'Mind' Games: Ron Howard, Russell Crowe Aim For The Truth , But Missed Facts
By Glenn Whipp
Dec. 26, 2001
c. 2001 Los Angeles Daily News

Historical accuracy in movies has become such a hot-button topic in movies in recent years (think "The Hurricane," "The Insider," "13 Days," "U-571," etc., etc.) that the makers of "A Beautiful Mind" aren't even going to PRETEND that their movie is a true story. Director Ron Howard calls it a "simplification"; his producing partner, Brian Grazer, says the movie is "inspired by" the life of Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. Screenwriter Akiva Goldsmith calls it a "stab at the truth, but not by way of the facts."

Russell Crowe, who plays Nash, puts it this way: "There's three big story points you've got here -- you've got genius, madness, Nobel Prize. Everything else is really irrelevant as long as you stay true to the spirit of the story."

The story of Nash as told by "A Beautiful Mind" is this: Brilliant, anti-social mathematician does groundbreaking work in a number of fields -- game theory, quantum mechanics and number theory among them. All the while, the tendrils of schizophrenia are reaching into his mind and eventually he succumbs -- for 35 years. He then conquers his demons and, in 1994, is awarded the Nobel Prize for economics work he had done as a graduate student at Princeton in the 1940s.

When producer Grazer read New York Times reporter Sylvia Nasar's biography of Nash, he knew he had the perfect three-act movie. There was even a love story: Nash had the support of his long-suffering wife, Alicia (played in the movie by Jennifer Connelly), whom he met while teaching at MIT.

Sure, there were elements of Nash's story in Nasar's book that were more troublesome than triumphant: Alicia divorced John (they remarried last June); Nash fathered a child with another woman and abandoned them both to poverty; Nash was a bisexual and had numerous affairs with men, eventually losing his security clearance and job with the RAND Corp. after being charged with soliciting sex in a men's room in Santa Monica.

None of these things made it into the movie, and you won't find any members of the filmmaking team offering an apology.

"It's delicate because it's so interpretive," Grazer says. "For me, the movie was about Nash's victory by simply surviving. It's probably a better subject today than it was a year ago when we started making the movie because people are looking for movies that can be entertaining and life-affirming at the same time."

Says Howard: "You couldn't make this movie if you weren't offering a true story because the events are too incredible. People would think it was contrived and not worth watching. But in shaping a life into a couple of hours for a movie, you make a lot of choices. We did not set out to try to make a biopic or the last word on John Nash. Quite frankly, this is an unauthorized biography."

Nash himself, now 73 and still teaching in Princeton, N.J., visited the set several times and cooperated with Howard -- to a point. One thing that the movie does not gloss over or leave out is Nash's rarefied oddness, his surly behavior and misanthropic tendencies.

"He's not somebody you pal around with," Howard says. "He's mellowed considerably, from what I understand, but he still has an intimidating presence."

Which, as many directors would say, makes Crowe a perfect choice to play the man. Crowe has famously clashed with strong-headed filmmakers like Ridley Scott ("Gladiator") and Michael Mann ("The Insider"), all the while nabbing consecutive Oscar nominations and a victory last year for his work in "Gladiator." Howard says Crowe's intellectual intensity was indeed an asset for playing a mad genius like Nash. And he doesn't cop to a downside of working with the actor.

"I don't know quite what occurred, but I don't think I got the uber-intense Russell," Howard says. "There may be a couple of reasons. I'm not contentious, although I am dogged and thorough. And so is he. And I'm very interested in trusting and I'm not frightened of conversations with actors. I have a lot of patience with them."

Crowe returns the compliment: "Ron Howard, it seems to me, has got everybody in the world fooled that he's some kind of simple bloke. He's one of the most intense filmmakers I've ever worked with. But he does it in a gentle fashion, and that's because he's organized and he knows what he wants. That's a great platform for me to start working from."

Crowe didn't meet Nash before filming began, mostly because he didn't think he'd be an accurate witness to the events in his younger life. Apparently, Crowe was right. (At least he says so.) The actor had Howard videotape an interview with Nash, and Crowe says the mathematician either lied about or couldn't remember a number of things about his life.

But Crowe did find some useful information from watching the video interview. He noticed Nash's long, tapered fingers and grew his own fingernails to give some grace that he says "might have been missing from my sausagelike fingers in the first place."

When Crowe and Nash finally did meet during the first week of shooting at Princeton, some other decisions the actor had made were confirmed. Crowe had meticulously crafted a halting Southern accent (Nash was born in West Virginia) and had taken to heart a line in the book that called Nash's style of speaking "Olympic and ornamental." If there were a more difficult way of saying something, Nash would find it.

"When we met, I asked him a simple question: 'Would you like coffee or tea?' " Crowe remembers. "About 15 minutes later, I got somewhere near an answer from him. Such is the level of examination that he'll put everything that comes his way.

"You know, I said, 'Would you like coffee or tea?' and he said, 'Well, if I have a coffee, should I have it with milk or should I have it with sugar. But if I have it with milk or sugar, would it actually still be coffee, or would it be sugary milk? And if I have a coffee, will that give me more or less pleasure than if I have a cup of tea? And if I have a cup of tea, how can I be sure it's going to be of a density and fullness of flavor that I actually enjoy, because Sri-Lankan teas, Southern Indian teas, are not necessarily to my palate. I prefer Northern Indian teas.' And he went on. I ended up using it in the film. Every second that I spent in front of him, there was always useful information coming my way."

In the end, most of that information was synthesized, simplified or outright eliminated. Still, Crowe believes the movie authentically captures the spirit of its subject.

"The book is a great read, a wonderful biography, but again, it's a singular opinion," Crowe says. "It's not necessarily the absolute truth. Neither is the movie. But there's an emotional path I believe that we've found and I believe to be authentic."

“We’re going to walk down 15 floors?” a studio publicist asks, her incredulity perhaps motivated by her stiletto heels.

“Yes, mate,” Crowe says. “I’ll do anything to avoid crowds. “A little solitude is the Aussie way,” he says, beginning the long walk down the darkened, narrow emergency staircase.

Actually, Crowe says, he’s been hankering for some solitude since winning a Best Actor Oscar last year. “I didn’t even go to any Oscar parties,” he recalls. “I invited a few blokes to my hotel room, and my mother. We just sat around and had a chat about the
meaning of the night.

“Again, that’s the Australian thing to do.”

He won his Oscar for playing the not-too-cerebral Maximus, the vengeful title character in “Gladiator” (2000). But his current role is altogether different — the troubled mathematical genius John Forbes Nash Jr. in Ron Howard’s “A Beautiful Mind,” which will open nationwide on Dec. 21.

Casually handsome in jeans and a red corduroy shirt over a white T-shirt, the stubble-faced Crowe admits that it was difficult to play Nash, a Nobel Prize-winning mathematician who has struggled with schizophrenia.

“To say you understand the process of John Nash’s mind would be an oversimplification,” he says. “There is no way you can understand it. It’s ridiculous to try to understand another man’s 35 years of pain and torment.

“A lot of the construction of this character was done blindfolded.”

Now 70, Nash himself turned up on the set on the first day of shooting. Meeting the man he was playing, Crowe had one key question: “Coffee or tea?”

“About 15 minutes later I got somewhere near an answer from him,” the actor recalls with a laugh, “because of the level of examination he puts everything under. He responded, ‘If I have coffee, should I have it with milk? Should I have it with sugar? But if I have it with milk or sugar, would it still be coffee or sugary milk? Will coffee give me more or less pleasure than tea?’

“He went on and on,” Crowe says. “I ended up using every second in the film.”

Filming on the Princeton campus and at another college in the Bronx, New York, was complicated by the actor’s legions of devotees. At one point photographers captured Crowe giving the finger to a crowd of screaming fans who wouldn’t leave him alone, a picture which was reprinted in thousands of newspapers worldwide. It only enhanced the actor’s reputation for brusqueness, even bullying.

“I don’t think I’m misunderstood,” he says. “I think I’m misconstrued. It’s very easy to offend people with the truth, for some reason.”

He has been in the spotlight’s glare since winning the Oscar, but Crowe says that on balance he wouldn’t trade the award for anything.

“On a deeper psychological level, there is a part of me that’s relaxed now,” he says. “Not that I was ever seeking the Oscar — but, once you receive that kind of recognition from your peers, it does validate you. It says to me that, regardless of my public persona and public reputation, people like my work.

“I’m sure it has made me a little calmer about what I do for a living.”

As a young boy growing up New Zealand, Crowe says, he never imagined Hollywood stardom in his future.

“Did I allow myself to dream of all of this?” Crowe says. “No, this is a nightmare, man. It’s not a dream.” He pauses to fire up a cigarette. “When I was a young fellow, mate, I didn’t imagine I would ever work in feature films,” he continues. “I knew I wanted to be an actor and write songs. I knew I wanted to explore performance in general.”

Crowe’s parents worked as movie-set caterers, a job which led to his television debut at age 6. By his early 20s he was performing as a professional musician under the name Rus Le Roc, and had scored an Australian hit with the single “I Want to Be Like Marlon Brando.” But it wasn’t until the early 1990s that he broke into films with “Romper Stomper” (1992), “The Sum of Us” (1994), “The
Quick and the Dead” (1995) and “Virtuosity” (1995). “L.A. Confidential” (1997) put him on the Hollywood map, and he earned an Oscar nomination for “The Insider” (1999). Then came “Gladiator” and worldwide fame — which, Crowe says, he still doesn’t take for granted.

“Remember,” he says, “I didn’t do a feature film until I was 25, so it was a 19-year apprenticeship to getting on a film. When a director finally offered me a lead in a feature, I didn’t quite believe it. Once I was on a set and I was performing for the camera, I realized how comfortable I felt. It was a revelation to me.

“I knew this medium was expandable as long as I remained committed to it on a deeper level and made decisions that respected the medium.”

In the wake of “Gladiator” Crowe found himself the recipient of death threats, and he continues to be accompanied by bodyguards wherever he goes.

“I think most of that situation has been resolved,” he says, “but it’s not something I can chat about now. If the organization connected to those threats ever wants to discuss it, they will.

“I don’t elect to have security around,” he adds, “but when I’m working I suppose, from an insurer’s point of view now, it’s a necessary evil.”

He spent last summer touring with his band, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts. A concert film will debut at the next Sundance Film Festival.

“We shot some footage while rehearsing and recording our last album in London,” Crowe says, “and we put it together with some of the footage of a show in Texas last year. Then I asked (Miramax Films chief) Harvey Weinstein if he wanted to see it. He said, ‘Yeah, yeah. I’ll bring some friends along.’ I think it was Harvey and 50 people, including some opinionated people like (Talk magazine
editor) Tina Brown. They really enjoyed it.

“It’s very raw and very rude,” the actor says cheerfully. “It puts me in an incredibly bad light, which should be fun for audiences to see.”

He has no patience with critics who see his band as an actor’s vanity trip. “The music is never on hiatus,” Crowe says. “Music just won’t go away. I love to just sit down, write songs and hang out with my mates.”

Otherwise, he says, he’d rather be by himself — he’s currently single after the breakup of last year’s controversial, very public relationship with Meg Ryan — on his 600-acre cattle ranch in Australia.

“I think last year I slept 21 nights on my farm,” he says, “which is not good for my mind.”
(Cindy Pearlman is a Chicago-based free-lance writer.)

A role not to be taken lightly: Crowe doesn't tolerate uninformed schizophrenia remarks in rounds for A Beautiful Mind
By Jamie Portman JAMIE PORTMAN
The Gazette (Montreal) December 14, 2001
Copyright 2001 Southam In

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. Russell Crowe is only a few minutes into the press conference, and already he's getting irritated with the questions.

He thinks they're frivolous, and he doesn't think there's anything remotely frivolous about his new movie, A Beautiful Mind, in which he plays a Nobel Prize-winning mathematician who has schizophrenia.

He's scarcely made it to the platform before a reporter asks him about the fabled link between genius and madness. Crowe makes short shrift of that one. "I think it is a romantic notion to think there is a connection between genius and madness," he says tersely. "There are many studies which I think indicate to you that whereas intelligence doesn't protect you from madness, a lack of intellect doesn't protect you either. It's across the board and it's in all social and economic areas of life." The Oscar-winning actor likes the follow-up question even less. Has he himself ever "lost it?"

"I think like everybody in life I've had my moments, but in the true sense of the terms of insanity - no." He pauses. "I think it cheapens the seriousness of the disease even to go into that area." He glares down at the reporter who's asked the question. "I know what you're thinking, mate." He looks out at the rest of the reporters: "Next!"

Crowe is an odd mixture. On the one hand, there's the remarkable sensitivity of his screen performances in The Insider, A Beautiful Mind and Gladiator, the portrayal that won him his best-actor Oscar. On the other hand, there's the offscreen image of the brawling, carousing Aussie hell-raiser.

Then there's the guy who can give thoughtful, articulate answers to tough questions, and the rough diamond who will descend to sudden, unprintable vulgarities in the flicker of a second.

Although he can play the most fragile of creatures on the screen, he tends in real life to convey a sense of coiled intensity and wariness: there are semblances of a street fighter awaiting the cue to initiate a brawl.

Certainly there are times when he has been driven into near apoplexy by that frequent staple of press junkets - an unending assembly-line process of media interviews. So this afternoon, he's trying to lessen his misery by doing a single, 30-minute mass session with the print press.

A Beautiful Mind, which opens in Montreal on Christmas Day, is inspired by events in the remarkable life of John Forbes Nash Jr., an eccentric genius who seemed headed for great things when he arrived at Princeton University in the late 1940s. But the promise he showed as a boldly original mathematician was shattered when he developed paranoid schizophrenia and endured decades of emotional pain and despair. But Nash fought back, continuing his work through sheer force of will and eventually winning the 1994 Nobel Prize for his mathematical theories.

Everyone connected with this film - Crowe, director Ron Howard, screenwriter Avika Goldman - has taken pains to emphasize that A Beautiful Mind is not a literal account of Nash's life. For one thing, Nash himself has no memory of the delusions that tormented as a young man. But Crowe says he has worked hard to capture of the essence of the man, and bristles when it's suggested he must be finding it a "schizophrenic" experience to be portraying a real-life person while also filming key scenes that may be fictional.

"Can we just do something?" he says slowly, and deliberately. "Schizophrenia is a really, really serious disease. OK? The social misunderstanding of schizophrenia is that it's about split personality, whereas in reality it's about thinking on totally different planes of reason. This film is not a medical statement about the disease, but at the same I wouldn't want anyone to think that we were stepping away from treating it as seriously as it needs to be treated."

Crowe has learned to me more cautious with his comments. "I made a quip to the New York Times that was taken as a kind of smart-alecky thing. They asked me what I was doing for research, and I said: 'I'm living in Manhattan. I go for a walk every Sunday.' " Crowe understands why the remark could be taken as an insensitive "gag" but he says he was attempting to make a "serious statement" about New York's street people, many of whom are schizophrenics who would once have been hospitalized.

Approaching the character of Nash, who is in his early 70s, was a long and complicated process for Crowe. "Yes, the man's still alive, but we're dealing with situations in his life five decades previous to where he is now. In the middle of that is 35 years of hospitalization and medication."

Crowe researched the changes associated with the disease. He discovered that physical gestures can become manifestations of the disease, that the way victims talk can change dramatically.

But Crowe could only go so far in researching Nash. There were 17 black-and-white photographs from that period, but little else. "We had no film footage of him as a young man. He may have been famous in mathematical and academic circles, but he hadn't been on TV. There was no documented evidence of how he walked and how he talked. There was no audio for me to listen to."

Nash himself has virtually no memory of the paranoid delusions, and he had trouble answering key questions submitted to him by videotape. Nash couldn't remember ever wearing a beard, yet photographs showed he had. "We asked him if he smoked cigarettes and he said no, but we had evidence that during the period of (greatest) intensity of his disease, he regularly self-medicated with cigarettes and whatever else was around."

Given the situation, Crowe says, it was essential to zero in on the salient facts regarding Nash's remarkable life. "There are three big story points you've got here. You've got genius and madness and the Nobel Prize. Then you've got a hook - the developments and complications of the life of his guy built around the stuff that shows the spirit of the story."

Crowe concentrated on what he calls the "emotional path" of the story. He admits he was not up to understanding a mind that was able to evolve epoch-making mathematical theories. "You can't really take all that stuff in. You can take in as much as you can. But to sit up here and say that you've examined every bit of it and understand the processes of John Nash's mind would be an absolute oversimplification.

"What attracted me to doing this was that not only did you have a great story of triumphing against the odds, he also had a magnificent romance that spanned five decades and is still in existence." In the film, Jennifer Connelly portrays Nash's wife, Alicia. "For me, the romance was as important as his achievements as a mathematician and the clarity of his mind."

Director Howard thinks Crowe is a much "misunderstood" actor. Crowe disagrees. "I don't think I'm misunderstood," he says gruffly. "But I definitely think I'm misconstrued. I think it's very easy to offend people with the truth, for some reason."

- A Beautiful Mind opens in Montreal on Christmas Day.

Academy Award Winner James Horner Scores and Conducts Original Music for This Yearâs Most Anticipated Drama A Beautiful Mind
Entertainment Editors
New York Entertainment Wire, (12/10/01) Film Stars Russell Crowe, Directed By Ron Howard
Soundtrack Released December 11, 2001 From Decca/UMG Soundtracks

The highly anticipated film, A Beautiful Mind is a compelling human drama inspired by events in the life of Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash, Jr.

Based in part on the biography A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar, the gripping film is directed by Ron Howard and produced by Brian Grazer. Starring Academy Award winner Russell Crowe (Gladiator), Academy Award nominee Ed Harris (Pollock, Apollo 13), and Jennifer Connelly (Requiem For A Dream), the movie is already generating major Oscar buzz among critics nationwide. Released December 11, 2001 from Decca/UMG Soundtracks, the album features music composed and conducted by Academy Award winner James Horner, with vocals performed by 15 year old singing sensation Charlotte Church.

James Horner, whose acclaimed soundtracks to Braveheart and Titanic have sold millions of copies worldwide, has composed the music to several Ron Howard films, including Apollo 13, Willow and Dr. Seussâ How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Hornerâs emotional score for A Beautiful Mind features the angelic vocals of Charlotte Church, the platinum-selling Welsh soprano, who is the youngest artist ever to reach No. 1 on the Billboardâs Classical Chart. Church also adds her soaring vocals to ãAll Love Can Be,ã a new song played over the filmâs end credits. This beautiful new ballad was composed by Horner with lyrics by Will Jennings, who wrote "My Heart Will Go On" for Titanic.

In addition, the soundtrack album is an enhanced CD containing exclusive bonus materials including notes from the composer and director, the movie trailer and exclusive photos.

From the heights of notoriety to the depths of depravity, John Forbes Nash, Jr. experienced it all. A mathematical genius, he made an astonishing discovery early in his career and stood on the brink of international acclaim. But the handsome and arrogant Nash soon found himself on a painful and harrowing journey of self-discovery. After many years of struggle, he eventually triumphed over this tragedy, and finally -- late in life -- received the Nobel Prize.

Universal Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures and Imagine Entertainment present A Beautiful Mind, opening December 21 in select cities and January 4 in theaters everywhere.

Variety, December 2, 2001

Memo To: Ron Howard

From: Peter Bart

OK, IT TOOK ME A WHILE TO FIGURE this one out. In a year when everyone's making movies about hobbits and Hogwarts, you decided to go off and make a movie about a mind! You even called it "A Beautiful Mind."

My initial reaction was to wonder, have you guys lost it? Don't you and Brian Grazer realize minds are not "in"? Besides, how do you shoot a mind? Especially the tortured mind of a math genius. This is not the sort of behavior I expect from the team that introduced us to the Grinch and the Klumps.

And I'm hardly alone in my skepticism. After all, Redford was set to direct your film, then panicked. Tom Cruise was flirting with it, then retreated.

To be sure, they were all wrong.

I managed to catch an early "sneak" of "A Beautiful Mind" the other day and, while I'm not going to pre-review the movie (that would be dirty pool), over the final credits I could visualize Oscars dancing by. Not only have you managed to make a movie about a mind, but you've made a very moving movie about a very remarkable mind.

But what made you try?

I'VE ALWAYS THOUGHT OF YOU as an open, down-to-earth guy, Ron, despite the fact that you had every reason to be weird. I mean, who would expect an Oklahoma kid who was already a major TV star at age 6 to still be in touch with reality? For that matter, who would expect Opie to start his directing career with "Grand Theft Auto," yet go on to make the superb "Apollo 13"?

When we talked about all this the other day, Ron, you explained that the real-life character on whom you based your movie, a brilliant mathematician named John Forbes Nash, led a tortured, yet heroic, odyssey.

And you found the subculture in which Nash dwelled -- that of the academic elite -- to be fascinating rather than intimidating. Sure, math geniuses talk in an arcane language, but the space age zealots in "Apollo 13" also relied on a complex lexicon, and you succeeded in making that intelligible to the audience.

There was something else at work, too. Having made two comedies in a row, you were clearly ready for more serious fare. Some people still have trouble dealing with the fact that Opie is a serious guy, but I first discovered this back in the days when I was a studio executive and you were still a wannabe filmmaker.

When you and your spike-haired partner, Brian, would come in with a project, my colleagues and I always assumed we'd be talking comedy, but instead you brought in compelling scripts about complex characters. And your presentation was consistently erudite.

You haven't always gotten your pet projects made, Ron, but then you and Brian have delivered some damn good films along the way, ranging from "Ransom" to the underrated "EDtv." To be sure, your peers have not responded with the anticipated accolades. "Apollo 13" was accorded nine Oscar nominations, but your name was not among them, an omission that left many perplexed.

The task facing Universal and DreamWorks is to build a word-of-mouth groundswell for "A Beautiful Mind" and that may prove demanding. If one filmgoer tells another, "I've just seen a stirring movie about a schizophrenic mathematician," that will not yield long lines at the box office.

Universal's Stacey Snider, an ardent supporter of the project, sees the film as "a moving epic story about the triumph of the spirit." That message would sell tickets. Grazer, who nurtured the script (by Akiva Goldsman), has always favored tales of personal survival and sees this as a classic of that genre.

A GOOD PORTION OF THE FILMGOING PUBLIC, having endured a yearlong barrage of popcorn pictures, may very well respond to these messages. They also may rally to the side of the offbeat casting of Russell Crowe who, one year after undertaking a very physical role in "Gladiator," is remarkably persuasive as an introverted prodigy.

Of course, as someone who's just made a movie about a brilliant mind, you surely realize that no mind, however brilliant, can predict box office results. The typical filmgoer may be too besieged by the noise level of our pop culture to pay attention. But I suspect that even the hobbits and Hogwarts denizens would be enriched by exposure to your mind games, if only they had the chance.Ê

(Thanks to Kim)

Ever More Familiar, But Still Hard to Get to Know
By Dana Kennedy
The New York Times, 11/4/01

When Jennifer Connelly was hired to play opposite Russell Crowe in "A Beautiful Mind," the producer, Brian Grazer, worried that the formidable Mr. Crowe might intimidate Ms. Connelly once they started filming, to the detriment of her performance.

"Russell is very tough," says Mr. Grazer. "He's very intense and he can break you down if you're not grounded. I thought Jennifer would weaken working opposite Russell, because I would. But she just had an amazing amount of confidence."

Mr. Crowe plays John Forbes Nash Jr., the math genius who won the 1994 Nobel Prize in economic science for a paper he'd written in 1949 and who spent much of the time in between battling paranoid schizophrenia. Ms. Connelly, 30, got the coveted role of Alicia Nash, John's strong but often put-upon wife, after meeting with Mr. Grazer's partner in Imagine Entertainment, Ron Howard, who was directing. He auditioned her for the film which opens Dec. 25, opposite Mr. Crowe. "They had excellent chemistry from the beginning," Mr. Howard says. "Jennifer actually looks a little like Alicia and had a wonderful perspective on the character."

Ms. Connelly says she was excited when she read the script, which is loosely based on the 1998 biography of Mr. Nash by Sylvia Nasar, a former reporter for The New York Times. "I don't read things this good very often," Ms. Connelly says. "Our version of Alicia is bright and irreverent, and it's the 1950's, and she's this woman at M.I.T., so she's sort of a rebel."

When asked about working with Mr. Crowe, Ms. Connelly pauses for dramatic effect and rolls her eyes slightly. "He's extremely challenging," she says.

"Rehearsals were very exhilarating. We'd go in, up-end scenes, talk about everything and put it back together. He didn't take anything for granted."

Mr. Grazer says it was imperative that Ms. Connelly hold her own with Mr. Crowe, since Alicia Nash not only stood up to her often difficult husband but also cared for him when he fell ill with schizophrenia.

"Russell's greatest strength is power and intensity with great vulnerability," Mr. Grazer says. "It's incredibly seductive and if you let yourself get drawn into that, then he will own you and dominate you. Russell and Jennifer were living in each other's psychology for four months. You've got to stay 100 percent professional and not let yourself be dominated. It's like prison. The inmates who know enough not to get drawn into the other inmates' rhythm survive. The ones who get drawn in get dominated. Jennifer didn't." Mr. Crowe says Ms. Connelly's performance may surprise some people. "She brings a delicate power to every scene and epitomizes the strength and conviction of Alicia Nash. I'm not sure if her previous work will prepare audiences for the detail and completeness of this performance," he says.

Until now Ms. Connelly, a former child model, has been known for her quirkily unpredictably career choices. Her movies have included attention-getting projects like her first film, Sergio Leone's gangster epic, "Once Upon a Time in America' (1984), in which she played the Elizabeth McGovern character, the love of a mobster's life, as a young girl; last year's "Requiem for a Dream," the downbeat Darren Aronofsky film in which she was the hero's drug-addicted girlfriend; and "Pollock," in which she played Jackson Pollock's mistress. But she has also made such slight films as "The Rocketeer" (1991), "The Hot Spot" (1990), Mullholland Falls" (1996) and "Inventing the Abbotts" (1997), and was in the cast of last year's short-lived Darren Star television series about a Wall Street firm, "The Street."

Despite her lengthy career, Ms. Connelly has yet to break through as a major star. This appears to faze her about as much as acting opposite Mr. Crowe. In fact nothing much seems to perturb Ms. Connelly. . .

. . . The real Alicia Nash met with Ms. Connelly before filming began and later stopped by the set to watch her work with Mr. Crowe. Mr. Nash visited the set as well. The Nashes, who divorced in 1963, at the height of Mr. Nash's illness, remarried this summer.

"I was very pleased with them both," says Mrs. Nash, who is a computer programmer with the New Jersey Transit Authority. "I like to think we were very lively in our youth, and when I saw them work, I thought they were too."

But the film took it's toll. Mr. Howard says he e-mailed Mr. Crowe after the actor returned to his native Australia and was surprised when Mr. Crowe e-mailed him back, saying he had had frequent nightmares during and after the shooting. Ms. Connelly nods when told of this. "I didn't realize how much a strain we both were under until it wrapped," she says. "It took me a month before I could resurface from this part."