The Grill:interview-Simon Baker

Byron Bay–raised, Los Angeles–based actor and father of three Simon Baker (The Guardian), 35, has landed his biggest Hollywood movie role in George Romero's zombie flick Land of the Dead.

From:Who Magazine
Date:Aug. 03, 2000
BY DI WEBSTER

You'd never made a zombie film before and I'd never seen one. Was it as traumatic for you as it was for me?

Not at all! It was actually a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it.

Are your kids allowed to see it?

No. My kids have said to me on numerous occasions, 'When are you going to do a movie that we can see?' If you go through the movies that I've done, in L.A. Confidential my throat was slit, in Ride with the Devil I got shot through the throat and in Red Planet I got eaten by some sort of bug. There's a lot of movies where I've died.

How much of the Hollywood stuff - first nights, red carpets - do you get involved in?

The last premiere I went to voluntarily was Lords of Dogtown, because I was interested in seeing the movie. A friend of mine produced it and Heath (Ledger) was in it. I don't like being under the microscope so much. I've given into it a bit more, but I used to just walk down the red carpet and put my hand up and do the Cliff Young shuffle straight through.

I understand Nicole Kidman taught you to accept praise?

She didn't teach me, but she told me, "Simon, you've just got to learn to breathe and say, 'Thank you.'"

How had you been responding to compliments?

Ah, I'd go red, shake my head, look at the ground and say, "F--k off." It's like when you're playing under-12s footy and you score a try under the post. You don't pump your fist in the air and jump around. You run back to halfway, head down and trying not to smile even though every fibre in your body wants to jump up and down and pat yourself on the back. It's just not right to do that.

Your nickname growing up was Smiley. Does anyone still call you that?

Not anyone I've seen for a while, but maybe in the next week or two I'll run into a couple of people who will... (Wife) Rebecca has always given me shit about it, like it was a really bad nickname. I went to school with kids called Snot, so I thought I came up trumps with Smiley.

Who gave you the name?

Poodles (laughs). Joshua Raymond Black, a mate I met at my under-7s rugby league team, the Ballina Seagulls. And I still know him. I went to his wedding last year. He lives in Germany now.

I read a review that described you as a "wiry but well-muscled bloke who'd punch you in the nose if you refused him a 12th beer." Would you?

If I wanted a 12th beer, that would mean I'd had 11 beers ... It could be likely (laughs). Certainly not if my wife was out with me, I don't reckon that would be happening. She wouldn't let me have 12 beers. I'm not here to promote that kind of behaviour (laughs). I've probably threatened to punch people after 11 beers in the past, but the future's unknown. I don't know.

And anyone refusing you a 12th beer risks missing your Mick Jagger impersonation.

After 12 beers I might be doing more of a Keith Richards (laughs).

From Who Magazine。

Zombie film delivers the gore

From:Sydney Morning Herald
Date:Aug 4, 2005

The zombies are restless and hungry for brains.

There's eight of them trapped behind an old, rusty steel fence and on the other side are some frightened, cowering humans.

It's dinner time for the zombies.

Looking a little malnourished, the zombies need a feed.

A bath and some Rexona under the armpits might be nice too.

Some are missing arms, others have just one eye.

Acne medication is not going to help the complexions of this rotting bunch, not that they seem self-conscious about the look of their horrid faces.

It's brains they want.

Fresh, warm human brains.

The zombies just have to break through the wire fence to get at the smorgasbord of humans screaming on the other side.

They rush the fence and begin shaking it, but as the hinges weaken and this motley crew is about to break through, gunshots stop their decaying bodies in their tracks.

Zombie heads explode.

Blood spurts from chest wounds. Hunks of what appears to be flesh is catapulted in the sky.

One by one the zombies drop to the ground.



Bullets to the head do the job.

The humans are safe, their brains intact.

The zombies ... well, they won't be eating tonight.

They're lying in a crumpled pile at the bottom of that steel fence.

"Great," Matt Birman, the stunt co-ordinator of the new George A. Romero directed zombie film, Land of the Dead, says as he emerges from behind a white sheet.

Well, it used to be white.

The sheet was placed around the camera to protect it from the mess and, after the head and body explosions, the sheet is splattered with red.

"That looked great guys," Birman says, clapping his hands after watching the footage on a monitor.

The zombies were actually highly-trained stuntmen and women who had small explosives and fake blood implanted in the prosthetics and make-up on their faces and bodies.

It is just one of the gory scenes from Land of the Dead.

The film is 65-year-old New York-born Romero's return to zombie films after a 20 year break. It is a genre he is considered the master of since he made Night of the Living Dead in 1968, a classic horror film with plenty of blood, but an underlying political message.

Romero followed that up with Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985).

Land of the Dead is the final chapter and opens in Australia today.

Romero has specific rules. He does not want fast moving zombies like the zombies in the 2000 horror hit, 28 Days.

Zombies are humans with rigor mortis. Their neck muscles are weak so their heads should slant a certain way. They should be slow moving.

That's Romero's way.

A quiet, mysterious figure with big dark owl rimmed glasses, Romero has cast Australia's Simon Baker as the Land of the Dead's hero, or anti-hero.

Although Romero has invited me to to watch a night of filming of Land of the Dead, he is not up to talking tonight.

He is too busy.

With a budget of just $US14 million ($18.32 million), it is a tight two month shoot schedule.

Land of the Dead is being made in Toronto, Canada, in the middle of winter. Most of the scenes are shot at night, so Baker and the other cast members, including Dennis Hopper, John Leguizamo and Asia Argento find themselves attempting to act in minus 10 degree Celsius weather at the painful hours before sunrise.

There is also snow.

When it rains, the rain drops are so cold they feel like nails.

"Killing the zombies, that' the easiest part," says the Tasmanian-born Baker, who plays Riley, a mercenary whose job is to protect the humans from the brain hungry zombies.

"The hardest part was the night in winter in Canada. It was freezing.

"There's scenes where we can't talk properly."

When shooting moves indoors it does not turn tropical.

Romero has taken over Toronto's Downsville Military Base, a former home of the Canadian airforce.

The military planes are no longer stored there.

With huge hangars lying dormant and the Canadian film industry booming, the military base is now a centre for film production. It is impossible to heat up such large spaces so it is still near freezing inside the hangars.

While Birman and his splinter film unit, nicknamed the "splatter unit", are blowing up hungry zombies in one hangar, Romero is walking through some scenes with Leguizamo and Baker in another hangar about a five minute drive away.

It's 2am.

Romero is a big man, about 193cm tall, with a grey beard and one hand always holding a cup of coffee.

"He's a chain-smoker, he's a coffee drinking addict and he's always wearing that vest that looks like standard issue from the Director's Guild of America and he's got those big owl glasses that I don't think they make anymore," Leguizamo says.

"But, he's got a great sense of humour about the thing. He's very specific and he's really focused on the acting. It's not just about the special effects."

Romero disappears, probably for a smoke, leaving Baker and Leguizamo to chat.

They are laughing and seem like best buddies.

Later, when Leguizamo finds out I'm Australian, he shakes my hand and says: "G'day, howya going (expletive)".

"That's how you Aussies greet each other isn't it?" he asks.

In the cold, quiet moments between scenes, Baker apparently has been filling in his curious 41-year-old Colombian-born co-star with some Australian slang.

"Hornier than a five dicked dog," Leguizamo says.

"You say that one downunder don't you?

"How about 'Gone off like a bucket of prawns in the midday sun'."

Leguizamo, one of Hollywood's busiest actors, arrived late to the set of Land of the Dead as his previous project overlapped rehearsals.

But, he says, soon after his plane landed in Toronto he made contact with Baker. Leguizamo plays Cholo, Baker's second in command of the zombie killing unit, so the two had to form a relationship off-screen as well as in front of the cameras.

"I called him up and said let's spend some time together," Leguizamo said.

"We'd work some things out in our trailers and go and show it to George."

Land of the Dead is an interesting career move for Baker, 35, who has built up a nice resume in Hollywood with his TV drama The Guardian, L.A Confidential with Russell Crowe and The Affair of the Necklace with another Oscar winner, Hilary Swank.

It was only the insistence of his manager, a huge Romero fan, that he took a meeting with Romero and Land of the Dead producer Mark Canton in Los Angeles last year.

"I wasn't really that familiar with the genre before I took the job," Baker confesses.

"I met George and he was just one of the nicest guys I've met in Hollywood.

"I looked him up on the Internet and there's a lot of information and there's a lot of people who put him up on a pedestal.

"I walked into the room and there was this very warm, lovely, self-effacing guy who was not overly confident. He didn't say 'I'm going to make the best movie ...'

"He said 'We're going to make a movie and have some fun'.

"I was drawn to that.

"It was very real.

"I thought 'These are really nice guys'. George's wife was there, Mark was there, who I had worked with before, so we had a bit of a laugh.

"I enjoyed the meeting which is rare."

It's now 2.30am.

It's snowing outside.

Romero re-appears smelling more like cigarettes than he did half an hour earlier and he has a fresh cup of coffee in his hand.

The cameras roll.

Baker and Leguizamo are peering out a window.

It's time to kill some more zombies.

From Sydney Morning Herald.

Baker 'new Steve McQueen'

From:Daily Telegraph, Australia
Date:Aug 4, 2005
By Peter Mitchell

LOS ANGELES: Australian actor Simon Baker has been dubbed Hollywood's new Steve McQueen.
McQueen, the hard-drinking, chain-smoking tough guy from 1960s classics The Great Escape, Bullitt and The Magnificent Seven, had an icy, anti-hero presence audiences adored.

Two powerful Hollywood players, producer Mark Canton and director George Romero, believe the Tasmanian-born Baker, with his blond locks and penetrating blue eyes, has that same on-screen charisma.

That is why Canton and Romero cast Baker as the anti-hero, zombie killing star of their new film, Land of the Dead.

"We were looking for that Steve McQueen style anti-hero and Simon is that guy," Canton, the former chairman of Hollywood studio Columbia Tristar and responsible for bringing more than 300 of Hollywood's biggest films to the screen, said.

"He has a subtlety to the way he acts."

The line, "Girls wanted him and men wanted to be him" followed McQueen, nicknamed The King of Cool, until his death in 1980 from lung cancer.

Tell Simon Baker, 36, he has been compared to screen legend McQueen and the notoriously shy Australian brushes it aside.

"That sounds like such a Mark Canton line," Baker responds.

"Mark just flatters me.

"Is it true? Well, you just do what you can, right?

"If you put labels on yourself, then you are shooting yourself in the foot aren't you?

"If you accept labels being put on you then you might as well be holding the gun as well.

"I'm just going to shrug it off. Laugh it off."

When Canton, Land of the Dead's producer, and Romero, the director, sat down to discuss who would be their star, both came up with Baker's name.

Canton produced Baker's 2000 sci-fi film Red Planet and Romero, who lives in Pittsburgh, was aware of the Australian actor through Baker's TV drama series The Guardian, set in the US steel city.

"I organised a meeting with Simon and just thought he was terrific," Romero said.

"We sat down for an afternoon, chatted, talked about the script and he had a clear idea what he wanted to do with the character."

Land of the Dead is 65-year-old Romero's return to the zombie genre. His 1968 breakthrough zombie film, Night of the Living Dead, has become one of the most celebrated horror films in Hollywood movie history.

Land of the Dead, the fourth and possibly the final chapter in Romero's series, was shot in Toronto at night over two months in the middle of Canada's bitter winter.

The film is set in Pittsburgh, a city that has been transformed into a wasteland overrun by zombies.

Humans are forced to live in a heavily fortified compound with large walls protecting them from millions of brain eating zombies.

Baker's character, Riley, is head of a hardened group of mercenaries paid to run missions through the zombie infested wasteland to pick up food and other supplies.

"Simon worked almost every night," Romero said.

"If he had been unco-operative we just would not have got the film done, but he was fantastic."

From Daily Telegraph, Australia .

Fabulous Baker boy

DARK side . . . Simon Baker plays a mercenary in George Romero's Land of the Dead.

From:Brisbane Courier Mail
Date:Aug 05,2005
By Helen Barlow

SPORTING sexy stubble and with his eyes at half-mast, Simon Baker looks as if he has just stumbled out of bed. He has.

"Where's that coffee?" he says to a hovering publicist, who is organising a rather chaotic Sunday morning brunch for his film Land of the Dead at the Cannes Festival.

"Last night we had a big noisy party," he says nonchalantly of the film's plush midnight premiere.

"I need to find my phone, I'm such a mess this morning. I brought it down and I lost it among all that photocall. It's my only contact to the outside world right now."

He's talking about his contact with his Australian actress wife Rebecca Rigg – they met on E Street – and their three young kids.

The 35-year-old Los Angeles-based Australian, who attracted an international following and a Golden Globe nomination for his tortured lawyer role in the American television series, The Guardian, still sounds very much like an Aussie – even if there's the occasional American lilt on some words, and he switches between ending his sentences with "mate" and "man".

"It's not something I consciously think about," he says. "The only time I'm ever aware of it is when an Australian points it out to me, and I tell you, they always point it out to me.

"Even if one word slips in, they turn around and go, 'What?' They really rub it in. But I do it for a living, you know."

With his tousled sandy hair and taut muscular physique that comes from years in the surf, this retiring Tasmanian seems far from your typically anxious pent-up thespian. And even if his movies have not always done well, it wasn't his fault.

With some of his more high-profile efforts – The Affair of the Necklace, Red Planet and Ang Lee's Ride with the Devil – it just seemed like bad luck.

Even when LA Confidential became an unexpected hit, it was fellow Australian cast members, Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce, who were thrust into the spotlight.

It took The Guardian to bring Baker's talent to the fore. Yet he is pleased that the series is over and he can now spend more time with his family at the Malibu house the series helped pay for.

"I reached a point where I couldn't go any further," he says with relief.

"It's hard to keep playing the same character over and over and over again. You have a hard time maintaining the quality of the scripts so that it started to feel like a sausage factory. People complain a lot about how poor sequels are, but imagine doing 77 sequels because that's what I was doing."

Didn't the series provide a sense of security?

"Yeah, but that's boring, isn't it? If I was really someone inclined to be financially secure I don't think I'd be an actor, because what percentage of actors can make a living doing it? It's why I make choices like this." Land of the Dead was hailed as the comeback of George Romero, the American-Cuban director who put zombies on the cinematic map with his seminal 1968 movie, Night of the Living Dead.

A man of the 1960s and 1970s, he is a filmmaker with a conscience, who never really bought into Hollywood. He also has taken his time.

In 1979 he made the sequel Dawn of the Dead – which was remade last year starring Sarah Polley – and in 1985 he made Day of the Dead, the finale to his zombie trilogy.

His idea with Land of the Dead was that he would introduce characters that might become part of a new franchise. With the popularity of recent horror movies, why not give the master a comeback?

The fly in the ointment has been the American public, who have stayed away in droves. The 14-year-old boys, who comprise horror's main audience, have been weaned on special effects. Romero's movie proved a little too intelligent and low-tech.

Yet these are the very reasons that a discerning big kid like Baker would be attracted to work with one of cinema's legends.

"He's unlike any director I've met, he's a complete regular Joe," he says. "His wife was at our first meeting with him and his business partner and they didn't seem like Hollywood movie people at all.

"And I liked that. He said some smart things and was really self-deprecating. Being Australian I responded to his dryness and lack of ego."

Romero says: "I hadn't met Simon but he'd shot The Guardian in Pittsburgh where I live so we knew the same beer joints."

Baker, who himself has constantly been described as lacking in ego and down-to-earth, experienced a new lease of life while making the film.

"I've normally played very internalised characters so I'd crack myself up. There's a certain level of tongue-in-cheek humour you have to push yourself to and George is really good at that.

"On the set I had a ball. I was blown away by how obsessed I became about the zombies and checking out the make-up and stuff. You'd go to lunch and people would be sitting around, you know, mangled, and it was pretty funny.

"The great thing about this film is the majority of the action happens on camera. If a zombie bites an arm and rips stuff out it's a real arm with a wax sort of prosthetic on it and tubes for spurting blood.

"They've got bits and pieces that they're pulling out and we're going, 'Ahhh!' You know, I'm a guy, and I like to see how they put that stuff together. So I'd go over to the splatter unit and find out."

In Land of the Dead Romero paints a world rife with zombies, while the real people live inside an enclave presided over by Dennis Hopper, and protected by mercenaries including Baker (the leader) and a trigger-happy John Leguizamo. "I think it represents world corporatisation and the eradication of the middle class," opines Baker. "There's an under class that supports the upper class and the upper class have to keep the under class down so they can maintain their position.

"But the funny thing is, you talk to George about it and he's like, 'Hey, this is just a zombie movie', and I love that. He doesn't go all Michael Moore about it."

In our interview Romero does admit that his films, like the classics horror movies from the 1970s, have an agenda.

"My stories deal with humans unable to see the communal or global picture. The stories don't really involve the zombies; the zombies are just sort of the tsunami."

From Brisbane Courier Mail .

Baker in it for the dough

Making a spectacle ... Simon Baker

From:Northern Territory News
Date:04aug05
By Michael Bodey


SIMON Baker left Australia to try his luck in Hollywood when Australia wasn't so hot. Today, Australian actors are so hot over there, it's bad for our industry and bad for the actors.

Now the local industry is dominated by first-time filmmakers, Baker says, and our actors are at risk of becoming deluded in Hollywood.

"Because of these guys, Russell, Nicole, Naomi, Geoffrey, Hugh, Americans associate Australians automatically with good work, straight away," Baker says.

"It used to be the English could do no wrong but I can't tell you how many kid's birthday parties or whatever I go to and Americans go, 'You guys are the best actors in the world'.

"That's a leg up. So even if you've done diddly squat, don't know your way around a set and you're just out of acting school, NIDA or what have you, and you show up there, they're assuming, whether it's a good thing for you or not, that you're a decent actor."

Baker can speak with some insight. After leaving Australia with a Best New Talent Logie under his arm, he's worked long and hard to make it there. His run as TV's The Guardian helped while his latest film, Land Of The Dead, is another lead role in a major studio movie after his role opposite good friend Naomi Watts in The Ring 2.

It also marks the return of zombie film legend George A. Romero, and a change in tack for the normally serious Baker.

"I look at it like this. I had a great time doing it and didn't regret it for a minute," he says. "It was liberating because in the past I've had a highbrow sort of snobbery and hang-ups of certain things."

Land Of The Dead isn't highbrow but in the realm of popcorn movies, it's not exactly lowbrow either.

Romero is the master of zombie films, a genre of horror film that has been used and abused since his first low-budget cult hit, 1968's Night Of The Living Dead. He's made other films since but it's his zombie films, including Day Of The Dead and Dawn Of The Dead, that ensured his place in cult history.

Baker was first approached to star in a remake of Romero's Dawn Of The Dead while he was filming The Guardian in the US.

"I was, like, there's no way," Baker says. "Why? It's been done.

It was relevant to the time it came out and that was the beauty of George's films. Why do a remake of that movie now when the whole essence of that film was political comment back in the 70s?"

Then Romero soon beckoned with his own project, Land Of The Dead, in which zombies finally infiltrate the last human outpost.

"When George was doing it, I thought, hang on, here's this post-9/11 world where people are able to use fear as the tool to manipulate and kind of control the masses.

"The parallels with what's going on in Western society at the moment were too great."

Besides, the raffish 36-year-old has got to a point where his self assessment is far sharper.

"I take the work seriously while I'm working but I won't take myself too seriously. They're movies for God sakes, people sit and eat popcorn and drink fizzy drink and go out half way through to take a p***. You're not saving the world."

Baker's stoicism comes from a US career that has had its ups and downs. After breaking through with a distinctive cameo in LA Confidential, Baker couldn't find the film that would propel his career forward. Until he became The Guardian, and was watched by 12 million Americans a week.

He knows only too well it's a flighty industry.

"A lot of people take themselves way too seriously," he says. "It's something that hit me just as I'm getting older. I've been working now for years and I'm not an Oscar-winning actor, I'm not an iconic character, I'm just a guy who works as an actor and makes a living doing it to support my family."

* Land Of The Dead opens today

From Northern Territory News .