Time has been very good to Guy Pearce.
After all, the Australian actor first made his mark in Hollywood in 1997’s brilliant, retro noir, ’40s-era L.A. Confidential. Last year critics and audiences alike were astounded at his compelling portrayal of a man whose brain injury leaves him mentally stuck in time in the nonlinear Memento. This year he villainously romped through the swashbuckling period piece The Count of Monte Cristo. Now, Pearce mans the controls of The Time Machine, journeying through several different eras in a modern take on the H.G. Wells classic.
But the role of a big-budget action hero in The Time Machine was as foreign a landscape to the stage-trained Pearce as the world 800,000 years in the future is to his character in the movie, the time-traveling Victorian scientist Alexander Hartdegen.
Still sporting bleach-blond hair for his recent role on the Australian stage in Tennesee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth, Pearce says that he was compelled to look in more iconic terms at his role as a bookish professor who explores the boundaries of past, present and future.
“I’ve never really looked at films before as mythical stories,” Pearce says. “I always look at films as real stories with real people in real situations. That’s why I struggle with the whole notion of calling someone the ‘good guy’ or the ‘bad guy,’ because I think we all have potential to do good things and all have the potential to do bad things.
“But for me, doing The Count of Monte Cristo and then this film, I really had to be able to start looking at films in more mythical terms,” he adds. “And that’s what allowed me to sort of see this character as someone who was able to become what we quite often call the hero, the rescuer.”
Pearce admits that because he is used to playing more reality-rooted characters, Hartdegen’s evolution from tortured genius to resolute protector was much more muted and subtle, while set against a fantastic sci-fi backdrop. “The challenge for me was to try to maintain some consistency through the story with the character, even though the character changes through the course of the film quite dramatically…It was an interesting experience, but I don’t know that I’ll keep on doing it.”
But it wasn’t just the mental and emotional moments that tested Pearce’s acting heroics. He also had to contend with the extreme physicality required to pull off The Time Machine‘s harrowing action sequences, such as the intense sequence in which a band of menacing Morlocks– bulked-up, feral aggressors–savagely hunt down the peaceful race of Eloi.
“Doing that hunt scene was really quite demanding. I actually broke a rib during that scene. And then all the scenes after that became quite challenging, just breathing and laughing,” Pearce reveals. “I’m not at all suggesting that I feel old, but as a 34-year-old it’s certainly a lot more difficult than it was when I was 21, leaping off towers and doing stuff like that. So I don’t really see myself as an action hero as such.”
Reacting to sights, sounds, characters and environments that literally didn’t exist anywhere but inside the digital brains of high-tech F/X computers also presented a whole new challenge. “Obviously there’s a lot of green screen work, sitting in the time machine in essentially what is a large green room with the background put in later,” he says. “It’s not something I had dealt with before, looking at marks on the wall and imagining it’s the New York skyline changing or whatever. It’s quite challenging. I like to rely on my imagination.”
Pearce admits he wasn’t exactly prepared for the big-budget production values involved in making the film. When he first laid eyes on the time machine itself, “I was just astounded…I just saw dollar signs. You just are really reminded in this country and with studio filmmaking how much money they have,” he says. “Because in Australia it would’ve been made with papier-mâché and [popsicle] sticks…My immediate thought was ‘Where is it going to end up when we finish making the movie? Whose lounge room is that going to end up sitting in?'”
Given his attraction to more dramatic psychological fare, it’s a wonder Pearce even bothered to read the script for The Time Machine when his agent forwarded it to him. And he might not have, were it not for the actor’s fond childhood memories of watching
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director George Pal‘s 1960 classic of the same name, also adapted from the H.G. Wells tome. And it didn’t hurt that the earlier film’s star, Rod Taylor, a Sydney native, was Pearce‘s fellow countryman.
“Maybe it’s something about Australians not being happy where they are and feeling the need to [travel elsewhere]. An insecurity complex about being down at the bottom of the planet,” Pearce quips, then gets serious. “That was the reason I wanted to do this film–being such a fan of the George Pal version. I guess just what it conjured in me, the child within…to get back to that again is quite appealing, because this is not normally the kind of film that I would be drawn to doing.
It seems that even in real life, moments from the past still affect the actor’s present–and perhaps the future. “I saw the film probably about eight years in a row, and then hadn’t seen it for a really long time,” he explains. “The script for this brought back a great deal of memories for me when I was a kid. I started to think about what effect the film would have on kids in this day and age, and perhaps on kids in the future as well.”
Pearce adds that he was encouraged by the fact that Oscar-winner Jeremy Irons was on board–indeed, the highly respected British actor had taken the vampy role of the evil Uber-Morlock. “He has a great sense of fun and enjoyment and that’s something I found quite inspirational, because I really had to tap into that in order to do this film. Knowing that Jeremy was doing it was quite an inspiration.”
Armed with fond childhood memories and an acting inspiration, Pearce took his role as a time traveler to heart and became very intrigued with the notion that human beings would rather fantasize about the future or dwell on the past rather than concentrate on the present. “That’s our ego trying to create some kind of identity for ourselves,” he says. “We allow guilt and fantasy and all those kinds of things to identify us, when really we would do ourselves a much greater service if we could actually exist in the present moment.
“Now obviously this is a philosophical perspective that probably I didn’t have when I was eight years old watching The Time Machine,” he continues, “but that whole notion of turning those fantasies about wanting to go somewhere in the future or the past into a tangible prospect is just the most fascinating concept in the world.”
When faced with the now oft-asked question of whether he’s like to travel to another era, Pearce admits he usually tells journalists he’d rather focus on the present. But then he concedes, “I’m sure I would. Of course it would be fascinating to go back, wouldn’t it? I was born in 1967, and I’d actually love to go back to the late ’60s and see what it was like back around that whole Woodstock time, but as an adult.”
The conversation eventually turns to Memento, a film that once seemed like a leading Oscar contender but garnered few major nominations. Pearce, who invests little attention in the Hollywood awards race, is sanguine when asked if he thinks, because of the film’s release early in the year, Oscar voters let the movie slip their minds come nomination time.
“I think it’s ironic that people should forget about that film, don’t you?” he laughs, adding that he takes both pride and comfort in the fact that Memento‘s unconventional narrative will likely make it a classic studied by cinema buffs for years to come.
Despite his plans not to revisit the action-movie genre, Pearce doesn’t rule out frequent returns to the big-budget world of Hollywood filmmaking, even as he continues to make more adventurous forays in smaller movies.
“I’d always like to think I could be or would be credible in any role that I do, whether it’s a bigger studio picture or whether it’s an independent picture. Essentially what I’m drawn to is a story and what characters experience throughout that story. Whether or not it’s a bigger film or a smaller film doesn’t really play into the picture for me in choosing,” he says.
If this year’s model of The Time Machine resonates with audiences as powerfully as it has in the past, now may be his opportunity to enjoy the best of both worlds.
