Guy Pearce had some tonsorial ideas for his role in Lawless.
Philippa Hawker, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports
It’s the eyebrows you notice first. Or rather, their absence. Guy
Pearce is one of the stars of Lawless,
a period film from the team of director John Hillcoat (The Road, The Proposition) and Nick
Cave, who has written the screenplay and co-written the score. Pearce has
chosen to portray his character, a brutal deputy, as a man who has taken the
notion of hair care to a whole new level. He is shaved and styled to within an
inch of his life. Lawless
is a rural gangster movie, set in Franklin County, Virginia, during the
Depression. It focuses on a family of bootleggers plying their trade under the
semi-tolerant eyes of the local authorities. But there's a new figure in the
frame: Charlie Rakes (Pearce), a vicious and calculating special deputy who has
arrived from Chicago and wants to hold the bootleggers to account, by any means
he can.
The film is based on real events, although its original source is
a best-selling novel, The
Wettest Country in the World, by Matt Bondurant. His grandfather
was one of three brothers who operated an illicit still, and he drew on
archives and family stories for his account of a resilient family business with
some very particular ways of doing things.
Pearce began to read the novel, then decided he didn't want to
confuse details of book and film, and would focus completely on the script. In
the book, Rakes was a local character, but Cave has made him a figure from the
big city, a dandy and a violent man, as fastidious as he is ferocious.
''Nick said the reason he wanted to make me so judgmental and so
vain and so disgusted by everything around him is that he wanted him to seem
like an absolute outsider,'' Pearce says. ''He is entering a world he has no
understanding of whatsoever.''
The Bondurant boys are stubborn men who barely seem interested in
profit, and certainly don't care for conspicuous consumption. Tom Hardy plays
the eldest, Forrest, a man who simply wants to continue bootlegging, without
taking orders from anyone else, whether they are criminals or representatives
of law and order. Convinced of his invincibility, he seems almost recklessly
committed to doing things his way. Jason Clarke is Howard, the second brother;
Shia LaBeouf is the youngest, Jack, who seems enthusiastic but ill-equipped for
the challenges of the family business.
Pearce's notion about the shaved eyebrows was, he says, ''based on
what Nick had said about the vanity of the character. The combination of vanity
and disdain for the people he has come to deal with. It is an indication of his
judgment of the world, and of his distaste for dirt and extraneous hair. I
thought eyebrows were something he wanted to get rid of.''
Before shooting started, Pearce mentioned this idea to Hillcoat,
who was slightly dubious. So he held back, until he arrived in the US, and
started going through reference photographs of people from the period. Pearce
was struck by the severity of some of the haircuts, in particular by the image
of a man who had shaved an extra-wide parting into his hair. Opting for this,
he pleaded the shaving case again. ''I said, if we take the eyebrows off, it's
going to give this strange, nude creepiness, and John said, 'Yes, you're
right.'''
There's also something about Charlie - his extreme dapperness, his
sharp suits, his manicured, coiffed, controlled look - that proclaims who he
is. It's a way of asserting himself, Pearce suggests: he is drawing attention
to himself, in the same way a police siren proclaims the presence and actions
of the law.
There were risks, Pearce acknowledges, that he could easily push
the characterisation too far. ''Some people really hate the performance,'' he
says, frankly. ''They go, 'It's so camp and over the top, what the hell were
you thinking?' And other people say, 'This is brilliant, this is what happens
in life, strange people end up in unusual places, and there's a total
mismatch.''' For Pearce, the divided opinions are not an issue ''as long as I
feel I am honouring what Nick and John believe is right''.
Thematically, there are some similarities between Lawless and The Proposition, Hillcoat
and Cave's first movie collaboration, in which Pearce also starred. It is set
in the Australian outback in the 19th century, but it is also the story of a
group of outlaw brothers, and of a lawman determined to hold them to account
(although on that occasion Pearce was one of the brothers). But there's not the
bleak, visionary intensity of The
Proposition in Lawless.
To Pearce, ''Nick has a fascinating view of the world. And doing The Proposition, I felt
that I was inside a Nick Cave song. The script is the most extraordinarily
written script I have ever seen. There's something so formal, and yet so free
and limitless, about his work.''
He is also struck, he says, by the female figures in Lawless: Jessica Chastain,
as a woman from Chicago, a cool and elegant refugee from the big city and the
Mob, who becomes close to Forrest, and Mia Wasikowska, as a preacher's daughter
who is wooed by the ardent Jack. They are strong characters, he says, but they
are also the product of a deeply romantic vision: that's who Cave is, he says,
''even though there is this Prince of Darkness whirlwind that seems to surround
him''.
The scenes of violence in the film are relatively straightforward
for an actor, Pearce says. ''I'm pretty good at that stuff, and Shia was right
into it. The great thing about working with someone like Shia is that he is
prepared to fling himself around like mad, just like I was when I was younger.
You can't have any limits on this stuff, although you've obviously got to be
safe.''
The important thing, he adds, is that ''if you are ever going to
do anything violent in a film, it has to be realistic, and it has to be
original. And to be as scary as real violence is.'' If you happen to see it,
you can't stop thinking about it. And that's something directors often forget.
What's notable about the violence in The Proposition, he says, was what came
next: ''There was the short, sharp burst, and then the shock afterwards. That's
what is really effective. In a lot of films, the focus is on the actual
violence, and everyone seems to be quite flippant afterwards, as if it has just
gone away.''
■Lawless opens on October 11.
