One of Australia's most loved actors answers questions from the audience at a CinefestOz function.
The day was superbly sunny for August. The setting a marquee in a delightful nook in Yallingup. Some three hundred people sat down to dine and hear from filmmakers about their lives and careers.
Pleasure and pain
Actors are often asked which movies they loved and loathed. One stands out for David which gave him both pleasure and pain.
He spent five "wonderful" months in Hawaii playing the part of the Belgian priest in Molokai, a film with the biggest budget ever made in Belgium.
But it was also fraught with the most incredible difficulties. The director Paul Cox was fired twice and was asked to leave the island.
We were living within the community with the people who suffered from Hansen's disease. Paul had involved himself so heavily in the community, that those patients said to the producers, 'If you kick Paul Cox off this island, we'll revoke your permission to be on this island and you'll all have to get out in 24 hours.'
So Paul Cox stayed on the film.
In post-production, they sacked him again. And the idiots - the producers cut the film themselves. They cut the negative of the film.
When Paul took the producers to court in Belgium, in a landmark case, he won the right to have his film back.
When he went back, he found there were bits of the negative he could never retrieve.
But it's still a remarkable film.
On casting
Actors know the audition routine only too well but how does a director know if their actors are right?
David has so far directed just once and knew he wanted Hugo Weaving for the part. "I've worked with Hugo," he joked, "and I didn't particularly want to audition him."
In the end, all it took was an email for Hugo to accept the part.
Likewise with the second role, David found a young actor whom he could see as Hugo's son.
I knew that they were capable of doing it. How would you know otherwise? I'm only guessing here.
Some people are really good at auditioning. They come in and they can be fantastic. But those actors could also be the same actors that when they appear on set, that's all you're ever going to get from the performance.
Sometimes, you want a performance to change. To do something other than what they're doing and they're not capable of doing that.
So you want to be confident that your actor is malleable and can take direction and can change.
Some actors are also very good technically. I was having a discussion with my good friend Robert Connelly the other day about a very, very, very well known actress who quite possibly will be up for an Oscar this year.
She's a technical master. Amazing.
Amazing performances...I'm more into performances that will actually move people or can change people or affect people in some way, as opposed to watching a performance and going "Oh that's amazing, that's a really good actor." That doesn't interest me at all.
On auditioning
In this country, I don't audition, which is wonderful because I'd never work. Overseas, certainly in American television they still get virtually everybody to audition. It's a guessing game.
In all honesty, if somebody asked me the secret of auditioning for Americans, I don't know. Often, I do what's called self-taping for America. I go over there quite a lot to sit in a room and do stuff in front of people. You feel like a performing monkey. It's bizarre.
Sometimes, I'll do stuff for an audition and I'll think, this is amazing. There's no one else on earth who could do that as well as me.
No one will ever call me back from that particular audition.
There's other times where I go in and I'm atrocious. I can hardly remember the lines, and I'm sweating and it's just appalling.
I'll go out of the room and my phone's ringing immediately. My agent is telling me, (David adopts an American accent) "Oh they think you're amazing."
I think we sort of know what we're doing over here but over there, it's a lucky dip.
On acting
Acting is a consequence of the human compulsion to tell stories, says David Wenham.
There are different methods. Some people have heard of The Method which originally goes back to Stanislavski...he gave you six major pointers whereby you became that character and tried to fool your mind psychologically.
That's it in a nutshell. Daniel Day Lewis is an example of somebody like that who stays in character between takes. Viggo Mortensen who I worked with on
Lord of the Rings was somebody like that as well.
On
Lord of the Rings, he used to sleep with his horse. Some actors are prepared to go that distance in order to ...Yeah, I know - strange. He bought the horse and went home with the horse as well.
There's different ways of getting into character. There's what's called the outside in which is finding the physicality of the character first.
To give an example, in
Gettin' Square - Johnny Spitieri- that's how I found that character. I knew those people that I'd seen up at Kings Cross. I knew how they sounded. So for me it was a physical thing first.
The costume was very important. I sourced all my costume myself at a thrift shop on the Gold Coast. I went into the women's section and the children's section.
Then I developed a walk and I got the sound.
Then once I could talk like that character, I could think like that character.
I got to this stage with Johnny Spitieri I believed I could put that character in any situation and I knew how Johnny would act.
That particular character, I think I actually employed The Method.
Other actors approach from a mental base and want to understand the character first. So it's an intense process with the script, understanding what motivates the character and their reasons for existence. It's a much more cerebral form of acting.
That's two extremes of how actors go about it. From my perspective, depending on the role, I mix it up. Different roles necessitate different approaches.
On directing
I was lucky that
The Commission was only a short film. It was manageable; there were only two actors in it.
I purposely wanted to keep it very, very simple in terms of what I was doing with the camera.
But I wanted to reflect Tim Winton's writing. For me, Tim Winton is very, very simple and sparse with his writing. There's nothing extraneous.
I wanted to very clearly and simply get the kernel of truth within those two characters.
I also think the great thing that we have as actors, we have worked with dozens of directors. A director has never worked with another director. So we have all that experience with what actually does work and what doesn't.
A director doesn't. I think that gives us a huge advantage as directors. Not just for directing actors but for working with crews and being aware of what a camera can do and what you can actually do (with the camera).
I think actors do make really, really wonderful directors.
From here.
