Geoffrey Rush: The Eye of the Storm

Geoffrey Rush has been a part of the cinematic and theatrical landscape in Australia and around the world for over four decades, and his work has won him countless awards including  the rare triple threat of an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony.  His long list of outstanding films  includes “Shine,” “Shakespeare in Love,” “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers,” “Munich” and of course “The Kings Speech.”   This week he stopped by the SiriusXM studios and sat down with Ron Bennington to talk about his newest film, “Eye of the Storm.”  He is also a strong proponent of Australian film and theater and has recently been named President of the newly formed Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts.  Excerpts of the interview appear below.

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Ron Bennington: Quite the cast that you guys managed to put together for this small independent film.

Geoffrey Rush: I think when Fred Schepsi decides to do a project– I got to know Fred quite well about eight or ten years ago. I became the patron of the Melbourne International film festival. And we met maybe in 2002, at some cocktail event thing. I had always been a huge fan of his works. Because if you look back– his debut films of Devil’s Playground and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith are both masterpieces. And I looked at the whole body of work that he’d done in America with Roxanne and Six Degrees of Separation and Empire Falls, etc etc etc, and I thought wow, he always casts amazingly. And the thing I noticed is– in Melbourne– cause he always spends half his year in Melbourne and half in New York– I think he just escapes winter or something clever like that….. he’s always at the theater. So he knows, not just the people who are on screen. He can detect, ah, there’s a person I’d like to work with or here’s a role that is going to work really well. And I think in Eye of the Storm, apart from Judy and Charlotte and myself, the other principal players, people like Robyn Nevin and John Gaden, highly notable Australian theater actors chiefly– sometimes in film but most of their career has been stage based. And also they have a big history of having worked in a lot of Patrick White’s plays in Australia in very historically notable productions.

Ron Bennington: And this is the type of film that I imagine– for an actor– it’s the type of thing that everybody is looking for. Just to be in a film where there aren’t explosions but the tensions are caused through character interaction.

Geoffrey Rush: And also, Patrick– he’s our big boy. He’s written over from the late 40’s till over a thirty or forty year period he wrote 12 internationally significant novels about the psyche of the Australian mind and the landscape. And won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1973, presumably for this novel, in The Eye of the Storm. And he wrote about eight plays. No one had ever filmed his works because they are such massive– it’s like, it’s hard to film James Joyce Ulysses. The style of it is filled with extraordinary internal devices of interior monologues.

Ron Bennington: How are you able to take that? When it’s something that’s so internal on the page…

Geoffrey Rush: You’re lucky to have somebody like Fred Schepsi at the helm because he won’t shoehorn it into the nearest and best genre that he thinks will bring it to life. I know that he worked in collaboration with Judy Morris, the scriptwriter over time to try and capture some of the qualities of Patrick White’s novelistic world and say, how can we make this– and ultimately he found a way of putting up a very big canvas of a kind of empathy for this very dysfunctional family.

Ron Bennington: And the kind of physicality of this movie– where, I think it’s Australia in the sense that there’s a rawness to the weather, the land. Even when you’re well off, it’s not such an easy life, is it?

Geoffrey Rush: Yeah. I’m glad you got that from it. Cause it’s set in 1972 and just to put that into a little context, Australia had had a conservative government since just after the second world war in 1949. So for 23 years, which is an entire generation there was the one– pretty much the one Prime Minister up until ‘66. So there was, in the late 60’s early 70’s there was a definite post war feeling of the country emerging from an old, slightly imported English class bound squatocracy is what we would call it. Landed people who had money and maybe pretensions towards being the gentry. But there was a counter cultural movement happening. Patrick was a part of that in terms of literature. Suddenly it was a big deal for me and all my friends when we were in our early 20s to have an Australian novelist lauded with the Nobel Prize for literature. It was a big deal to us because there was no precedent to that kind of– at that stage our film industry was only just getting back on its feet after 40 years in the wilderness. And so with a new government in 1972 there was a tremendous energy. The fact that the Sydney Opera house was being built and we had never dreamed that we would create such an iconic, fantastic 21st century looking building, in that landscape that you’re talking about. So there was a lot of positive cultural energy.

Ron Bennington: For you I guess, as a young actor in Australia, you probably thought theater was just as far as you could go. What changed for you? What was the thing that was that turning point.

Geoffrey Rush: The turning point was, I had done a play back in the late 70s which was a quaint old, almost comic forgotten melodrama. It had been very famous as a radio series back in the 40s and 50s that I used to listen to as a kid. And it was based on this very old series of books called On Our Selection. They were like homesteaders. So they were nice little folksy tales of crazy dysfunctional families. We did a production of this and it became a huge kind of alternative hit– the oddness of it really appealed to people. And probably something to do with– yeah we’ve got to also find the crazy goofball history that we come out of as well. And then maybe 15 years later, the guy who directed it decided to make it as a film. So that was the first time I really had a proper role in film cause I was constantly doing stage work. And having done that I then did Shine and then I did another film. I did three films in a row and I thought ‘oh this is kind of interesting.’ And we had reached that point where– I suppose this is a bit of a blanket statement but, there were a lot of films about the pioneering days of Australia. Guys on horseback. And that was never really my territory. And suddenly there were a couple of roles that came up where you could play the country doofus. Or you could play the classical pianist with the slightly off center personality.

Ron Bennington: It’s a different skill set, isn’t it, to be in theater than film. Different muscles have to be worked I guess? Because there’s so many great theater actors that can be a draw here in New York and never make that translation to film. 

Geoffrey Rush: There are examples of some people who have been very notable stage and screen actors. Probably many more examples of people who have exclusively worked in the theater. But that’s also a generational thing. Olivier always wanted to be in the movies but also had a hugely substantial stage career. I think it might be to do with what floats your boat really. Because there is something about theater being in a big three dimensional space that allows you to kind of rev the engines to full throttle without it being cut up into little pieces by somebody else. Do you know what I mean? You actually take charge of the piece for the two or three hours that its on and it becomes more of a marathon run. Not to say that film making isn’t a marathon run but it’s to do with….

Ron Bennington: It’s a marathon of sprints almost.

Geoffrey Rush: Yeah, and there’s always– there’s always an intimacy there.

Ron Bennington: The film that you have now, Eye of the Storm, we mentioned great great performances. When you’re in a performance with some of these people, are you also, at the time paying attention to– wow, they’re nailing it?

Geoffrey Rush: Very much so. Particularly just in the context that Charlotte Rampling’s character is pretty much bedridden for 95% of the film. So there’s a strange theatricality to that. That exists even in the novel, that this central figure is sort of in the throne room so every other character’s got to come to her bedside vigil where she rules the family. And to watch somebody have to deal with those kind of restrictions– it means in your normal syntax of film making you don’t really get to be in wide shots or full length shots. You’re in a bed. So working with Charlotte on those scenes, I thought, she is so cluey. She’s one of the great actresses. She’s been around since….she was in Georgie Girl. Am I right in thinking that?

Ron Bennington: Yes.

Geoffrey Rush: So going into six decades of very significant film presence. So she brings a very comfortable very assured unpretentious artistry just to the job.

Ron Bennington: For you too, there’s a weakness in your character and then when you get away from her, a strength and almost arrogance.

Geoffrey Rush: Yeah. Look, Patrick White is revered, adored and equally loathed by the non-reading Australian public, I think I’d be fair to stay. His work is like– I think as a novelist, he’s out of the tradition a little like James Joyce or Lawrence. It’s very complex. Dense. Extraordinary prose and imagery. He can be inside a character’s head with an interior monologue and then after the next full stop, you suddenly realize he’s gone out of that person’s head somewhere else. It’s compelling stuff to read. But at the same time, he can be very blunt in his almost satiric angle on the strange culture of Australian life. Mostly a European or predominantly English migrant settlement moving into a country that’s got one of the oldest civilizations on earth. We’re clinging still to the edge of the island cause we’re desert in the middle. He takes those metaphors, he could be writing a novel like Voss, sort of based on — Blackhart, one of the great German explorers going into the heart of that country. It’s really autobiographical I think about Patrick going into the heart of his experiences of trying to come to terms with where do I live? What’s it mean to everybody? And Patrick, as a personality I got to know him a lot later in his life when he was writing for the theater– could be a curdmudgeonly difficult prickly person. But he also had a passionate love of the theater and a very sly cunning sense of humor. And I’ve been hearing from people in America who have seen the film– that audiences are really picking up on that.

Ron Bennington: Absolutely. The film is The Eye of the Storm. It comes out in select theaters Friday September 7.  We’ll see you next time through.

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You can learn more about Ron Bennington’s two interview shows, Unmasked and Ron Bennington Interviews at RonBenningtonInterviews.com.