Geoffrey Rush has rarely met a physical task he didn’t want to attempt, be it sword fighting for “Pirates of the Caribbean” or playing the piano for his Oscar-winning role in “Shine.”
The new horror movie “The Rule of Jenny Pen,” starring Rush as a supercilious former judge living in a nursing home, required yet another unfamiliar skill set: He had to use a motorized wheelchair.
“I got very good at getting up to speed, but in narrow corridors, it was not the same story,” Rush, 73, said of the feature directed by James Ashcroft and also starring John Lithgow as a psychopathic fellow resident. A lot of the final day’s goof reel “was punctuated by me running into staircases or James leaping over furniture because I went, ‘It’s just not responding.’”
In a video call from his native Australia, Rush discussed his cultural essentials, many of them — to his surprise — from his childhood and early professional life. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
The Treniers
They were the first band to use the words “rock” and “roll” in lyrics, way back in the late ’40s and early ’50s, when they were a blues band hovering between swing and boogie-woogie. Their energy was definitely sexy and audacious. They beat Bill Haley by about a half decade. My mum was a great jiver during my childhood, and she loved Little Richard. She used to dive onto the dance floor.
Silent Film Clowns
Bob Monkhouse, who was an English comedian, had a show that I used to watch every Saturday night called “Mad Movies.” I got introduced to silent film and not necessarily the big guns. He looked at a lot of the minor characters, and I became obsessed by that.
Chuck Jones
I took “Shine” to the Denver festival and they said, “Tonight there’s a special guest. He’s an animator.” I went, “I love cartoons. I’m a big Chuck Jones fan.” They said, “That’s who’s here.” I kind of went to jelly. He invited me to lunch, and then he showed me his oil paintings of his characters in the style of the truly great heroes of art. Wile E. Coyote as done by Vincent van Gogh. Daffy Duck in a homage to Duchamp. I just went, “Oh my God, this is heaven.”
Cryptic Crosswords
It’s a great word game because the clue you are given, unlike in a normal crossword, is pretty much a synonym. It’s like an IKEA tool kit. You are being given some instructions word by word, and you’re going to have to look very carefully because they will trick you.
Audience Participation
My son and I recently went to the Australian Open. It was really overwhelming to sit in an audience of 20,000 people where you are watching two virtuoso athletes. The crowd is just riotous. Cinema should be like that. If you sit at home, you are not sharing your own private experience of what the general pulse of the world is at the moment. We all have a responsibility for life to be as intoxicating and as challenging and as celebratory and as communal as we possibly can.
‘The Act of Creation’
In this book on psychology, Arthur Koestler was seriously discussing how jokes work by analyzing the jester, how aesthetic experiences are stimulated by the artist, and how new things are discovered by the scientist. I love that that came from his brain.
Teodor Currentzis
He looks like a genuine hipster, otherworldly, romantic, demonic person on the podium. His hair flops everywhere. A friend sent me his Tchaikovsky Sixth, which I knew well. By the end of the fourth movement, we were sobbing because this guy was creating an intensity of a sadness and a deep sense of regret, which is in the score if you choose to bring it out.
Pondering the Future
So what will 2380 be like? Will any of us be around to experience the extraordinary, inconceivable impact of unidentified anomalous phenomena making meaningful contact with us?
The Universe
I was obsessed as a 10-year-old with the Mercury space program. John Glenn flew over Australia, and I sent away to get an acetate recording of what he said when he saw the likes of Perth. So I thought, “I’ll be an astronomer.” The career guidance officers went, “You’ll need physics and chemistry and applied maths.” I did that in my last two years in high school, and I bombed. But at the same time, I was running the school’s drama club and kind of realigned my trajectory.
Synesthesia
I’ve never been officially diagnosed as having that condition, but when I was 8, my sister was in a dance studio and they did a concert. I was sitting with my mom in the front row, and suddenly the band burst into life. And my brain just exploded. I went, “I see shapes.” I went to an exhibition of Kandinsky when I was studying in Paris and saw this huge painting, very geometric and very kind of abstract. And I went, “Yeah, I can hear that.”
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