Four years after his Oscar, Geoffrey Rush is still wary of taking on Hollywood.

Michael Bodey

GEOFFREY Rush is in a good place right now. "It feels pretty nice," he says slowly.

Right now, that place is taking a break after a six-month period that included his third Oscar nomination (for Quills) and two more very different films, The Banger Sisters and Frida.

"They both gave me a chance to say I'm going to enjoy a lovely, long winter in Melbourne," he says with relish.

And that's where he'll stay, waiting for his next film with Kate Winslet to raise its finance; waiting for his next stage role in Melbourne, next year, and possibly another in Sydney, in 2003; and talking about his upcoming films, the local thriller Lantana and the current international thriller The Tailor Of Panama.

And the break gives the Oscar-winner time to contemplate his new-found, self-described job description.

"I define myself now as being a 'platform release' actor rather than a 'weekend opener', " he laughs.

"The moment you become a 'weekend opener', you're at the hard end of the completely brutal commercial scale."

Consequently, he says, that tends to mean you're placed in films that, well, aren't ones for the curriculum vitae. "I tend to be in those sort of films that have to wait for finance," he says.

After his Oscar for Shine in 1997, Rush didn't ride into Hollywood, guns blazing. His later experiences there, on The House On Haunted Hill and Mystery Men, a funny film somehow nobbled, showed just why he made the correct decision to take Hollywood slowly.

"Look, it was great for me," he says of Mystery Men. "It was the biggest budget film I'd done and, unfortunately, it kind of nosedived but that's out of my hands once we've finished shooting.

"But I went into it with the knowledge that here's a really smart, popcorn movie that's subverting the whole heroic genre by having these suburban klutzes taking on that form. And it was a phenomenal cast with the cream of contemporary American comedy, an acting experience and a half."

While not ungrateful for that experience, Rush seems far happier with his latest work on the adaptation of John Le Carre's The Tailor Of Panama.

Rush stars opposite Pierce Brosnan and Jamie Lee Curtis as the dithering aforementioned tailor who sparks a comical diplomatic crisis with his desperate storytelling.

Director John Boorman (Deliverance, The General) has shown a surprising variety over his 30 years in movies.

Again, he confounds with an international thriller with a tone ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous that is equal parts Our Man In Havana and Dr Strangelove.

Even Rush was surprised the first time he saw it, with 2000 others at a Berlin Film Festival screening, where Boorman later won the Best Director award.

It's a busy life when you are in front of cameras: one day Panama, the next Mexico and Paris for Frida or New York for The Banger Sisters with Susan Sarandon and Goldie Hawn.

"They landed at the right time," Rush says of his latest films. "I was talking to my agent and said, 'Wouldn't it be great to do a smart adult comedy', in the wake of having been back in a wig prancing around in period clothes (Quills).

"And then years ago I'd spoken to Salma Hayek and she said 'I'm planning this project on (Frida Kahlo) and I'd love you to be involved'. "

So clearly Australian actors are very much part of the mainstream and not treated as exotica. Rush laughs. "I think what amazes people is the sort of baffling array of people we have," he says.

"There's a fair impact now on commercial film making with people like Heath Ledger and Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe and then they see Rachel Griffiths and Cate Blanchett and Toni Collette.

"I think the diversity is a great quality that we project. They're starting to realise there's a greater depth to the culture than the images they've been fed for such a long time."

Australian actors have forged the same path through Hollywood our technicians did in past decades, Rush adds. "I know in America the DPs (directors of photography) go: 'Scratch any American film now and there's a one-in-five ratio that an Aussie DP shot it'. "

Rush concedes he is a little sheltered from the impact of recent Australian Taxation Office rulings against the "runaway" US film productions Red Planet and Moulin Rouge.

In fact, Rush's career has almost exclusively comprised independent Australian and European cinema. But he has sensed a few noses out of joint with the upsurge in big-budget movies coming here.

"In the bigger picture, mainstream Hollywood is now aware, since the rise in independent films in the past five or six years, that a lot of very substantial and interesting material is being shot in England and Canada and here," he says.

"And it's draining some of their resources. They always thought themselves to be the kingpin, I suppose."

Particularly when, he says, "a production like Moulin Rouge comes out of Fox Studios but it's got that 95 per cent deep Australian quality and practicality to it".

The Tailor Of Panama is screening now. Lantana will open on October 4.

Source: Courier Mail