Bleak Futures

20 June 2014 | 9:26 am | Anthony Carew

"It’s just logical that we’ll be in for some huge crisis if things continue the way they are."

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The 46-year-old Pearce was excited to be working with Michôd again, following 2010's Animal Kingdom, but he wasn't sure what he was actually working with. “I didn't know who the character was in there,” says Pearce. “I didn't know what we were doing. It was question of humanity, morality, and ethics. Like: is this guy just a psycho? Is he a lovely, gentle man who's just damaged? Who is this guy?”

This guy is the titular character in The Rover, Pearce playing Eric, a vengeful hard man in a lawless, desolate near-future outback. “I keep getting asked if this is a Western, and I just don't know. I went through the same thing with The Proposition, just being unsure. Is it a Western?” Is it, perhaps, a post-apocalyptic movie with no apocalypse? “I know David started writing it in the wake of the [global financial crisis], and when the ball was being dropped on climate change. It's set 'ten years after the collapse', because he didn't want this to be something post-apocalyptic, after a meteor's wiped out half the Earth, but something far more true to life, and relatable.”

Pearce's performance is classic anti-hero, and comes after some eye-catching villain turns in Prometheus (“I know a lot of people had problems with [it, but] it's a really interesting film by a great filmmaker”), Lawless (“Nick [Cave] claims I made the character nastier than he was [in the script], but I don't agree”), and Iron Man 3 (“It's a giant piece of popcorn entertainment”).

Since cutting his teeth on Neighbours in the '80s, Pearce has had a long and varied career both abroad and at home. The Rover marks his third notable performance in the Australian outback, following The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert and The Proposition (each notable, Pearce smirks, for watching English actors Terrence Stamp, Emily Watson, Ray Winstone, and, in The Rover, Robert Pattinson become “tortured” by flies). Shooting The Rover through the Flinders Ranges, Michôd needed to make sure he avoided places already overfilmed (“everywhere we went they'd just had Tracks or Home & Away or Wolf Creek 2 go through there”). “On a visual level, it's just stunning. Any time you're in the desert shooting, the look on the cinematographer's face is one of pure joy. There's something to it just photographically, getting to shoot pretty pictures. And there's great drama to it, the looming danger, the terror of the wilderness.”

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With the great terror of The Rover being not so much the violent vision of a resource-scarce future, but how plausible it is. “Someone asked me why all futuristic movies tend to be so bleak... If you base it on the trajectory of the world – human nature, war, the rapidly rising population – and project forward, then it's bleak. It's just logical that we'll be in for some huge crisis if things continue the way they are.”