Sunday, August 1, 2010

When Gerard Butler appeared on screen as King Leonidas in the stylised movie epic, ‘300’, the world sat up and took notice.

The fact he was sporting little more than a loin cloth and a six-pack no doubt helped the film gross more than $450 million at the box office, but it was also his commanding performance that got audiences excited.

Since the film’s release in 2007, the Scottish-born actor has gone on to star in the romantic drama, ‘PS I Love You’, Guy Ritchie’s gangster movie, ‘RocknRolla’, the romcom, ‘The Ugly Truth’ and all-action flick, ‘Gamer’.

Such an eclectic mix of roles has proven Gerard’s chameleon-like quality and is one of the reasons he can now command a reported $15 million per movie.

His box office clout was a deciding factor in his choosing to produce, as well as star in, his latest movie, a crime thriller called ‘Law Abiding Citizen’.

“There comes a time when you get a lot more say in which movies are going to be made and movies are made off your back, so then you want to be a little more involved and get some credit for it,” says Gerard.

Candid, chatty and prone to swearing intermittently, he’s just turned 40 but looks five years younger despite admitting he’s only had three hours sleep.

In ‘Law Abiding Citizen’, Gerard plays Clyde Shelton, an honest, upstanding family man whose life is left in tatters when his wife and daughter are brutally murdered. Starring opposite him is Jamie Foxx who plays Nick Rice, a young and ambitious prosecutor. When Nick cuts a deal that spares one of the killers from death row, it proves a catalyst for Clyde to seek vengeance on the legal system and everyone who has let him down.

“There’s one thing I’ve learnt as an actor, as well as a producer, and that’s to trust my own instincts,” he says.

“When I first started acting, I would have an idea about certain things, whether it was a scene or some dialogue and often it wouldn’t be followed through but I was never in a position to have the power to press the matter. When the movie came out, my agents would say: ‘Do you know what, that was a good point you had there’. I noticed the more involved I became in developing stories, the more I realised I could actually have a huge amount of input.”

Gerard first came across the story for ‘Law Abiding Citizen’ when a script writer cornered him and begged him to read his work. The story may have been pretty raw but Gerard recognised its potential.

“It was two years of slowly but surely getting this thing going and working on the script and developing it,” he says. “I had so much to say about how the story turned out and in actual fact, some of the mistakes that were made were the few areas where I didn’t stand up for myself, where I felt I wish I had believed in myself and trusted my gut.”

He catches himself before divulging exactly what these mistakes were, although he does reveal, “positions were filled but tasks weren’t fulfilled”.

“That caused the movie to take a lot longer to be made and cost a lot more money than it should have.

The strange thing is, when it all came together, every possibility had been analysed a thousand times over, so it felt like it made the movie stronger in the end,” he explains.

Initially, Gerard was going to play Foxx’s character “but as time went on I became seduced by the role of Clyde,” he says. “I’ve often played the more heroic character with a more straightforward journey and I wanted something I could get my teeth into.”

His greatest challenge was turning what was a two-dimensional character in the initial draft into a complex character.

Working with criminologists on the psychology that drives revenge killers, Gerard says it’s about climbing into the mind of person who has been wronged.

“Everything in his life has changed in one moment. What must that be like and what kind of lengths would you go to as a person to take revenge and answer back?”

Be warned that Clyde goes to violent and bloody lengths.

“What was cool was there was nobody who was trying to shy away from the violence,” says Gerard. “Everybody realised that’s what was going to make this movie stand out.”

A law student for seven years before he turned to acting, Gerard says his experience was one of the reasons he was initially attracted to the movie.

“As much as we talk about the analysis of the legal system, I guess it gets to the point where it’s just pure entertainment. There’s a huge popcorn element in this movie,” he says.

“It hits a certain level and you say: ‘Okay, we will have fun with this’ and push every bit of violence that we could. In actual fact there are a couple of things we had to take out of the final cut.”

Apparently, one such scene was so graphic, Gerard says: “There were guys who had worked in the film industry for 30 years in front of the monitor with their hands over their mouths.” Be warned!