Russell Crowe enjoyed an enthusiastic response to his bio-doc meets concert film What Love Builds as it premiered Out of Competition to a 1,400-strong crowd at the Venice Film Festival on Friday evening.
The documentary sets out to show that music has been part of Crowes’s life long before he decided to move to Sydney from New Zealand in the late 1980s to pursue an acting career, busking on the streets initially to make ends meet.
It features footage showing Crowe’s early musical endeavours from his teen years performing at an Auckland music hall under the stage name of Russ Le Roq, to his 415 performances as Eddie/Dr Scott in a New Zealand production of The Rocky Horror Show.
Crowe also delves into the creation of his first major band 30 Odd Foot of Grunts; its prophetic The Photograph Kills EP, and his abrupt decision to disband it as his acting career took off and he felt his fame was muddying the waters. He suggested a pushy offer from then Sony head Tommy Mottola to sign the band had been the final straw.
In an example of how his love of music has fed into his acting, Crowe reveals how a line in Gladiator in which his character Maximus tells Emperor Marcus Aurelius he has been away for “2 years, 264 days, and this morning” was rewritten at his request and taken inspiration from the line “It’s been seven hours and 15 days” in Prince’s track Nothing Compares 2 U
Later, he recounts how on Ridley Scott’s 2010 Robin Hood, he had been able to influence the casting of the merry men to bring actors who were also musicians. These would include Scott Grimes who would go on to become an occasional member of his current band Indoor Garden Party alongside the likes of Samantha Barks and Alan Doyle.
Crowe also digs into lows of his career such as his arrest in New York in 2005 for assault for throwing a telephone at a hotel employee; “the pain” of being pursued by paparazzi, who he says he is also grateful to for capturing some of his best pictures of him with his children, or the ridiculing of his work as a musician and songwriter.
Footage from the band’s performances intercut throughout film had the Venice audience clapping as if in a concert, with a cover version by Crowe of Dire Straits’ Romeo and Juliet causing the Sala Darsena theater to erupt into full-scale applause.
As the credits rolled at the end, spectators clapped to the beat of the final track while a visibly happy Crowe laughed and smiled at the reaction.
Crowe, who wrote, directed and produced the documentary, told a press conference earlier, that the work, showing the central role music has played in his creative life since he was a child, had been 15 years in the making.
“I thought it might take me a year, but as I was doing it, things would come up that I was going to be doing shortly with the music, so I kept waiting for that, and the next thing, and the next thing. By the time we sat down to cut it we had an extensive 18 feet of film,” he said.
“It was massive undertaking to try to chip away at the narrative, but I knew what my intention was, and my intention was to answer the question I get asked probably most and that is to define the difference between music and acting. The film attempts to explain the two things are completely intertwined for me,” he said.
Crowe told the press conference that Venice had been his target festival for the documentary and that he had contacted Italian director Gabriele Muccino, who directed him in Fathers & Daughters, to help connect him with festival director Alberto Barbera.
“As we’re coming towards the end of the cut, I said out loud, the most amazing thing would be if I could get to screen this in Venice. I’ve been to a lot of film festivals, but the most fun film festival is Venice, and there’s depth in the appreciation of the audience,” he said.
“I couldn’t have had a better result as a filmmaker. This thing was just extremely personal, and this is the absolute perfect place,”
