Crowe salutes his Australian/New Zealand heritage in latest film

Even the accomplished Russell Crowe needs to complete himself. As a storyteller, Crowe thinks he has with his directorial debut, The Water Diviner. “I’m 50 films down the track, so you yearn about things you haven’t done,” says the 51-yearold, promoting the movie in Los Angeles. His choice for a creative mid-life crisis couldn’t be more demanding on a New Zealand-born, Australian-raised citizen of distinction. In The Water Diviner, Crowe plays Joshua Connor, a grief-stricken Outback farmer (and expert water diviner) who returns to the Gallipoli killing fields of Turkey to retrieve the bodies of his three sons near the end of the First World War. The eight-month Gallipoli campaign is considered the birth of nationalism in Australia and New Zealand, and commemorated every April 25 (this year is the 100th anniversary) to honour the significant Australian and New Zealand casualties. What Crowe didn’t appreciate, until he read The Water Diviner script, was the impact of the battles on Turkey, a country emerging from the ashes of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. “It was fundamentally embarrassing to read the script and realize that I never thought about it from the other perspective,” Crowe says. “I wanted to show a mutual respect in the film.” He did that by hiring Turkish actors Cem Yilmaz and Yilmaz Erdogan to play key roles in the movie and included Turkish dialogue with English subtitles. Besides shooting in Australia, the director also insisted on filming sequences in Turkey, which included rural villages, along the streets of Istanbul and even at the city’s revered Blue Mosque. Adding to the stress level of a rookie director were the complex battle sequences depicted in the film. In the end, Crowe was pleasantly surprised: “It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it was going to be, and I had heard some horror stories, but it seemed like a natural transition.” Though he won’t admit it, he seems relieved that The Water Diviner earned positive reviews and a decent box-office when it was released in Australia and New Zealand last December. It also received favourable notices in Turkey