Time to Turn the Page

Australian actor Geoffrey Rush was catapulted into the limelight with the 1996 release of Scott Hicks’ debut film, “Shine.” Cast as musical prodigy David Helfgott, Rush won an Academy Award for his work in the picture--which, needless to say, makes “Shine” a hard act to follow.

This week Rush attempts to beat the sophomore jinx with the release of “Les Miserables.” Directed by Bille August and co-starring Liam Neeson, Uma Thurman and Claire Danes, this latest version of the Victor Hugo classic finds Rush cast as Javert, the diabolically obsessed officer of the law who makes it his life’s work to hound Neeson’s Jean Valjean--a man condemned to a life on the run after hunger drives him to steal a loaf of bread.

Born in Toowoomba, Australia, in 1951, Rush had a solid career in Australian theater for two decades before winning the Oscar. Though his options expanded considerably with the success of “Shine,” Rush continues to live in a modest home in Melbourne with his wife, actress Jane Menelaus, and their two young children. Recently in L.A. to attend to various bits of business, Rush reflected on his life of the past few years over breakfast at a Beverly Hills hotel.

Question: What attracted you to “Les Miserables”?

Answer: I met Bille August in 1996 on one of my first trips to America to promote “Shine” and liked him very much. A week later we met in London and he said, “I want you to do this role.” I told him I couldn’t see myself as Javert because playing that kind of heavyweight just wasn’t in my repertoire, and Bille said, “Forget about thinking of him as a villain--Javert is a guy with a lot of demons.” And that I understand.

Q: What are Javert’s demons?

A: It’s a curiously written character because you don’t get much of Javert’s back story in the novel. Every time he appears on the page there’s very little description--it’s as if this implacable force simply appears: “There was the cold-hearted, marble face of Javert,” and that’s it.

I think his demons are rooted in the fact that his moral system is so inflexible and controlling that he can’t help but be in conflict with the real world. You’ve got to be able to roll with the punches in life, but Javert is incapable of that.

Q: In preparing for the shoot did you watch any of the other film versions of the novel?

A: No, but I did see the musical several years ago when a friend of mine was in a production of it in Sydney, and I liked it very much. It’s got a big, thumping score, people get to sing some great songs and there was a fantastic feeling in the audience. You might ask who cares about a story about a convict in the 1830s? It’s remote and has nothing to do with life today--but that’s why the classics are so good. They’re emblematic stories that continue to connect with people.

Q: What is the myth at the heart of “Les Miserables” that continues to speak to people?

A: I think it’s the sheer scale of the story that’s given it such longevity. I’ve been mostly in much lower-budget films, and on the set of “Les Miserables” I found myself shooting scenes where the background is textured with 400 extras--that rarely happens on Australian films, because budgets there simply can’t accommodate production values like that.

Even in the intimate scenes between Valjean and Javert, you’re aware of crowds of people working in the background in factories and in the streets, and they build up a rhythm that tells you something’s gonna snap. We shot the film roughly in sequence and when Claire Danes came on the set, Liam and I were both struck by the fact that the second part of the story is about an entirely new generation that struggles with the same conflicts. The power of our sins and troubles travels undimmed down through the generations.

Q: One interpretation of the novel is that Hugo is attempting to illustrate a belief central to all his writing: that man is perfectible. Do you agree?

A: For me, the story centers on the question: What does it take for a man to be good? Valjean has been victimized and humiliated by this savage penal system, and throughout the story he asks himself: Can someone be redeemed and made to feel whole again?

Q: Hugo also believed that it wasn’t enough for literature to simply be beautiful and entertaining; he felt it had a duty to serve society. Does film have a similar responsibility?

A: One is reluctant to assign specific responsibilities to art. It’s true that in the book Hugo goes on extraordinary rants--he’ll do several pages on the condition of the Parisian sewer system, for instance, or an entire chapter on the impact of the battle at Waterloo. Did his rant about the sewer system actually bring about any improvement in it? I think it probably did, but I doubt that it was noticeably direct, because society is conservative and slow. It takes a few forward-thinking and unusually humane people to say let’s legislate to improve things for this or that group of people. Legislating change in human behavior is a slow process.

Q: How did Rafael Yglesias go about adapting the character of Javert for the screen?

A: The novel is sprawling in that way particular to 19th century fiction, and there are stretches of several hundred pages where Javert disappears altogether. You can’t get away with that in film, however, and Rafael’s solution to the problem wasn’t to write additional scenes for Javert. What he did was focus on the Javert/Valjean duality, and create devices that allow a lot of the exposition of the book to be revealed in the way these two characters interact.

Q: Were there significant differences in how Scott Hicks and Bille August shaped your work on the set?

A: They’re similar directors in that both of them have extreme clarity of focus. Bille told me repeatedly, “Keep it simple and very dry, do less, do less.” I said, “Can’t I even have a little smile?” He replied, “Why would this man smile? The character is only humanized through his pain, not through any moments of warmth or levity.”

I don’t expect I’ll get many laughs with this performance. “Shine” came for me at a point where I’d just been in theatrical productions of “Diary of a Madman” and “King Lear,” and everyone told me that compared with theater, one must rein everything when acting on film.

David Helfgott is a pretty extroverted character, however, so Scott’s approach was to encourage me to keep David active and never let him become pathetic.

Q: What was the first film that made an impression on you?

A: My family used to holiday at the Gold Coast, which is Australia’s version of Miami, and my mum used to take me to movies there at night. When I was 6 she took me to see ‘Three Little Words,’ which is a biopic about the songwriters Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, and I also recall Abbott & Costello’s ‘Dance With Me Henry.’

When I was in high school I remember seeing “A Man for All Seasons” and thinking it was a terribly serious film. Then once I got to university in 1969, film became my passion. Scorsese, Coppola and the rest of that generation of American directors were making extraordinary movies and I saw them all, never dreaming I’d meet any of the people involved in the making of them, let alone be in a film myself.

The school I attended from 1969 through ‘71--the University of Queensland--was a center of activity in Brisbane for theater geared toward social change, and though I was in plays at school, it hadn’t occurred to me to pursue a career as an actor.

I figured I’d end up being a teacher and acting was strictly an extracurricular thing for me until 1971, when the Queensland Theatre Company was set up in Brisbane--at that point everything changed. I literally did my last exam on a Friday for my arts degree, and started work on Monday at this company where I spent three years.

Q: Were you deluged with offers and invitations after you won the Oscar for best actor?

A: I wouldn’t use the word “deluged,” but certainly there was more interest. I think I’ve been offered every Australian film that’s gone into production since. Some of the offers were quite silly too--it was obvious people wanted my name attached just to get funding.

Q: Is there such a thing as an Australian film style?

A: We’ve always been peculiarly determined to maintain the integrity of our own culture, and I think that’s why the films that come out of Australia have been so diverse. From “Shine” to “Muriel’s Wedding” to “Strictly Ballroom”--there’s a clarity of vision in the films produced there that perhaps is rooted in the determination to be true to ourselves. There’s also something strangely subversive in the Australian temperament that could have to do with the fact that it was a culture begun by convicts.

Q: What’s the most widely held misconception about the life of an Academy Award-winning actor?

A: That you immediately become a jerk. I did an interview for Australian television just prior to the Oscars last year, and the interviewer made some comment along the lines of “soon you’ll be driving a Porsche.” At home it’s assumed that any Australian actor who becomes successful will immediately move to Hollywood.

My wife and I just bought a new house in Melbourne so I could have an office and the kids could have a playroom, and when the auction sign went up on our slightly humbler house, all the neighbors started whispering, “I hear they’re going over to Hollywood.” We moved one suburb up the road!

Q: What’s next for you?

A: I just finished shooting a film adaptation of “Elizabeth I” directed by Shekhar Kapur and co-starring Cate Blanchett--I play Sir Francis Washington, who was Elizabeth’s spymaster. I’d originally turned the part down, but Shekhar came to the set of “Les Miserables” in Prague and spoke so brilliantly about where he saw the film heading that he totally won me over.

I’m also about to do a stage production of “The Marriage of Figaro” with a director I’ve worked with a lot over the last 15 years. The repertory company he’s affiliated with is opening up a new theater in Brisbane, which is my old stomping ground from 25 years back--that’s where I started.

Q: How do you occupy yourself when you’re not working?

A: Dealing with downtime is one of the hardest things about being an actor and I must admit I’m not good at it. I’ll get a bit spun-out shooting a film and think it’ll be great when I can take three months off, but a few days into the holiday I start mumbling to myself, “Can I act? I don’t think I can act. I’ve lost it.” It’s terrible!

The last time I worked really hard was in 1992--I did seven projects in the theater that year, and afterwards I had a bit of a midlife crisis. I went through a bad period of panic attacks and anxiety, and at that point I started to redress my life and worked on finding some balance. My daughter was born around that time, and her arrival was very restorative for me. After that I did a few theater projects in a row--one was David Mamet’s “Oleanna,” which I did with Cate Blanchett--and all of them were well-received.

Then from 1993-95 I hardly did anything. I was healing from the panic, waiting for “Shine” to startshooting, and spending time with my daughter. So, comparatively speaking, last year was quite busy for me--I did three films, not to mention all the awards ceremonies I attended.

I was such a media slut last year--I felt like I should put “awards show attendee” on my tax form.

Q: Were you surprised at the thrashing David Helfgott got from classical music critics when he toured last year?

A: It’s true he got shockingly cruel press. The experience David offers is obviously not what classical critics are looking for so they dismissed him, but there are two sides to this story. I recently saw him perform the “Rach 3” at the Albert Hall in London. [Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 plays a pivotal role in the plot of “Shine.”]

I’d never seen him perform it before and as I watched him I thought, “This is what this whole story’s been about, this possibility, and this evening closes a chapter on my life.” It was an extraordinary concert. English audiences are reserved, and English classical concert audiences are extremely sober, but most of the audience was standing as he came out.

Technically he played rather brilliantly by my hearing, and at the end of the piece people were crying and running up to the stage. He took the most outrageous curtain call I’ve ever seen [Rush stands up and executes a wildly exaggerated bump-and-grind]--it was as if he was making love to the audience! When he first sat down at the piano, you could see him mentally clinging to the conductor--he looked up at him like a child. To see a performer come out in front of 3,000 people at the Albert Hall and reveal that degree of fragility and vulnerability means something to an audience. And it certainly meant something to me.

Q: Do you expect audiences who loved you in “Shine” will be reluctant to accept you as the villainous Javert?

A: I don’t know. I do know, however, that it’s important that I don’t keep playing David Helfgott roles.