Russell Crowe is shown in a scene from “The Water Diviner.” (Photo credit: The Weinstein Company)

By Steven Rea
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Most first-time directors — even veteran actors who decide to take a turn behind the camera — opt for something simple, spare, contemporary. No elaborate sets, no period costumes, no exotic locales. Stick to the basics.

Russell Crowe, on the other hand, decided that for his inaugural effort he would shoot on two continents, re-create one of the bloodiest, most famous battles of the First World War, have actors riding atop galloping horses, stage fistfights and shoot-outs in a rolling vintage locomotive, and set another firefight in the ancient hilltop ruins of a village on the Aegean coast. There would be 121-degree days in the desert. And windstorms that threatened to bring sets and camera cranes tumbling.

“The word that came to mind was ‘impossible,’” Crowe says with a laugh. “And that just made it more compelling.”

The film that the Oscar-winning actor has directed — and stars in — is “The Water Diviner,” set in 1919, four years after the Battle of Gallipoli. Crowe plays Connor, an Australian farmer whose three sons joined the ANZA C forces and went to fight in the Ottoman Empire. More than 360,000 soldiers, on both sides of the campaign, died. Including, Connor believes, his three boys. So, Crowe’s character — who has an uncanny ability to locate deep-seated water sources in the driest stretches of the Outback — journeys to Istanbul, then to the Gallipoli peninsula, looking for the remains of his children, determined to take their bones and bury them back home.

Of course, there’s a beautiful widow — “Quantum of Solace” Bond girl Olga Kurylenko — with her own grievous stories of the war. And there is a Turkish officer (Yilmaz Erdogan) who was at Gallipoli, and who may well have been responsible for the deaths of Connor’s sons.

“The Water Diviner, which won the Australian Film Institute’s Best Picture prize and opens Friday, is, Crowe says, “unashamedly” antiwar.

“I think there’s a grave responsibility when you’re approaching a subject like this, to, at the very least, show these kinds of conflict in a real sense,” he offers, on the phone from San Francisco recently. “To package up war as being simply about bravery and courage and convenient death I think does a gross disservice to any viewer — but particularly to generations to come.

“And the opportunity that the script afforded me was to put a perspective in front of Australians and New Zealanders and also Turkish people, which we hadn’t seen before. That is, to understand that in any armed conflict, there’s going to be bravery, and compassion, and grief, on every side.”

For the New Zealand-born and Australian-bred Crowe, Gallipoli was part of his schoolboy history books. In 1981, when Crowe was still a teenager, Peter Weir’s “Gallipoli” — starring Mel Gibson — came out.

“I loved that film, and I watched it again in 2012, to remind myself what it was about that film that I liked so much.”

Crowe believes that, without consciously intending so, his “Water Diviner screenwriters — Andrew Knight and Andrew Anastasios — have crafted a “cultural companion piece” to Weir’s film, a way to frame the same events from a more inclusive perspective.

“It provided an opportunity for a shift in how we view this particular story,” he says.

Crowe would get the chance to work with Australian New Wave director Weir in the early 2000s, starring in the grand nautical adventure, “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.” Growing up in the midst of this burst of new Australian cinema, Crowe says, was life-changing for him.

“The work of Australian directors in the mid-‘70s and early ‘80s was very definitely a formative thing for me in terms of my love of the cinema. When I saw Peter’s movie “The Last Wave,” for example, it was a completely different experience from watching an American film. … It was culturally much closer. …

“That period was the golden age of Australian cinema. So part of the way we shot the film was in respect to what directors like Peter, like Fred Schepisi, like Bruce Beresford, like Phil Noyce, like Gillian Armstrong, achieved. … There’s definite influence there.”

Crowe took other lessons from other filmmakers he has worked for over the years: Ridley Scott (five times, including “Gladiator,” for which Crowe won the Academy Award for best actor), Darren Aronofsky (“Noah”) and others, among them Ron Howard (“A Beautiful Mind”).

“If you talk about influences, you might well find that somebody like Darren, when he was designing those sweeping overhead shots in “Noah,” was actually influenced by how Ridley Scott shot the Colosseum in “Gladiator.” And if you looked into it, you’d probably find that Ridley was influenced by how David Lean saw the desert in ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’

“So, influence is part of the journey of any artist. But how you filter that influence is always going to be your own.”