Mind kind of Guy

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

Backwards interview this do to try should we suggested it's when laughs Pearce Guy.

Sorry, but the spirit of Memento - a movie with a story that runs backwards after opening with an apparent murder committed by Guy Pearce's character Leonard - is quite infectious.

Er, sorry, what we were talking about?

Ah yes, the problem with Leonard is that he's woken up with a blow to the head to find his wife dead and his brain unable to make new memories.

That's anterograde memory loss, to give it its proper psychological definition. In Leonard's case it means after 15 minutes or so he's at a loss about who he's talking to, where he is, or just why he might be holding a gun on someone.

So he writes a lot of notes to himself, keeps polaroids of people and is covered in tattoos to remind him of his revenge mission. It's a puzzle film, a neurological noir and really quite something.

The initial buzz for the film from the northern hemisphere festival circuit is growing louder, especially with its arrival at American cinemas earlier this month. The film is the product of another pair of fraternal whiz kids, English-American director Chris Nolan and his writer-brother Jonathon, who figured that in receiving the story backwards, the audience is caught in Leonard's memory puzzle and, like him, denied the knowledge that a forward linear story would provide.

Leonard's only guide in his hazy world is a suspicious friend (Joe Pantoliano) and a mysterious and sultry bartender (Carrie-Ann Moss, who was in another mind-game film, The Matrix, with Pantoliano).

No, he didn't quite get it at first either, says Pearce on the phone from Sydney, but after encountering the Nolan brothers, he knew he just had to do it.

"Well, I did say, 'Look, I have to preface this meeting by having to say I really have to read this script again. There is sort of a lot that I don't get but what I do get is the emotional plight of this guy and that is all I can really offer you anyway. That is all I am good for'."

It's a left-turn kind of movie, something the English-born, Melbourne-based (his late father Stuart was a New Zealander) Neighbours alumni has been doing for the past decade. He first made his mark in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert but got his big break stateside when he gave an electric performance as a strait-laced detective in LA Confidential opposite fellow antipodean Russell Crowe.

His role as Leonard also shows the main traits of Pearce's film characters - he's wired, paranoid, brittle and potentially dangerous.

"Yeah, I can be a pretty wired person so it was pretty easy to pick up on characters and have that trait."

But Pearce says playing a character who essentially has to start from scratch every so often was oddly liberating.

"Even though there is a great deal of complication within the story and the structure and the whole concept, because of the condition Leonard suffers, it allows me to have a great deal of freedom.

"I was really able to forget all of the information I was supposed to know as an actor and kind of just make it up as I went along. That is the sort of quality Leonard has.

"It was almost like Leonard had to do all the acting and I didn't have to do any. It's funny because some of the things that make Leonard survive his day relate to some of the things that help me survive my day, which relate to why I'm an actor anyway.

"Just that whole thing of when you meet somebody you present a particular person because maybe you are nervous about your real self or you feel boring so you present something.

"I think part of the reason I am an actor is because I probably was pretty gutless as a kid or a teenager or a 20-year-old and I got pretty good at keeping people entertained and not having them thinking I was a boring git or a nerd."

Since moving on from the Neighbours gig that he started a couple of days out of high school in 1986, Pearce's credits suggest a restless talent keen on roles in risky movies. There was Priscilla of course, then, before LA Confidential, he portrayed Hollywood's first antipodean bad boy Errol Flynn in Flynn.

Next he appeared in the little-seen and bizarre Ravenous, in which he played a US Cavalry officer tempted into cannibalism on a snowbound frontier post ("a hideous experience") before playing the stern prosecutor in last year's Rules of Engagement which he says was ruined by test audiences' demands for a happy ending. "Maybe it's because I did Neighbours for four years but now I need to be versatile to make up for it."

It seems that Pearce doesn't do career moves, unlike Crowe, with whom he may forever be compared, and also has a sideline musical interest in songwriting and recording.

"We are actually very different people," says Pearce about the Oscar-winner and former screen partner. "I think there is a big part of Russell and me that is exactly the same as far as our paranoias and our abilities to dissect human personality and our extremes, so far as our moods.

"We just have a different energy and obviously a different physique. I think Russell has more energy than I do and he is able to handle the American psyche better than I can. I don't know if he has been acting any longer than I have but he's certainly had a more prominent career - he's certainly done a lot more work."

Would he swap places?

"No, I don't think so."

Pearce laughs that on his most recent shoot - a new version of The Count of Monte Cristo shot in Ireland and Malta - he encountered Crowe's Gladiator co-star Richard Harris.

"All he did was rave about what a fabulous guy Russell was and he couldn't work out why the whole world seemed to hate him. I thought, 'Well obviously he's got you in his pocket, mate, y'know'."

Still, for Pearce the work is interesting and regular on both sides of the Pacific and, if the buzz for Memento builds, he could be up for awards.

"My level of embarrassment over the amount of work I get in comparison to some fabulous actors out there is increasing remarkably."

And with that, a boat somewhere on the Sydney waterfront near Pearce's phone can be heard sounding its horn loudly. "Ah, my ship's come in," he laughs.

Right be well may he, Memento with.

* Memento screens from Thursday April 12.

Memento's great website