By Danny Peary
“As an old man, I’m sick of doing shit like that,” Russell Crowe laughs on the set of The Nice Guys, where he’s just filmed a scene involving guns, shooting, and lots of running. “They’ve gotta pull me out of there in a wheelchair.” In The Nice Guys, Crowe plays Jackson Healy, a hired hard-man forced into working with hapless private investigator, Holland March (Ryan Gosling), to solve the case of a missing girl (Margaret Qualley) and the seemingly unrelated death of a porn star. In short, it’s a bent spin on the classic mismatched buddies trope. “You never know if it’s going to be there or not,” Crowe says of the required chemistry between him and Gosling. “Ryan just makes me laugh, and that keeps me engaged. The characterisation that he’s doing is so special.”
Set in the seventies and directed by Shane Black (Iron Man 3, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), the film rolls with punchy dialogue, a darkly comic tone, and a narrative that veers off into unexpected territory, with the case eventually taking Healy and March into the rarefied corridors of power. “The element of social commentary really elevated the material,” says Crowe. “If, for instance, you look at the state of the city of Detroit today, and at what might have been done differently there in the seventies, you could have ended up with Detroit being another place right now. It’s decayed through specific decisions to hold onto things rather than look to the future. That’s what was really interesting to me about this film.”
Representing a major shift for Crowe, The Nice Guys was the first film set that he walked onto after making his directorial debut with the ambitious period mini-epic, The Water Diviner. Did that change his approach to acting on The Nice Guys? “I’m always very interested in what the camera is doing,” Crowe replies. “I have information that I want to feed to this inanimate object, so I want to know where it is. But when you go onto a movie, there’s a lieutenant – the director that you’re working for – so it doesn’t cross over. You’re working for somebody else’s vision and the way that they want it, so it hasn’t had any effect on my perspective. But with The Water Diviner, I just loved being in charge. I’m totally comfortable if every single creative decision is mine,” Crowe laughs. “I don’t know if that surprises you.”
Crowe, however, isn’t the only Australian in the cast of The Nice Guys. Booking a major supporting role is Angourie Rice, the teen actress who made such an impression in the powerful Australian apocalyptic thriller, These Final Hours. When it’s suggested that she might be the special ingredient in The Nice Guys, the young performer smiles. “I hope so,” she says. “Maybe…there are a lot of men in this film, and I’m the youngest, and one of the only two females.” Rice plays Holly, the precocious daughter of Gosling’s private eye. “Their relationship is important,” she says. “They’re both protective. He wants to protect his daughter, and Holly wants to protect him as well. He’s getting into gun fights and getting shot and all of these crazy things, and she wants to help out with everything. She knows what to do. I think that she’s the brains behind it all,” Rice laughs. “She’s like the puppeteer in everything…she has a kind of power.”
And how is the actress adapting to an American film set? “I have two people who always follow me around,” Rice laughs. “Legally, they have to. I have my mother, and Maura, my studio teacher. It’s very different here in America; there are so many more people. There are two people for everything, and I never know who’s doing what. It’s very confusing and very big, and I don’t know half the people, but it’s interesting to just sit back and observe everything and see what’s going on.”
The Nice Guys is released on May 26. Stay tuned for more on the film at FilmInk.
