Why isn’t Guy Pearce a bigger star? Having been a guilty pleasure as the
muscle-bound gym-bunny Mike in Neighbours, he quickly earned cult
credibility and respect for his role in the gender-bending road movie
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
After playing the upright, uptight Detective Ed Exley in LA Confidential, and
a lean, deadly amnesiac in Christopher Nolan’s brilliant Memento, Pearce
should have been on the fast track to Hollywood’s A-list. Surely something
must have gone seriously wrong for him still to be plugging away at little
Australian movies, rather than enjoying the profile of high-flying
compatriots such as Russell Crowe and Heath Ledger.
So go the arguments on the fan websites, which tend to ignore one vital fact:
if Pearce is not a massive Hollywood phenomenon, that’s exactly the way he
wants it.
Pearce, who still lives in Melbourne, is probably the only actor on the planet
who has consistently worked at making himself less famous since inspiring
worldwide teen adulation when he was in his early twenties. He is, he says,
exactly where he wants to be in his career and, consequently, he hasn’t
priced himself out of the market for the smaller independent projects that
have been the more interesting additions to his CV of late — films such as
the Outback western The Proposition, scripted by the multi-talented musician
Nick Cave.
“The funny thing is most normal people say, surely you want to be as big a
star as possible? Why didn’t you take that thing? And I’m just, no, you are
falling into the trap of thinking that’s what people want, that if you want
to be an actor, you want to be at the very top of the A-list. But I don’t
work at that company, I work at another company.”
Averse to being fussed over on set, Pearce admits that he is the wrong person
on some levels to fit into the star system. “I’m really aware that actors
get put up on a pedestal and everyone wants to make a cup of tea for them.
And I’m always the first to say look, it’s actually really important that I
feel like we’re all completely equal on this, and that I’m focusing on my
job as much as the guy who has to come in after each take and sweep the
floor.”
Pearce has had a taste of big-budget, mega-salary Hollywood, notably in The
Count of Monte Cristo and the ill-starred remake of The Time Machine. He did
not enjoy the experience. “You kind of realise how thin it is and you end up
doing crap work anyway. You end up going, OK, that was embarrassing and
humiliating, now I’ve got to live that down. I’m much more affected by
feeling humiliated than anything else.” It’s not, he explains, as though
anyone needs millions of dollars to survive. The little jobs have the added
bonus of fulfilling a need that Pearce returns to time and again during our
conversation — feeling part of a team, being a link in a chain.
LA Confidential was an exception: “Curtis (Hanson) is a headstrong guy, it
wasn’t like a studio film, there weren’t too many cooks.” Otherwise, he has
been happiest in lower-budget projects. It all comes down to purity of
vision, an on-set consensus about what film is being made. Money destroys
creativity. “If you work on a low-budget film people know they have to be
creative because they know that they have only got $3.50. They can’t shoot
it 12 different ways and figure it out later.”
Pearce has chipped plum-coloured varnish on the nails of one hand, “Kate, my
wife, put it on me.” Whip-thin and wiry, with a face full of angles so sharp
that it looks like origami, Pearce has lost the boy-next-door accessibility
that characterised his Australian soap opera years and evolved into
something far more interesting. In The Proposition, he has an almost feral
quality, an outlaw’s cruelty, and a mute animalistic magnetism — if
magnetism is the right word for a character who looks as if he has been
stewing in his own sweat for the past month and presumably smells like a
rotting camel.
Pearce plays Charlie Burns, one of three outlaw brothers who have been
terrorising the 1880s Outback. Captured with his younger brother after the
brilliantly conceived gun battle that opens the film, Charlie is offered a
proposition by the police chief (Ray Winstone): find and kill his reckless,
charismatic older brother Arthur (Danny Huston), and Charlie and his
vulnerable younger brother will be pardoned. The conflicting loyalties and
the realities of life in a land so harsh that it crushes the good out of a
man are lyrically explored.
Pearce was already a fan of Cave’s music and says that once he heard about
Cave’s script he knew that “it was going to be good in the way that I need a
script to be good — insightful, unique, where the focus is on characters and
on real life. A lot of scripts that you read aren’t written to be acted,
they are written to be shot.”
Nonetheless, Cave’s script also managed to convey some of the visual impact of
the film, with its sun-baked Outback landscape and its threatening expanses
of sky. “Nick writes all that. He evokes the complete world in the script.
It’s like reading a beautiful book. And obviously my character doesn’t say a
lot in the film, and somebody asked me, how did you know you wanted to do
it, you’ve got no dialogue in the film? And I said because the print on the
page was so spot-on and gorgeous.”
What really boosts the impact of the picture is that, despite a dreamlike
quality to some of the photography, and despite the occasionally stylised
dialogue, the film is grounded in authenticity. For the men and women of the
Outback, grooming and personal hygiene take a back seat to simply surviving
day to day. Teeth are mossy green, eyes and mouths are mobbed by
opportunistic flies. For Pearce, this level of historical accuracy is
essential. “We talked a lot with the costume designer about how grubby and
screwed up the shirts should be. Then there might be an assistant in the
costume department who would see a shirt from the day before and give it a
wash before bringing it out to you. You’d be going, no, these people,
they’re not washing their shirts every night. So don’t be washing my shirt,
please. We all pretty much stank.”
With The Proposition, Pearce’s allegiance to the Australian film industry has
paid off. He’s been told that the film is going to save the local industry.
But does it need saving? Australians should have more belief, he says, in
their own judgment. “We need to be told by people overseas that our films
are good. Australians will then go, yeah, proud! Australian movie! Yeah! But
only because they have been told that by the French. People would much
rather watch Julia Roberts 27 times than take a punt on an Australian movie.”
- The Proposition is on general release
