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 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."