Better than most
JIM SCHEMBRI
10/11/2000
The Age

For one precious day, David Wenham is back at his home in Rushcutter's Bay. He's just arrived for the premiere of his latest film, Better Than Sex, but flies out in the morning to return to the set of The Lord of the Rings in New Zealand, where he will stay until December.

The last time Wenham was home for any extended period was in January, to shoot Better Than Sex around Sydney with co-star Susie Porter and writer-director Jonathan Teplitzky. Since then he's barely seen the place. He's not whining, though. "No, I've got no complaint about that," he says. He is in high spirits. It's good to be busy, and Wenham has been busier than most.

In Better Than Sex, Wenham plays Josh, a wildlife photographer who has a casual fling with Cin (Porter), a girl he just met at a party. Their torrid one-night stand develops into a three-night stand-off as they banter, bicker, joke and cajole each other between penetrating encounters under the sheets of Cin's stress-tested bed.

Wenham admits to having the script for a long time before he "got around" to reading it. Once he did, though, his reaction was immediate.

"I found it refreshing. I found it a well-observed, witty, intelligent comedy," he says. "It had potential pitfalls, but it avoided them quite well. You've got two people in a bedroom for 90 minutes. It's a hard thing to pull off, to make it ring true, to make that interesting to watch for that period of time."

Wenham says the script was "certainly different for an Australian screenplay". Just guessing here, but does he mean that this one was polished, had a structure, good dialogue and a point? "Oh, that's cruel," he says with a poorly masked titter.

When he met Teplitzky to discuss the project, Wenham was impressed with how thoroughly the first-time writer-director had worked out and storyboarded the film. Wenham reads far more scripts than he can say "yes" to, and wishes they all showed that degree of creative investment.

"Look, it's hard to find a good script, and I don't think that's just here, it's everywhere," he says. "And why that is, it's because it's bloody hard to write a good script, so it's rare to find something that you read and you think, 'Oh my God, this is really well-crafted, very well-structured, with great characters'."

And it rang bells with him. Though wary of divulging too many details of casual encounters with the opposite sex, Wenham says: "I could certainly identify with certain parts of the script. Other parts of the script, I had friends who had been through similar experiences. To answer you briefly, the situation wasn't entirely foreign to me!

"I'm making a huge generalisation here, but I'll have a stab in the dark and say that most people, I think, would have had an experience not too dissimilar from the one that occurs in the film."

The film comically celebrates behavioral differences between the sexes, often with the accuracy of a Japanese laser-guided car factory robot. One sequence shows men's snooping habits in strange new habitats. Another details the inordinate amount of time it can take a woman to dress for something as casual as a visit to the local cafe.

This scene rang a particularly big bell with Wenham, who agrees the sequence almost qualifies Better Than Sex as a documentary.

"It is! It is! Oh yeah!" he exclaims with a laugh. "All those little things are truisms, they do occur. Some people might describe that particular element as cliched, but it only gets the title 'cliche' because it does happen. It is a truism, it is a reflection of life, and the dressing scene is certainly a common one."

Better Than Sex was made for a tiny budget of about $1 million, with Wenham, Porter and much of the crew happily working for reduced rates. "We didn't make any money out of it. It was a labor of love, and that's good," says Wenham. "I suppose there's a perception sometimes that actors won't do things unless they're paid their required wage, but here we all took a bit of a pay cut and did something that we wanted to do. It was so enjoyable to work on because everybody was there because they wanted to be."

Wenham has a formidable roster of films about to be released. Apart from Better Than Sex, for which he's received a best-actor AFI nomination, he's in Russian Doll, Dust, Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge and The Bank - made with the team that did The Boys. He is now busy playing Faramir in Peter Jackson's three-film adaptation of JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

The massive production has been enclosed in a George Lucas-like cone of secrecy. Can Wenham offer any insights?

"It is shrouded in secrecy, but that's fair enough, because Peter wants to make it a great surprise when eventually the first film's released in a year's time. It's such an enormous project, hugely ambitious, but God, it's so exciting."

Had he read it? "Now I have!" he says. "When I got the job I hadn't read it, but, I must say, I'm not the only actor where that's been the case! Now that I've discovered the book, I keep thinking, 'Gee, I wish I'd read this when I was in my teens'."

So, David. The Lord of the Rings. What's it about? Twenty-five words or less.

He laughs. "Well, it's just a bloody good road movie, I suppose!"

Given Wenham's current ubiquity in film, it's a harsh irony that the film that arguably contains his best performance may not be released here, at least for a long time.

In Molokai: The Story of Father Damien, Wenham plays the the title role of the Belgian priest who goes to work on a Hawaiian leper colony. Directed by Paul Cox (Lonely Hearts, My First Wife, the upcoming Innocence), Wenham sports a convincing Flemish accent and dons progressively garish make-up to play that rarest of all things - an understated hero.

He spent four gruelling months on a remote island to do the film. Does he have any idea when, or if, it will hit screens?

Wenham sighs. "In all honesty, I don't, and it's very frustrating, especially for Paul, the fact that it mightn't get out there." He sighs again. "It's all a bit silly, really.

"The great pity about the thing is that I do feel that it is a really beautiful film and a beautiful story, and that people would really appreciate the film if they saw it. The great irony is the fact that the reason it isn't being shown is a quibble about money."

During the shoot, Wenham worked with real patients, who became increasingly involved in the film. It must have been hard to work in circumstances like that and not be affected. Did the experience change him?

"It did, without a doubt."

How so?

"It taps into $" Wenham stumbles, then pauses a moment. "It's very hard to articulate. It's really hard to articulate. You appreciate life just that little bit more and realise just how lucky you are."

It was while filming Father Damien that Wenham first got word that the ABC series SeaChange was a hit, and that his character, Diver Dan, had become something of a sex symbol.

"It was a huge surprise, a great surprise," he says. "I loved doing SeaChange, but it was for the ABC, something that's not normally associated with great popularity."

Wenham was well established before SeaChange. He'd starred in and produced The Boys, which was adapted from the play in which he also appeared. He won an AFI award for best lead actor in a TV drama for his role in Simone De Beauvoir's Babies. His other film credits include Cosi, Idiot Box and A Little Bit of Soul. But it was SeaChange that made him a household name.

"Television does that to you," he says. "It took me to a much wider audience. It is the medium of the masses, I suppose, and I became much more well-known."

Wenham appeared only in the first series, and in two episodes of the second. Leaving SeaChange had nothing to do with any fear of typecasting. "It wasn't that calculated. I finished the first series and then said that that was the end of my contract because I did have other work, so I moved on. The decision was made before the first episode even went to air."

That spike of popularity has preyed on Wenham's mind very little. He's glad of the exposure, but has neither assessed its impact on his career nor on his approach to choosing roles.

"I must say, I'm really not that calculating in terms of the reasons I take work," he says after a thoughtful pause. "I don't think about the people's effect or what they might think. I really just choose each project on its merit."

Wenham, who has representation in Britain and US, says with mock-tedium that sooner or later he'll have to pack a bag and go over for some meetings. "I don't mind where the work is," he says, "but, of course, I always want to do work here. This is my home and I love telling stories that are from here."

Reticent as Wenham often is on certain subjects, this is one he quickly warms to. He has watched with some distress the "talent drain" of young film makers who go overseas.

"The interesting thing is that people who have worked here and gone away sometimes aren't permitted to work back here. People like Fred Schepisi are finding it very hard to get films up here, which I just find a little bit embarrassing.

"We seem to have a thing here in Australia whereby we nurture first-time film makers. We nurture something that's new, but we don't nurture careers in Australia. I think that's a real pity. The fact that, yeah, we love seeing new faces and new film makers and whatever, but what about their second film, their third film and their fourth film to keep them going?

"Like, where are all the great film makers from the 1970s, which was the wonderful heydey of Australian cinema? Why aren't they here making films? It's great that Phil Noyce is making a film here at the moment, it's so bloody brilliant $"

But rare?

"Yeah," Wenham says, sounding not at all as cheery as when we began.

Better Than Sex is now screening. See listings for details.