place in the story and you’re examining it from that point of view. When you’re playing a real person, especially one that’s still alive, there’s a responsibility involved. But I kinda like that responsibility. If you’d asked me about 15 years ago I probably would have said I’ve probably got no real interest in playing real people but over time it seems I’ve started to play quite a few real people. I don’t search for it but I certainly don’t shy away from it either.
“The thing that was interesting for me was how compelling this man, Frank Lucas, was. If we were talking about Frank Lucas in American corporate terms, we’d be talking about a guy who’d had universities named after him. There’d be scholarships in the name of Frank Lucas. The brilliance and genius which he applied to his particular thing, which was selling heroin, is equivalent to Bill Gates in his particular game. This is a guy who decided to circumvent all usual channels, cut out the American market completely from the thing that they did, which was supply drugs, find his own source, and then come up with the concept of flying that heroin which he found in South East Asia back into America in the bodybags of dead soldiers. If you flip that over into a series of decisions in some other product, it’s brilliant. He’s a guy that had $250m in the bank when he was arrested in 1974. Which is equivalent to a couple of billion today. He’s a compelling figure and a movie should have been made about him.”
The filming of Body of Lies, with Leonardo DiCaprio is taking place at the moment but there’s a rumour of other movies with Ridley Scott – one of them being Nottingham, about the Sheriff of Nottingham. Is that true?
“The script for Nottingham should arrive this week. We’re thinking that we’ll be in production between February and June. Just recently we were both contacted by David Geffen who has a project that’s been on his mind and burning for a long time. We’ve talked about it in some detail, we both agree with David that it’s a really compelling story so it would appear that we’ve got at least two projects to go.”
The Sheriff of Nottingham tends to be portrayed as a bit of a panto baddie. Will this be different?
“I’m a big Robin Hood fan, I have been since I was a kid, and if you go back in the history and the mythology and you go back to the ballads of Robin the Beheader, who was a man who would chop off your head and your hands and take all your money and not give anything to anybody, so we’ll have a look at that. We’ll have a look at how the mythology morphed over time in terms of who was in power and what was the kind of church we should all attend and we know in this country that changed quite regularly and we’ll look at the whole mythology and how much of that is embedded in the psyche of people when they think of Robin Hood. I tell you this; Richard the Lionheart won’t be bounding up in the last scene saving the day. The bloke only spoke French, the bloke spent less than six months of his ten-year reign in England and Richard Harris is dead.”
Last time you were on set with Denzel there were rumours of trailer envy. What happened this time?”
I don’t really remember that. I don’t. I probably made a joke about it. My bottom is covered in the bruises of my own comedy coming back to bite me there. It was probably one of those sort of things you’re expected to say when you’re a young actor. I’ve got people who remind me they asked me when I was earning 26 cents a movie they were saying ‘What would you do if you earned 10 million dollars a movie?’ and I went ‘Fucking retire’, go home, you know, pay the bills off, look out for mum and dad and say ‘see you later’ to working. But of course the reality of the thing is that you’re not in this business for the bucks anyway, that’s a thing that’s probably going to come across as being archly pretentious and some of you will assassinate me for it but this gig’s a calling, man. Especially for people that do it in a public way for more than four or five years. You put up with all the shit that comes with this job, you’ve got to love it at its core and I dig it, man. I think it’s a privilege making films.
It’s the most expensive commercial creative medium on the planet and it’s a privilege for me to do it. And I dig it and I give it my best. And I don’t have any problems whatsoever in standing up in front of a group of people and saying I take making movies seriously. And if you don’t think I should well you obviously won’t like my movies.”
And on that unexpectedly philosophical note, our encounter draws to a close and shortly afterwards, he leaves. On my way out I take a last slightly suspicious sniff of the air in the room, just in case. By and large, I do like his movies. And after 40 minutes in his company, I rather like Russell Crowe as well.
