![]() So, obviously, when I’m gardening, I’m thinking about it when I’m watching films, I’m thinking about it when I’m reading stuff, I’m thinking about it and processing it. It didn’t work for me at school, that way of learning, I was not able to function in that kind of: sit there and learn. So, creatively, I don’t want to sit there and learn in kind of a didactic way. So, this is what we’re shooting this day, then we move here, and so on – so it’s structured in these ten to 15-minute increments. I work in a very unstructured way in my preparation, generally because, when you start shooting a film, it’s automatically structured. I knew about it for a year out I knew about the film for pretty much a year before we started shooting, I was constantly thinking about it. How did you approach this element of the performance? So an understanding, and trust, and a strong grasp of the technique and skills helps the evolution of the process, and for me, as an actor, it gives me the freedom and the opportunity to take more risks and explore more of what I have to do – because I feel safe, you know? And I feel confident in his hand, his guiding hand. ![]() ![]() ![]() I think a lot like a director, and he’s someone where we have an immediate shorthand and understanding of what each other is doing, and basically an idea or parameters of what we’re going for… to work with someone who you know knows how to do that, because a lot of people will project forward into what they want, but they don’t necessarily know how to mechanically get to that place, or organically get to that place. It’s fantastic to work with someone like Ivan. You know, I work a lot with first-time filmmakers, inexperienced filmmakers, which is exciting because I like the idea of fostering new talents, but, at the same time, there’s a lot of risk associated with that when you’re out there and you’re off, and you can often be in a situation where you’re sort of the most experienced person on the set. We kind of talked about it backwards and forwards, played around with the script a little bit, and then got the thing together. At the time I was living in America, and then we sort of met up again, and he sent me this thing, and sent it to me maybe a year and a half or so before we started shooting. I’d met Ivan when he’d just finished film school, and I think it might have been his first film – he offered me his first film straight out of film school, many, many, many, years ago and I didn’t do it. Weirdly, I had shot a film out there before, in about ’99 or 2000 – a Mars film called Red Planet a terrible movie if I’m to be brutally honest! But I was out there for some time, and I stayed in the same hotel. You shot in Coober Pedy, a fairly remote part of Australia. Shot in luminous black-and-white, the feature stars Baker as Travis Hurley, a police detective sent to the isolated starkness of the outback to investigate the 20-year-old unsolved murder of a young Aboriginal woman. The Upcoming sat down with the actor to discuss his latest Australian story, director Ivan Sen’s Limbo, which premiered in the Competition at Berlinale 2023. But, these days, Simon Baker prefers to work where he lives: in his native Australia. He’s experienced international success with roles in films such as The Devil Wears Prada and The Ring Two, not to mention 151 episodes of The Mentalist.
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