» Dirty news – Russell Crowe interview
Russell Crowe talks about creative journalism and his role as a morally challenged reporter in State of Play
Why did you want to make State of Play?
I wasn’t predisposed to do this film. I was back in Australia. The sun was shining. I was looking forward to a very long summer at home, and I got a call from the studio with which I had worked on Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, and American Gangster.
The first thing I did was to look at the work of Kevin Macdonald, and my absolute desire was to dismiss it completely. Do it quickly. Do it in a day and get on with my holiday. But you can’t dismiss Touching the Void and the Last King of Scotland. They’re both great pieces. Then I read the script, and I have a rule that if I have a physical reaction to a script – goose-bumps, a tear to my eye, then that’s the project I have to do.
Where in the script did you have a physical reaction?
I was engaged by subject matter within the film: friendship and loyalty before profession, the myth of objectivity in journalism, and the privatisation of war.
Do you like Cal McAffrey? Do you have sympathy for him?
I think he goes on a journey of rediscovery and finds out just how far away he is from his ethical standards. I’ve sat in front of journalists for 30 years of my life, so I have a lot of observational material to call on. I’ve been praised, flayed and betrayed, and those experiences obviously are going to colour the way I think.
“You can’t ignore it. You ignore politics at your peril”
Has playing a journalist changed your opinion of them?
No, not really. But the fact that I may harbour disappointment and anger about journalists in certain situations, does not preclude me from having a deep personal opinion that it is a noble profession. However, it has to be ennobled by the people who do it. We all have our faults; predilections and preferences, but that’s what you want from any creative artist. You want the writer to be personally involved, just as you want the painter and the filmmaker and the actor on the stage to be personally involved in what they’re doing. But I also do think that there’s a seriousness to that job which can prevent the individual journalist from achieving that. It could be the schedule or whether a sub-editor rips the heart out of things after he’s had his two pints at dinner time and makes sure the article fits in neatly on page five next to the ad for women’s lingerie!
Do you have a view on the future of journalism?
If there is a crisis in serious journalism, it’s been created by journalists because we’ve been trivialising news for a couple of decades; blurring the line between news and entertainment in order to try and achieve a larger distribution, more sales, and better ratings. But in every newspaper, no matter what level of seriousness that newspaper has a reputation for, there are pages of tripe that the editor knows to be untrue, but they will titillate the readers. They’re fine with that. There’s a sort of elbow nudging, or giggling, like “Did you see what we wrote about such and such?” And once you allow that, you may accept information from a source you know to have no credibility, but you can now safely reprint because it’s been printed before and you can always take that as your defence.
Are you interested in politics?
You can’t ignore it. You ignore politics at your peril. But I think there are so many blurred lines, so many secret hatches between news organisations and politicians, and so many strands and plans afoot at any given time. I think you really have to develop your own “bulls**t detector.” It is an odd situation that we are in because I think for the last generation we have been teaching people this thing where they cannot discern truth. We emphasise truth only for it to be uncovered a few years later as false, and yet people sort of giggle about it and have a cynical tap at the elbows, like “Wasn’t it funny that we did that?”
Win cinema tickets to a film of your choice at the Odeon Brighton
For a chance to win this week’s tickets, answer this question:
For what film did Russell Crowe win an Oscar in 2001?
Email your answer to competitions@thelatest.co.uk with ‘State of Play’ in the subject box, or write to us at the address on page three. Closing date for entries is Monday 11 May.
The winner will get a pair of tickets to see a film of their choice. Proof of age may be required.
