Breath star Richard Roxburgh on working for directors Simon Baker, Guy Pearce
STARRING in Simon Baker’s coming of age movie Breath had Aussie favourite Richard Roxburgh flashing back to his rebellious youth.
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FROM their Aussie soap beginnings to their international breakout in LA Confidential, there are many similarities in the careers of Simon Baker and Guy Pearce.
Now Baker is unveiling his first film as director, an adaptation of Tim Winton’s coming-of-age novel Breath, while Pearce will take the same step later this year with his reworking of the MTC play Poor Boy.
As first timers in this capacity, they have something else in common: Richard Roxburgh.
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“I seem to be making a story of working with all my theatre and film comrades on their first ever jaunt into directing,” says Roxburgh.
Are they casting him because he’ll ... “Be forgiving?” he laughs. “Be gentle with them? Possibly.”
Roxburgh knows exactly what each of his comrades is going through: it is more than a decade since his directorial debut, the Eric Bana-starring Romulus, My Father, hit cinemas.
He’s wary of giving so much of his life over to directing another one; it would have to be “exactly the right project,” he says, as he didn’t find it “a pleasant process”.
“I guess because I felt the constant push back of budgetary constraints, time constraints, all of those things I found awkward intrusions on my creative process,” he elaborates.
“I loved it in equal measure, but I found it really, really difficult.”
If any such stresses were weighing Baker down during the making of Breath, he hid it well.
“He was all over it like German measles,” says Roxburgh. “He knew at all moments what the shot was going to be and what he required from it. Because it’s a film that had to be beautiful and telling imagery from one moment to the next, it had to be really alive in that area. And he’s very particular, so in that sense he was very natural.”
Set on the WA coast, Breath tells the story of teenagers Pikelet (Samson Coulter) and Loonie (Ben Spence). Struck by the sight of a surfer gliding down a majestical wave, they save up to buy their own boards and are taken under the wing of a former champ (Baker), whose tales of wild Indonesian reefs and knowledge of the local coast leads the boys into ever riskier territory.
Roxburgh plays Mr Pike — Pikelet’s dad — more tinkerer than talker.
Filmed between seasons of his ABC TV series Rake, that made for a nice change of pace.
“It was fabulous because I’ve spent so of my time in the last few years being Cleaver Greene, who never shuts up, so the opportunity was to occupy a world that was entirely filmic.
It’s about everything that’s happening on the inside, it’s about what’s not expressed.”
No stranger to the words of Winton, Roxburgh has performed the author’s works on stage as well as in films The Turning and In the Winter Dark.
The appeal, says the actor, is that Winton “dwells in really particular, fascinating corners of the Australian male consciousness that are largely unexplored”.
Breath in particular hones in on “the horrible things about what it is to be a young man, coming into manhood, the kind of pressures and the extraordinary creeping influence of what has become known as toxic masculinity,” Roxburgh says.
“There’s such pressure as an adolescent boy to do scary and scarier things, to prove yourself to yourself. In a way that’s a rite of passage, but on the other hand it can also guide you into darker places.”
In the same era that we find Pikelet and Loonie testing their limits in Breath, Roxburgh was a high-schooler in Albury, on the NSW side of the Murray River.
Sadly, there isn’t much in the way of surf round those parts.
“If only,” says Roxburgh. “Surfing, great, you’re in nature, it’s beautiful. What we had was cars, which was worse.
“Growing up in the ’70s in Albury, we were maniacs in cars, just terrible. Luckily drugs weren’t a big deal, so that wasn’t an issue. But everything else was: pointy, sharp, metallic ... anything potentially dangerous or lethal that you could get your hands on.”
He can see a lot of what he put his “poor parents” though reflected in Breath.
“The fears they must have had in having a wayward son — which I was — it must have just been an awful journey for them.”
What goes around, comes around: Roxburgh and his wife Silvia Colloca are now bracing themselves for the day their eldest, Raphael, 11, hits his rebellious phase.
“It’s that sense of ‘batten down the hatches for what may come your way’,” Roxburgh says. “The best that you can do is try to keep an open chain of communication. Because as Simon discovered so beautifully in the film, there’s that cave that boys, in particular, go into; that a silent place.”
Roxburgh will be back behind the wheel when he heads to WA shortly to film the “really fun” kids’ tale Go Karts.
“What I’m loving about the shape of this year, is I’m doing so many types of films,” he says.
Indeed, after Go Karts it’s back to Melbourne to shoot Kim Farrant’s “beautiful psychological drama” Angel of Mine with Noomi Rapace and Yvonne Strahovski, before rounding the year out with Kriv Stenders’ Danger Close in Queensland (“We haven’t dealt with our Vietnam story very much in film, so that’s potentially a really significant work”) and Pearce’s Poor Boy in Victoria.
“It’s a really unusual work,” Roxburgh says of the latter. “I’ll be fascinated to see what Guy brings to it.”
Breath opens on Thursday.
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