Given his long film career, Academy Award-winning actor Russell Crowe has had many chances to get behind the camera.
He settled on “The Water Diviner,” set in Australia and Turkey before, during and after the bloody World War I Gallipoli Campaign of 1915-16. His directorial debut, it opened in New Zealand and Australia last year and opens in the United States on April 24.
“I had a direct, visceral connection to the story,” Crowe said during an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I thought, this is a film I should direct.”
Born in New Zealand and raised in Australia, Crowe very much related to the film's plot. He plays Joshua Connor, a farmer who travels to Turkey following World War I to search for his three sons, who never made it home.
“You’re talking about a period of time where there’s no cellphones,” he said. “Children go off to war and you’re not going to hear from them.”
Despite his grim mission, Connor retains his humanity, befriending a precocious young boy, Orhan (Dylan Georgiades), after he lands in Istanbul to begin his search. Orhan's war-widowed mother, Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko), shows Connor kindness despite many Turks' understandable postwar animosity toward Australians.
The friendship Connor is able to forge with Major Hasan (Yilmaz Erdoğan) speaks to the reconciliation of the former warring factions years after Australian and New Zealand forces' retreat from the peninsula following the deaths of tens of thousands on both sides.
“In any conflict, there’s going to be bravery and compassion and grief on both sides,” Crowe said. “It very definitely gives you a perspective.”
“The Water Diviner” is unsparing in depicting the gruesome truths of Gallipoli, a strategic campaign launched early in World War I.
Allied troops sat bogged down in trench warfare on the Western Front in 1915, so British forces hatched a plan to knock the Germans’ weaker ally, the Ottoman Turks, out of the war. If successful, the move would have strengthened Britain’s Russian allies, and could have turned the tide against Germany.
Australia and New Zealand, self-governing members of the British Empire, fought with the mother country during World War I. When these troops — many of them farmers fighting for distant king and country — landed on Turkey's Gallipoli peninsula, they were met by well-entrenched enemies, led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Thousands of the "Anzacs" were cut down by machine-gun fire, and after months the campaign was abandoned. The failure cost several British leaders, including future Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, their jobs.
“Anzac Day” became a holiday in Australia and New Zealand and helped the former British colonies forge national identities.
“It’s the first time those two countries fought under their own flags,” Crowe noted.
In other news, Crowe recently filmed “The Nice Guys,” a noir crime thriller set in 1970s Los Angeles, in Atlanta.
"I have no idea what that movie's going to be like," he said of the film, also starring Ryan Gosling. "It's either going to be something people find affection for or it's going to be me and Ryan driving our careers into a freight train!"
