As the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival is in full swing around the city the Scannain has been out and about taking to the actors and directors on the red carpet. Last Friday was the Irish premiere of Russell Crowe’s directorial debut, the powerful World War I set drama The Water Diviner. Crowe was in Dublin to promote the film and we caught up with him.
What was the reason that made you decide to go with The Water Diviner as your directorial debut?
In a funny way I didn’t choose this movie, it chose me. I was in the middle of the busiest time of my career professionally. I had five movies in sixteen months, Man of Steel, Broken City, Noah, Les Mis, and Winter’s Tale and in the middle of that this script arrived and I had such a connection to it. I had this thing happen which never had happened before, I wanted that visceral reaction, I wanted to write notes about the character and I’m correcting dialogue. Also I had this other voice that was saying you have to take responsibility for this, only you can see this through and read between the lines and I sat back and I thought, what’s that? Then I realised that is the sort of voice of directors I like working with. If you’re working with Ridley (Scott) you’re absolutely certain he’s the only person who could make the story a certain way it should be made and it’s that certainty of leadership that you respond to. For some reason this script drew that out of me.
You said there you look up to directors like Ridley Scott, did you ask any of the directors you’ve worked with before for advice going into this?
You’re on a .com aren’t you?
Yep.
So I can tell you the real story?
Yeah.
So I asked Ridley, any advice on this thing? He goes, oh fuck off you’ll be fine. Then he asked me about a question on a completely different subject.
There’s a great story of fatherhood and parenting in The Water Diviner, did you take much inspiration from your own fatherhood because you said you took on Man Of Steel because you wanted to show your children a film you could actually show them. Is this another kind of film like that?
There are definitely things in this movie that as a father is very obvious. Once you have children you see everything through the prism of having children, so yeah. My sons have seen this film and they get the perspective of it and it was very interesting with my little one because unbeknownst to me he had plans in terms of his career. What he wanted to do, he said after he finishes university he’d go off and have a couple of battles and I’ll do something creative. So I said, step back a bit, what’s the battle bit? Why would you go to battle? To earn some money dad. I said to him, being a soldier doesn’t necessarily pay very well. He goes to me, your kidding. No, what did you think and he said to me, well I thought you got a million a battle. There’s a logic in that, putting your life on the line but that’s not reality. So he saw the film and he asked me to arrange with his best friend at school to see it and so he saw it and then he said, no we’re not going to join the army.
The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival continues until Sunday March 29th. Tickets and more information can be found on the festival website.