By Christina Radish
Set against the harsh and unforgiving landscape of the 1880's Australian Outback, The Proposition is a visually stunning tale of loyalty, revenge, and the quest for justice in a land without rule. Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce) is a renegade living in the lawless frontier who, along with his two brothers, Arthur (Danny Huston) and Mikey (Richard Wilson), is wanted for rape and murder. When local law enforcer Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) captures Charlie and Mikey, he makes Charlie a proposition, in an attempt to end the brutality that surrounds them: the only way to save his younger brother Mikey from the gallows is to track down and kill Arthur, his psychotic older brother, who Captain Stanley believes to be the ringleader of the violence. Charlie must choose between revenge for Mikey, loyalty to the brother who saved his life, and his own conscience.
From director John Hillcoat and singer/songwriter turned screenwriter Nick Cave, The Proposition is a bleak, emotionally charged Australian western. Aussie actor Guy Pearce, best known for his roles in such films as Memento and L.A. Confidential, was cast early on to play Charlie Burns. For Pearce, it was the script that initially caught his attention.
{quote_top}“When you read a Nick Cave script, it’s so poetic, so evocative and just so spot on,” says the self-proclaimed Cave fan. “ He’s only got to say three words, and you know exactly what he’s talking about. You’re left with this really open pool of description and a very clear understanding of what it is that he wants. I had been a fan of his, at least since 1990. I have always had him on a pedestal. I would have done the film, even if I’d just read this great script, but I was certainly really intrigued, knowing that Nick had written it.”
Actor-director-painter Danny Huston was attracted to the project for much the same reason as Pearce. “I felt the script was beautifully written,” he explains. “It is a classic story, almost Biblical at times, yet lean and mean. The opportunity to play a mythical character like Arthur, who has embraced horror as his lover, and is contemplating cosmic thoughts while he commits acts of violence and loves his brother and has poetic feelings, and yet, can be heinous, is a dream for an actor.”
“I think all the characters in the piece are misfits,” continues Huston. “None of them are one-dimensional, which is what I think makes the story work. They’re all striving for some kind of spiritual inner peace, even though they’re all doomed. In westerns, that usually works so beautifully because you’ve got this epic landscape, and the size of the story carries you through. You’ve got this feeling that they’re marching toward some horrific end.”
Films that look the most intense on the screen tend to have the most humor behind the scenes because it helps to release tension, lighten the mood between takes and build a camaraderie among the actors and filmmakers. “John, our director, is a man of such integrity, and a very honest, sweet, loving, humble guy,” says Pearce, the star of cult fave The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. “And, everyone was very aware of Nick’s presence, and the fact that we were all there with this beautiful script in front of us, which doesn’t happen often. I think everyone was really keen to work very hard. It might have been a subconscious thing, but John cast the people he wanted to cast, and that he could communicate with and that were going to be respectful and that he could respect.”
“We all bonded, ridiculously, on this film,” continues Pearce. “It was really nice for me because I don’t have any brothers and, even outside of Richard and Danny, who play my two brothers -- there was a real brotherhood that was created. We all just felt very supportive of each other, and we managed to laugh and have a silly perspective on the whole thing, as well as take it very seriously.”
The fun also extended off of the set, as everyone stayed at the same motel -- the Boulder Opal Motor Inn -- while they filmed in Winton, in central Queensland, the home of the Opal mining town. “The place to go to was a swimming pool,” says Huston, “which was impossible not to gravitate towards because of the heat. You would just plunge into the swimming pool and not swim, but wallow and drink a beer. The beers tasted so good. Spending the day in that heat, returning back to the motel and having a beer is one of the highlights of my life. It was a great place. And, you have no sense of what’s going on in the rest of the world, which is wonderful. It’s as if you’re sitting on the edge of the world. The moon is the wrong way around and everything is not quite right, but it doesn’t take long to get used to. It’s quite refreshing not to feel the pressure that we do in our world.”
Born in Rome, Huston, who was raised in Ireland and London with stops along the way in Mexico and the United States, says that although he loves to ride horses, he wasn’t really able to impart any of his prior knowledge to his co-stars because they were so controlled during filming.
{quote_middle}“I think we were seen as potential maniacs,” says Huston, laughing. “We had stunt guys who were like, ‘No, slow down!’ Those of us who didn’t know how to ride so well were schooled. Certain attention was given to us, in regard to not just going completely mad and galloping off into the horizon and never returning. I’ve always loved to ride. There is an immature, boyish quality that comes out when you throw a group of guys together and put them on horses and have them brandish guns, out in the desert. It reminds you of when you were a kid and you used to play cowboys and Indians, and it’s fun. And, because it’s so much fun, all of a sudden, the environment seems to be very forgiving.”
Another, more trying, aspect to filming in the Australian Outback was all the flies that were constantly buzzing around the set. “It’s pretty intense countryside,” declares Pearce. “There have been films made in the desert before, and you don’t detect the flies as much as you do in this. I think John really honed in and focused on them. And, of course, the blood that we used in the film was that sugary, syrupy stuff, so flies flock to it as much as they would to normal blood.”
For their next projects, 38-year-old Pearce and 44-year-old Huston will be playing roles in films about real-life people -- Pearce in Death Defying Acts, opposite Catherine Zeta Jones, about Harry Houdini’s affair with a Scottish woman; and Huston in Fade to Black, with Christopher Walken and Diego Luna, in which he is taking on Orson Welles.
{quote_bottom}“Fade to Black begins in 1948 post-war Rome, after Welles has shot The Magnificent Ambersons and Citizen Kane, and he has broken up with Rita Hayworth,” reveals Huston. “He’s working on a film called Black Magic, director by Gregory Ratoff, and he’s in Rome, trying to raise financing for Othello, which he later shot in Morocco. A man dies on the film set and Welles starts to investigate and finds that the man died under suspicious circumstances. The film quickly turns into a political thriller, a la Third Man. The screenplay is written by John Sales and directed by Oliver Parker. What I think is delicious about the film is that it’s all a conceit, a lie, a trick, smoke and mirrors. I think that’s very Wellesian, in spirit, as far as it being a delicious card trick. It has a very rich tapestry.”
