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2001 Scans
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| AFI Insider (Australia: Summer 2001) Scan Provided By: Mona |
AFI Insider (Australia: Summer 2001) Scan Provided By: Mona |
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| New Idea (USA:March 2001) Scan Provided By: Mona |
Movieline (USA:July 2001) Scan Provided By: Mona |
Movieline (USA:July 2001) Scan Provided By: Mona |
Spain
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| El Paris (Spain: June 2001) Scan Provided By: Mona |
El Paris (Spain: June 2001) Scan Provided By: Mona |
El Paris (Spain: June 2001) Scan Provided By: Mona |
El Paris (Spain: June 2001) Scan Provided By: Mona |
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| El Paris (Spain: June 2001) Scan Provided By: Mona |
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Newsweek: Acting Chops
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Written By: Devin Gordon
Typed & Provided By Mona
USA: April 23, 2001
Playing a killer with a few bolts loose, an Aussie comic explodes.
Scan Provided By: Mona
Some roles you just can’t turn down. But if Eric Bana was willing to play Mark (Chopper) Read, Australia’s most notorious criminal, it’s hard to imagine a role the actor wouldn’t tackle. Jailed for a botched kidnapping, Chopper at one point in the film stabs a rival in the neck, then politely offers the man a cigarette as he bleeds to death. But it’s not the brutal scenework that makes the part such a doozy—it’s the real Chopper Read, the one who’s out on parole. Who was fully intending to see “Chopper,” the movie that bears his name. Read, already a fan of Bana’s asked to have the actor play him. (“He thought I had the necessary level of insanity,” Bana jokes.) But what if he didn’t like Bana’s performance? What if Read had a few comments—that he’d like to deliver in person? “Yeah, it did cross my mind,” says Bana, 32, reclining in a Manhattan hotel room. “But it wasn’t until the film came out—and I heard he thought it was quite amazing—that all that fear came up. It was like driving on a freeway and a car runs a red light and just misses you. You don’t think about it for a few seconds. Then you go, ‘Whew.’”
Scan Provided By: Mona
Bana’s performance in “Chopper” tends to draw much the same reaction: Whew. The film, by writer-director Andrew Dominik, is based on memoirs the real Chopper wrote behind bars. But whenever the truth didn’t live up to his loony standards, he embellished. The movie bravely calls his bluffs, giving Bana, a chameleon of an actor, the chance to show all sides of Read: hilariously unhinged, but also desperate and confused. Dominik shoots the early prison scenes in stark blues and whites, the later scenes in a hazy brown, and his artistry helps paper over a somewhat choppy (sorry) script. Bana, for his work, won Australia’s top to acting prizes and a major role in Ridley (“Gladiator”) Scott’s next film, “Black Hawk Down,” a retelling of the U.S. engagement in Somalia.
A hotheaded sadist, an elite American soldier—pretty stern material. But before turning to film, Bana was…a stand-up comedian. He also hosted a highly rated Aussie TV comedy show. Still, Bana, who lives in Melbourne with his wife and infant son, radiates normalcy. He talks easily—and, despite his comic roots, feels no need to crack jokes. The only hint of unrest comes when the subject turns to filming “Black Hawk Down.”
“We’re staying here,” says Bana, holding up a book of matches from the Hilton in Rabat, Morocco, “And in keeping with all capital cities, it’s a f---ing hole. There’s only two English TV channels, CNN and the BBC, so you get either the Nasdaq report or f---ing foot-and-mouth. It’s like ‘Groundhog Day’.” Take it, Eric. After your tango with a killer, the Nasdaq sounds like a nice change of pace.
Who Weekly: Chopping & Changing
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Author Unknown
Typed & Provided By Mona
Australia: October 22, 2001
Scan Provided By: Mona
Last December, two months into his fitness and diet regimen (no alcohol,
Scan Provided By: Mona
no sugar) for his role as a US soldier in Black Hawk Down, Eric Bana, 33,
developed a six-pack.
"I thought, 'I'm stuffed,'" he says. "I'd told my wife once you’re over 30, abs vanish and it's genetically impossible for them to reappear."
Along with the Lazarus abs, the Melbourne father-of-one (who was 106kg in Chopper last year and is now a chiseled 86kg to play a council worker in The Nugget) gained resolve:
"Fitness has become part of my life, not a fad thing for a role. You just feel so sharp."
Eric The Idol
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Written By: Philip McCarthy
Source: GloomyGus.org
Provided By: Coe
Internet: December 8, 2001
A dusty town in Morocco may not be the obvious place to look for the next big thing, but that's where Phillip McCarthy found our own Eric Bana.
It's his big break, his shot at the big time, but all Eric Bana really wants is to go home. And, really, who can blame him? He's sitting in his trailer on the set of Ridley Scott's military thriller Black Hawk Down. The $US95 million ($183 million) film is being shot in Morocco and we're on the edge of an appropriately bleak section of the capital, Rabat, which is standing in for the movie's setting, the Somalian capital Mogadishu. Convincing though he looks as a crack marine - the extra weight he gained for Chopper is long gone, and then some - Bana looks forlorn.
The former Full Frontal star has been in this scruffy north African take on Canberra for 10 weeks and he needs to get out. He's been planning a three-day break in Spain with his wife, Rebecca, and their two-year-old son, Klaus, for weeks. Scott has told him he can't go. He's confined to barracks. It seems, when you're a commando, even just for the duration of a movie, the mission comes first.
"I'm not angry, I'm just frustrated," Bana says fingering his M16 in a distracted way. I nervously remind myself that it's just a prop. That this time round he's not playing the loose cannon Mark "Chopper" Read, but a disciplined commando who would never shoot a civilian out of frustration. Trouble is, Bana seems to inhabit his characters so thoroughly.
The 33-year-old went from the doughy flintiness of Chopper to the chiselled silhouette of commando Hoot Hooten in a matter of months, a weight fluctuation that amounts, he figures, to about 23 kilograms. He weighs about 10kg less than he did before he gained all the beer-and-burger weight for Chopper.
"Eric is so incredibly disciplined," says English actor Matthew Marsden, who plays a young American soldier in the based-on-fact Black Hawk Down. "He's so careful what he eats. He has about 6 per cent body fat. And he's good, very good. Eric is going to basically steal this picture. I've told him, 'You're going to be a star, mate'."
This is just Bana's third feature film. In The Castle, he played Sophie Lee's kickboxing boyfriend Con. Then came his extraordinary turn in Chopper. Black Hawk Down, though, is in a different league.
Based on writer Mark Bowden's 1999 book, the film reconstructs the longest sustained firefight involving American troops since Vietnam. On October 3, 1993, about 100 elite US commandos were dropped by Black Hawk helicopters into the teeming market of Mogadishu. The aim was to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord. The mission went horribly wrong. By dawn, 18 Americans had died. Bana's character, Sergeant First Class Norm "Hoot" Hooten, is a composite of several of the Delta Force commandos who took part in the mission. One part of that composite is almost certainly an irascible real-life Delta sergeant named Norm Hooten.
Hooten was one of the team leaders of the shadowy and secretive D-Boys, as they are known, who served uneasily in Somalia alongside the more conventional hierarchy of the US Rangers. Bowden writes of the D-Boys:
"They eschewed salutes and all other traditional trappings of military life. Disdain for normal displays of army status was the unit's signature. They simply transcended rank."
It's the perfect role for an Aussie larrikin. Even so, Bana had some serious preparation to do.
"We went to boot camp at Fort Bragg, which is the Special Forces camp," he recalls. "I was really impressed about how intelligent and politically aware they were. I have to say my preconceptions about them being gung-ho types were altered."
Bana's also found that not carrying a movie can be quite appealing. "The workload is more spread out," he says. "What is interesting is that, despite the budget, this is just as disorganised as any $2 million film. In terms of the last-minute rush - and improvising - it's unexpectedly familiar. The hard part is that if you're not working there's nothing to do and the schedule is such that you can't really get away - even when you think you can. And, of course, going home is not an option for me ... I've been here three months already and, yes, I am incredibly homesick."
At least Bana has his wife and child with him at the "barracks", the Rabat Hilton. "Eric's wife is incredibly resourceful," says British actor Jason Isaacs, who reprises his role of nemesis to Aussie actors, having badgered Heath Ledger and Mel Gibson in The Patriot last year. "She joined a mother's group here. His son thinks he's in a house with 300 rooms and he has about 300 uncles."
It's all quite a leap for a migrants' son (Bana's father is Croatian, his mother German) from Tullamarine, Melbourne. Bana was working as a barman when he decided to try his hand at stand-up comedy. That was 1991. Two years later, he was on television as a cast member of the sketch comedy show Full Frontal. The ill-fated Eric Bana Show followed and, while the critics didn't warm to his interview technique, he won fans with his knack for impressions.
He skewered the likes of Warwick Capper and Ray Martin and got great milage from the character Poida.Then came the move to the big screen, with the smallish role in The Castle and the not-so-smallish, career-defining turn in Andrew Dominik's movie based on real-life crime figure Mark Read.
Despite its ensemble nature, Bana has been given second billing in Black Hawk Down, just below Pearl Harbor's Josh Hartnett. For his next major project his name will top the bill: he's been signed to play the lead in Ang Lee's adaptation of the old Marvel Comics classic The Hulk. He has signed on for a three-film deal.
Given the hype and the sudden career momentum, will Bana move to Hollywood? Not likely. "I've given no thought about moving to America at all," he says. "I think it is becoming less and less relevant. We're here in Rabat. Right now there are shoots in Prague, in Canada, in Sydney. I see it is important that I spend certain periods of time in Los Angeles and after this I will go there for two weeks and do meetings and stuff. It's inevitable that I have to visit, but I am more than happy to keep Melbourne as home."
Bana points out that he recently slipped in an Australian film, The Nugget, which was shot in Mudgee. In this effort from writer-director Bill Bennett (Kiss or Kill), Bana plays opposite veteran Max Cullen in a story about a group of council workers who find a gold nugget. It's a kind of fable, he says, about how the discovery affects their lives. "I made the decision to do it a long time ago," he says. "Then all this stuff happened and I remember thinking, 'I hope I'm doing the right thing'. And I re-read the script and I knew I was. The first thing I thought when I read it was, 'This is a film I would want my son to see'. So I had to do it."
After September 11, Hollywood was micro-agonising over what sort of films audiences would accept and Black Hawk Down looked like becoming a casualty. Sure, it was being made by Ridley Scott, who gave us Blade Runner, Gladiator, Alien and Thelma & Louise, but was America ready for a war movie? Especially one in which it looked decidedly vulnerable? Filming on Black Hawk Down finished in August. By the time of September 11, Scott was hard at work on his edit. Then America went into Afghanistan and things changed again. After all, the film deals with the very same elite forces Washington is relying on in its latest campaign. The geopolitical backdrop of Somalia, a dysfunctional Muslim state with striking parallels to Afghanistan, added yet more frisson.
As it happens, the mood seems to be that all this has only brought an added poignancy to the film. Just as Bowden's book is suddenly topical again as a primer on the seeds of fundamentalist violence, so the film has acquired something like the status of a public service announcement. Black Hawk Down is even set to get a brief end-of-year season in New York and Los Angeles in order to qualify it for Oscar consideration. All of which is extraordinary luck for Bana. He plays one of the film's central characters. In fact, it's probably not going too far to say that, in the canon of Ridley Scott films, Bana has the Russell Crowe role. And we all know where that can lead.
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