Bryan Brown – Shooting Straight

By James Hutton on November 30, 2015 in People

Where did you grow up and spend your formative years?
I’m a westie. I grew up in Panania, which is in the Bankstown municipality. I moved there when I was about three or four and lived there until I was 25. It was a Housing Commission house, and I moved there from a hostel in the back of Lindfield they had called Bradfield Park. That was the first Housing Commission house we were offered. You get offered three, and even if you turn down the third one you have to take it, so Mum took the first one. We ended up at Panania, which was the end of the suburbs with swamps and trees and everything. All I did was bloody run around, having a ball.

Where do you live now?
I live down the bottom of Balmain. I’m still a westie.

Do you spend much time in the Eastern Suburbs?
I couldn’t live in the Eastern Suburbs because I’m a westie, simple as that, but of course I spend time there. I love Bondi. In fact, I think Bondi is one of the greatest beaches in the world. It’s the shape or something about it. I’ve got a mate that lives up the north end. I sit on his balcony in the evening watching the sun coming down over that place, and I go, “There’s something magic about this joint.” I like the fact that it is a place that anyone’s allowed to go to, whether it be tourists or Aussies from out west. I love that about the joint.

What gets your goat about the Eastern Suburbs?
I don’t think there’s anything that gets my goat about the Eastern Suburbs. I think the thing that most annoys me about the Eastern Suburbs and places like Bondi is that when I was a little kid, twice a year my mum would say, “We’re going to the beach.” We’d have this fantastic day and then at like 4pm or something she’d go, “Okay, we’ve got to go home now.” I’d get in the bus and I’d look out the back and there would be all these blonde headed kids my age who didn’t have to go home.

How would you describe your acting style?
It’s really hard to talk about what you do because a lot of what you do in anything is instinct. It doesn’t matter if you’re a painter or you’re a plumber, or anything. It is instinct about how to do the job properly. That’s why you end up in a joint. Most painters have their technique, but a good artist has their instinct and a way that they express things that are in their head. It’s about how they see things. A lot of stuff comes down to instinct. I guess my whole thing has been searching for that honesty of connecting with a character where people will say, “He’s just being himself.” To me, that’s about the best compliment I can possibly get, because if I can be that natural then that’s what I’m aiming for.

You made it to Hollywood in the 1980s; what was it like being a laidback Aussie living in the fishbowl over there?
It’s a funny place, Hollywood. There are lot of very bright people there, and a lot of really talented people too. You can have a lot of fun there and I was a young bloke. I wandered in there and went, “Wow, there’s a lot of good looking girls here,” which was pretty nice being a single bloody Aussie bloke over there. One of the things that always jarred with me, though – and I don’t mean this in any sort of superficial or disrespectful way – but the amount of money was the power of the place. You could just feel that the money was so much. I don’t mind making money and it’s given me a good life. I’ve travelled the world and everything, but it’s like eating too much chocolate… you start to feel sick.

What brought you back to Australia after gaining good traction over there?
Eventually I got married and I had kids and that was easy at the time. I could put them under the arm and Rachel could put them under her arm, and we’d go off and do things. But as they got to around four and five years old it was all about where they were going to go to school. Where’s their stability going to be? I had real trouble becoming a yank, because if I was going to live there, out of respect, you have to become a yank. They’re not the same as us and I knew that I’d always be a square peg in a round hole. As much as I’d have really good fun with people, I just didn’t fit. Here I can say anything I like. If I don’t like a politician I can stand up in the papers and say it. If I don’t like how things are going on here I can say it, because I have the right and I was born here. It’s the same for anyone who immigrates here; you take on the place you immigrate to. To give up being able to state what I think Australia should be, or how we should be, and to take on saying how America should be was a really hard thing to think about. I ended up going, “There are 300 million Americans and they don’t need me. There are only 25 million Australians and they need me.”

What do you rate as your greatest film performance?
I don’t know. I can talk about movies that I’ve liked and really enjoyed playing in, and it comes back to the character. And I’ve had a few of them. I was lucky enough to play Breaker Morant, which was a really good character. I’ve become very fond of that character. I liked playing Coughlin in ‘Cocktail’ too. People quote lines to me all over the place from that character. He ended up committing suicide and he was full of shit, but I liked his bravado. I liked who he wanted to be. I also played this character in ‘Dead Heart’ that I really liked, this cop, and Pando in ‘Two Hands’ was a bloody good character to play. He had great humour for a really brutal bastard, and I liked that. I named my son after a character I played in ‘A Town Like Alice’. He was called Joe Harmon and I liked that character so my son got called Joe.

Did you stay in touch with Tom Cruise after co-starring with him in ‘Cocktail’?
I’ve seen Tom probably about four times. In fact, I did a movie with Simon Pegg recently and Simon went off to do ‘Mission Impossible’ afterwards. I didn’t realise this at the time, but then he sent me a text from Austria or somewhere saying, “I’m sitting here with Tom; he sends his best and asks how’s it all going?” I don’t really keep in contact, but if I saw Tom we’d have a laugh and ask one another if we’re still getting free beers from every pub we walk into, because that’s exactly what happened after ‘Cocktail’.

Who’s the best actor you’ve ever worked with?
A lot of people are good. I’m a bit of fan of the old Ben Mendelsohn. I think Ben’s quite capable of all genres. He’s got a dark bloody thing in there, but his irony is terrific onscreen. Sigourney Weaver is a very good actress. I worked with Sigourney on ‘Gorillas in the Mist’. It’s really hard because the good people that people talk about are good; it’s as simple as that. They didn’t get there because they’re crook. I think the thing about acting is you can only be average in an average part, but if you get the right role for you that really fits you like a glove, you can be bloody fantastic.

When it comes to films, do you look for quality over potential box office takings?
I’ve been a bit lucky. I’ve been involved with some big box office things, like ‘Cocktail’ and ‘Along Came Polly’ with Ben Stiller – he’s a good comic that man; Jesus, he’s funny. They were big movies, so luckily I’ve been able to mix it up. I like really good relationship movies. They can still fit a genre – they can still be crime or they can still be a love story – but you just want the people to be as real as possible so that they are able to touch you emotionally. I look for that.

What’s the best Aussie film of all time?
I was very affected by ‘The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith’, and ‘Gallipoli’ was also very good. In recent years, there have been some terrific movies like ‘Animal Kingdom’.

Now let’s talk about ‘Let’s Talk About’, which was written and directed by your daughter, Matilda, and which you appear in; what was it like working with Matilda?
I’ve worked with Matilda before. We did another thing called ‘Lessons from the Grave’, which was a series of three minute episodes that we sold to the ABC. We have a lot of fun working together and I really dig her creatively, and I really like her tone about things. She makes me feel good working with her. I like to pursue the stuff she’s trying to pursue, and make it as good as possible. We talk a lot; she will send me the scripts and I will comment on them and we’ll keep working on them. She will write them, but she likes to get feedback and I like to give it.

How much of an influence would you say you’ve had over Matilda’s career progression, and did you and your wife, Rachel Ward, lead her down the acting/directing path?
She sort of found her own way, although this collaboration we’ve had on these little movies that she does, which we’ve done with ‘Lessons From the Grave’ and ‘Let’s Talk About’, have come about from me kicking her in the arse and going, “Listen, when you’ve got nothing to do and I’ve got nothing to do why don’t we do something together?” I’ve probably had a considerable influence, but only by probably giving her a boot up the arse, but not in terms of telling her how to be creatively or anything. She’s her own person.

‘Let’s Talk About’ is the second Australian commission for Foxtel’s streaming service, Presto; can you see TV moving more towards these kinds of streaming services?
Well it is, isn’t it? I mean it’s all very different to five years ago. Free to air was everything then. I think with the advent of smart phones, you can just do so much on them. I’ll walk down and see someone watching something while sitting at a bus stop, and they’re actually watching a TV show or a movie. It’s a platform for storytelling. That platform wasn’t there before. The only platform was television or the big screen. There are so many more platforms now. They require content and it’s the young people’s world. Matilda never watches TV; she’s always watching stuff on her computer or downloading or it whatever. The really interesting stuff is coming away from free to air and going to these other platforms. It’s the way of the world. Where it ends up and how it ends up I have no idea, but I do remember when I was a young actor we’d be in people’s garages with an old sheet up playing a Super 8 film that someone had shot. We were always searching for platforms to put things on. Maybe this is a bit better than an old sheet, though.

What is ‘Let’s Talk About’ all about?
I think ‘Let’s Talk About’ is about growing up. We all get to a stage where we’ve got to grow up. That doesn’t mean we give away being a silly idiot, but we go, “I’ve got a certain responsibility that I’ve got to step into here.” Somewhere along the line for a bloke, you get married and you have a kid and you go, “Holy shit, this is really different. I can’t come home drunk and I can’t get up every morning with a hangover with my kids jumping on my stomach at 5.30am. Things have changed.” And when things change, you either step up to the mark or you become a f**kwit. There ain’t a choice. You have to move into that next area of life. This is a great story of a young bloke who is in a relationship with a girl and after six weeks they find out she’s pregnant. It’s the journey surrounding the fact that they’re going to have the baby and what exactly that means, and finally at the end of it all he has stepped into another life and there’s a baby there.

You play Barry, Matilda’s character Claire’s father in the show; is the relationship onscreen similar to that in real life?
Probably in certain areas, because we do stuff around and we do like laughing, the pair of us, and we have a similar sense of humour about stuff. The big thing about it is that Barry loves Claire and I love Matilda.

What other actors appear in ‘Let’s Talk About’?
Richard Davies, who most people know as Jimmy Proudman from ‘Offspring’, plays Ben, who is Claire’s boyfriend. Steve Le Marquand, who I just did ‘Blue Dog’ with, which is the sequel to ‘Red Dog’, is also in there. And Lisa Hensley plays Claire’s mother. Lisa’s an actress that’s been around for a good 20 years, and she is a very good actress. She plays a neurotic as hell mother who thinks that her daughter’s boyfriend is a clown and she cannot believe that her daughter is going to have a baby with him. It’s a little confronting.

How did you meet your wife, Rachel?
We met while doing ‘The Thornbirds’, which was a big mini-series in America. She was playing the lead in it with Richard Chamberlain and they wanted me for one of the main roles in it. We met there and she just couldn’t help herself.

You’re very passionate about the issue of holding of asylum seekers in detention; what’s your opinion about the detention centres in Nauru and Christmas Island, and the so-called ‘turning back the boats’?
I never liked any of those slogans, ‘turn back the boats’ and things like that. We’re not talking about boats, we’re talking about people. Where are the people in this scenario? And that’s even with Malcolm (Turnbull) in charge, and I’ve always liked Malcolm. I know him personally, and I think he’s a very bright man. I’m sort of glad he’s the prime minister, but I just don’t like the way this whole scenario is talked about, and how the humanity of these people is taken out. I remember there was a thing called ‘children overboard’, and they were saying that the refugees were throwing their children in the ocean. Nobody throws their children in the ocean. No parent would do that. Some evil bastard way off might, but no group of people does a thing like that. No child should be in detention, no child should be behind razor wire, and no child should have to grow up that way. They will be so mentally scarred that we’ll pay for it. In some way, down the line, the scarring that we cause those children, us or our children will pay for that. I know this is a really complex deal, but I think at the moment the world hasn’t gone, “Hey, this has to be all of us working out what happens to these 25-30 million people that are displaced.” This is a big deal. It’s not going to go away. The world is going to be affected by it and so the people in charge and the people that we get to represent us, I want to see them working out what we’re going to do with these displaced people. This means working out how to humanely look after them, how they get fed and how they get educated, because we’re going to have to do it.

Do you support any charities at the moment?
Yeah, I’m always involved with different things. I’m involved with a group called San Miguel out in the west. It’s a place that looks after women and children who have hit bad times and are on the street, whether it’s through domestic violence or whatever. Once a year we try and raise about $150,000.

Do you have any advice for up and coming actors and actresses?
I’d say the same thing to an actor or an actress as I’d probably say to any young person. In the arts, there’s no one plus one equals two. There’s no criteria, except that people like your work, like your painting or like how you act. There’s plenty of rejection while you’re trying to get to that place. If you believe in yourself, back yourself, hang in, and hang in as long as you can hang in, because it could be that the break you want is just around the corner. That’s all I’d say: believe in yourself and hang in there.

Who were your role models when you started your acting career?
It’s quite interesting because when I started out there was really no such thing as an Australian actor. One of the big things I noticed when I went to the theatre was that I’d see Australians putting on American accents. I loved Michael Caine and Sean Connery because they weren’t being Americans, but they were very big stars, and I liked how they did their stuff.

With regard to funding for the arts, do you think the government should chip in more taxpayer money?
I do. I mean we’re very lucky. Both governments, Labor and Liberal, since the late ’60s when the Film Commission was set up, have supported a film and television industry. They have put restrictions on the television channels meaning that they have to have a certain amount of Australian content, and without that push we wouldn’t be doing things. Would we like them to do more? Of course we would, but you tell me one area that doesn’t. Are we supported? Yes, we’re supported.

In an ideal world, what does the future hold for Bryan Brown?
I hope that I don’t waste what’s left. I figure I’m in the late afternoon and the twilight might be down there, and then the dark of the night. I’m still surfing and I’m still a very active guy. I don’t want to be a person who stops thinking, and I don’t want to be a person who stops making movies. I don’t want to stop being a bloke who is an Australian who believes in the place and will fight where I can for it to be as good a place as possible.