Cliff Curtis - The Talented Mr Curtis

Cliff Curtis has a long commute to work: Hollywood, Israel, Eden Terrace. RUSSELL BAILLIE reports.

It's a hot late-summer Sunday in Auckland but Cliff Curtis is stuck indoors. At an Eden Terrace recording studio, the actor is putting final post-production touches to the film Jubilee.

The next day he's off to Mexico for another American feature which will add "Johnny Depp" to the A-list of actors and directors he's worked with, and "Colombian" to the ethnic groups he's played. Of which, more later.

But right now he's channelling John Rowles: singing the paua-crooner's If I Only Had Time is his Jubilee character's Big Moment in a comedy of nicely-observed little ones.

The role of Billy, the hapless hubby and father-of-two who is forced into organising a school reunion, isn't only our first chance to hear his singing voice (aside from the boozy singalongs of Once Were Warriors in which he played the serpentine Uncle Bully).

It's also the debut as Cliff Curtis, leading man.

Looking at the finished film later, you can see that mantle suits him, even in this relatively modest context. He may have become an in-demand and ethnically-adaptable character actor in Hollywood over the past few years. But in Jubilee his Billy is a real character, one who's all too recognisable from smalltown New Zild.

Oh, and he can carry a tune, too.

"I think one of the key reasons I looked at Jubilee was because of the genre," he says taking the break from the studio microphone for an hour, "and yep because it's a lead role and I'm ready to take on that responsibility and see if I can handle it."

Curtis sort of sneaked up on us here. The onetime champion rock'n'roll dancer and glazier from the Kapiti Coast graduated from the New Zealand Drama School and soon got himself a solid theatre grounding.

In the early 90s he started turning up on both the small screen (in just about everything but Shortland Street) and on the big screen too, whether as a supporting player in the celebrated likes of The Piano or Warriors, as well as memorable turns in otherwise forgettable flicks like Desperate Remedies and Chicken.

Somewhere along the way that translated to the beginnings of a career in the big league Stateside.

"When I did Hercules - before it was a TV series it was a film - so they gave me a couple of tickets I had to go there for make-up and wardrobe and then I had to go back again for post production and I found myself there. I thought, 'If life is trying to tell me something it is not being very subtle,' and it coincided with Once Were Warriors being in Cannes, Desperate Remedies being in New York. So I felt I'd be really foolish not to have a look around and say hello to a few people.

"The first thing I wanted to know was if it would even be possible. Then I wanted to know whether I could work and then, after I found out I could work, what I wanted from it was, 'Can I work on projects with people that I respect and on projects that are substantial?' Now that's happened I thought, 'Great. Now I can go and look for something that I can do at home,' and that is where Jubilee came in."

In person, Curtis comes across as self-assured, driven, keen to make sure any question asked he answers in full with only occasional lapses into actorspeak, and with a fairly intense and unwavering eye contact. The sort of look that probably gets him parts.

And while he may have earned the right to drop a few names about the place, but any mention of the famous folks he's worked with only comes with direct questions about a career which has seen him building up the frequent flier miles between here and America.

Sure, the first two all-American films he was cast in - Deep Rising and Virus - went straight to video. And it might have been best if the third, Six Days Seven Nights, in which he and Temuera Morrison played AK47-toting pirates of the south seas harrassing Harrison Ford and Anne Heche, had headed straight to the bottom shelf, too.

But then something went right with the offers he got and the choices he made.

Ok, in his five minutes or so on screen as Iranian Sheik Fadlalah in the Oscar-nominated The Insider, Curtis is largely unrecognisbale under the beard and robes in his early scenes with Al Pacino and Christopher Plummer.

But exacting director Michael Mann thought it worth flying Curtis from New Zealand to Israel for one day's work.

In shouldabeen Oscar contender Three Kings, Curtis was in roughly half the film as an unwitting Iraqi rebel at the end of the Gulf War who rescues George Clooney and his bunch of AWOL American soldiers.

That's two Arabs he's played in a row, in movies that admittedly have treated the ethnic group with a lot more respect than we've come to expect from Hollywood. But a Maori actor playing an Arab? Perilous territory, surely?

Curtis relates a story of his first day on Three Kings and meeting the Iraqi supporting cast.

"There were a lot of people from Iraq that were in my group and of course their question to me was, 'You are not Arabic?' And I said, 'I am Maori. I am from New Zealand. I'm an actor my intention is to help tell your story with integrity' ... and then I said, 'So, have you been on a movie set before?' I had to place that down there right up front. I auditioned for the role and they looked and they looked and they looked for somebody you could have played the role. I wasn't getting the role because of any star status - I was really getting the role because the producers and director thought I could really do this role justice."

And in the yet-to-be-seen-here Bringing Out the Dead, Curtis was directed by Martin Scorsese in the celebrated director's return to New York's mean streets, its story centred on Nicolas Cage's soul-sick ambulance driver. In the film Curtis plays Cy Coates, a stress management consultant of sorts.

Mention Scorsese and it's hard to avoid that inevitable film nerd question: So what's he really like?

"Martin Scorsese is the man. Michael Mann is the man . But Martin Scorsese is a wonderful collaborator - he's not an auteur, as I would describe Michael Mann. Michael Mann writes and directs and produces. Martin Scorsese, in his directing style as far as I can tell, is ... he creates a possibility for everyone to bring their contribution forward. Like, he doesn't spend a lot of time telling you what to do, he spends a lot of time asking what you would like or what you think and so therefore whatever you like or feel he supports that. It's not keeping the 'talent' happy. It is working with artists, it's not as employees."

Oh, and Scorsese, who Curtis describes as "just a really gracious man," gave him a Christmas present to make any film nerd jealous - a poster from Raging Bull autographed by the director and Robert De Niro.

Wow, cool. Welcome to the club.

Even if it means getting used to commuting across the Pacific to work. And on the US immigration card where it asks occupation, he jokes, he's finally stopped writing "glazier." But this actor can still wield a mean putty knife: "Yeah, it's like riding a bike. It's like remembering lines."