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Tuesday, September 30, 1997

Excessive Force

FILM: Crime! Glamour! Police corruption!

Guy Pearce takes Hollywood

by storm in noir drama.

By Brandon Wilson

Daily Bruin Contributor

First impressions matter. For an actor, the role that introduces you to the public can shape your persona, positively or adversely, leaving an indelible mark on your career.

But Guy Pearce may have found a way around this phenomenon, because while the Australian actor's current role in director Curtis Hanson's "L.A. Confidential" (based on the James Ellroy hard-boiled crime masterpiece) may be his largest introduction to American audiences, this is in fact the actor's second major appearance on American screens.

Bearing no resemblance to his incarnation as straight-laced '50s cop Edmund J. Exley, Pearce was introduced to many as the youngest, prettiest and brattiest member of the drag queen trio in "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert."

The Aussie film found many fans here in the States, but director Hanson was among the legion of American moviegoers who missed the film, allowing Pearce to approach the role with no baggage from his earlier and decidedly more flamboyant performance.

Pearce is currently on screens across the nation in another cinematic trio, but these three couldn't be further removed from the fabulous interior of that bus named Priscilla. Pearce, along with fellow Aussie Russell Crowe and Oscar-winner Kevin Spacey, play the three protagonists in "L.A. Confidential;" and while the three have little in common besides their guns and badges, none of them fit the bill as your typical morally-upright movie hero.

Unlike most Hollywood directors, the Ellroy men's unsavoriness attracted rather than scared away Hanson; so fearless was the director that he set out to cast the parts with relative unknowns.

And that is why Guy Pearce is suddenly in a big Hollywood film that has the critics scouring their thesauri for superlatives.

In person, the slightly built Pearce sports un-Exley-like stubble and tousled hair, piercing blue eyes and a blazer-cut leather jacket, despite the Indian summer heat outside. Pearce spoke with The Bruin at the Four Seasons Hotel about his new entree to American audiences, and how he transformed Ellroy's clearly delineated character into a living, breathing and shotgun-blasting human being.

"It was good to hang out with the LAPD, to read about L.A. in the 1950s, but the thing I was most attracted to was the book because it was such a pure, undiluted vision," says Pearce of his pre-production preparation. "There's such a clarity in regard to the perspective, the humor, the cops and crime of the era; and Ellroy crosses the line between fact and fiction quite brilliantly. We looked at some early LAPD training films, and spent some time with the LAPD, but it didn't seem that beneficial to me."

The actor did however benefit from Hanson's aforementioned plan to use fresh faces, but his casting was the result of his various trips to Los Angeles following the success of "Priscilla."

"January of last year I was here for a couple of weeks, and 'L.A. Confidential' was one of the scripts I was reading at the time and by far one of the most interesting things that I was looking at," Pearce says.

Although Curtis was not familiar with Pearce, a meeting was set up. They met and it was all very casual. Pearce flew back to Australia the next day, and was soon asked to come back for a screen test.

"It all happened really easily and really nicely," Pearce admits. "It wasn't at all about the body of work you'd done before, and so on. It was quite anti-Hollywood in the way it happened."

Besides "Priscilla," the actor is the veteran of Australian television and numerous feature films from down under, such as "Snowy River: The McGregor Saga," "My Forgotten Man" and "Heaven Tonight." The road from home to Hollywood hasn't been a short one for Pearce, but he fell prey to the acting bug early, even though he couldn't have been born farther from the chugging heart of the American film industry.

"The town where I grew up, Geelong (an hour south of Melbourne), in Victoria, doesn't have any film industry, just a lot of amateur theater and plays. From a pretty early age, about 10, I suppose, my mom used to take me to see these things, and I was pretty inspired and interested in going up there and joining them."

Pearce's role in "L.A. Confidential" presented its own particular challenges as the character is unlike any found in standard American fare. Edmund Exley, a lowly but up-and-coming LAPD sergeant at the story's outset, is easily read as the most respectable of the film's three leads. Yet beneath the squeaky-clean exterior lies a ruthlessly calculating political animal; a man so consumed with ambition and the need to outshine his martyred policeman dad that nothing, not even a sense of justice, exceeds his drive to speedily move up the chain of command in Chief Bill Parker's police force.

"It was quite a balancing act," Pearce says. "He's someone who initially we judge as being a painfully self-righteous, obnoxious prat. It was important for me to try and understand why he was like that and where he was coming from. And I figured his insecurities about this guy in regard to the physicality of the police force and his own emotionally repressed frame of mind.

"I always find it difficult to explain how this process comes about, but I just generally understood that he was fearful of physicality and his survival technique was his intellect and his ability to put everyone else around him down via his intellect," Pearce says of his character. "He feels superior because naturally he feels inferior, but he's too afraid to admit that. So he compensates by acting superior. He calls (fellow police officer) Bud White a 'mindless thug' - he has a really narrow-minded perspective on things.

"I think if you're dealing with a lot of fear in your life, it's bound to explode somewhere if you're not honest about it," Pearce contitues. "He encounters a variety of catalysts in the film and becomes more honest about who he is, and that he's not just an opportunistic prick."

As the title denotes, the City of Angels figures in as one of the most important figures in "L.A. Confidential," and playing one of the city's guardians meant getting acquainted and at ease with a city that the Australian is hard-pressed to think of as home.

"It's a difficult town to deal with, particularly in regard to the film industry, which seems to be the foundation of the city. It's funny how every restaurant you go to, the waiters seem to be writing on a script or trying to produce a movie ... There's an element of competition that runs rife through this town, and it goes against any preconceived notion one would have about Hollywood before actually arriving here, because Hollywood does such a good job of putting up the facade of beauty, glamour and all things that are rich and wonderful. So when you do get here and you realize it's about so much more than that, and that there's this seething cesspool of desperation underneath the surface, it's quite an eye-opening experience.

"I can get pretty anxious within myself, and L.A. sort of heats that up for me. The competition fuels the anxiety, and I have to get home every now and then. I can only hang here a couple of weeks at a time. I'm no good at reading scripts or auditioning well when I can't concentrate ... I don't feel cut out for this town."

Clocking in at two hours and 20 minutes (which is short considering the novel is a hefty 500-page epic spanning from 1951 to 1958), the shooting of "L.A. Confidential" was bound to be different and more elaborate than any production Pearce had heretofore been involved with.

"It was meant to be 64 days and it ended up being 88," Pearce says. "Films in Australia generally shoot for six weeks, but it wasn't really grueling. It was actually quite luxurious to have all that time to really just chip away at it nice and slowly; I think any sort of creative artform works best when you take your time with it. And Curtis really did that. He took all the time he needed and I was really happy to be a part of that. I suppose it's nice to have the money to do that, back home they say, 'Here's the budget, it's a million and a half, for six weeks, and you can't go over budget cause there's no more money.' So everyone's forced to be pretty creative about the whole thing. Sometimes that works in your favor, sometimes it makes things pretty tough."

At the moment, Pearce has many offers but no projects before him and is busily looking for that next script to fall for. And rather shrewdly, the actor isn't restricting his search to this country or his homeland - a policy Pearce means to keep for the rest of his career.

"There's so much work here and a lot of great projects I'd love to be involved with, but I don't know how feasible that is. I don't know if this whole 'L.A. Confidential' thing is just a bit of a one-off; because (Hollywood) is something of a tight knit group. I guess it's possible because I'm here doing this film, so it's not out of the question. But I've always said if I'm out of work, I'd rather be out of work in Australia than here. I'd like to sort of come and go."

FILM: "L.A. Confidential" is currently playing.

MONARCHY/REGENCY ENTERTAINMENT

Russell Crowe as Dectective Bud White in "L.A. Confidential."

MONARCHY/REGENCY ENTERTAINMENT

Guy Pearce as Detective Ed Exley in "L.A. Confidential."

MONARCHY/REGENCY ENTERTAINMENT

Kim Bassigner plays a Veronica Lake look alike in "L.A. Confidential."

Monarchy /Regency Entertainment

"L.A. Confidential" is Guy Pearce's latest American film.