SYDNEY, April 15 — Russell Crowe would rather not call it a midlife crisis. He prefers to think of it as a midpoint epiphany. Either way, at 51 the Oscar winner was searching for his next great thing.

“I used to think I had the greatest job in the world,” he said with a broad smile. “Then I did this. I directed a movie.”

At noon on a sunny Sunday in Los Angeles, the sometimes volatile Australian actor was in a great mood. He entered a hotel suite to be interviewed wearing a blue-and-white flannel shirt and jeans, plus a cap bearing the logo of his favorite rugby team. Thoughtful and expansive, he addressed almost everybody as “mate.”

“Mate, let’s put it all in perspective,” he said. “I started working at age 6. I’ve been doing lead roles as an actor for 25 years. It wasn’t an intellectual concept where I thought, ‘It’s time to direct.’ I just had to do it.”

Crowe directs and stars in “The Water Diviner,” opening nationwide on April 24. He plays Connor, an Australian farmer who in 1919, four years after the famously catastrophic Battle of Gallipoli, sets out on a dangerous trek to Turkey to retrieve the bodies of his three sons, all of whom died in the battle.

Along the way on his epic journey, he falls in love with a beautiful Turkish hotel owner (Olga Kurylenko) and has to come to terms with a Turkish officer (Yilmaz Erdogan) who, he believes, killed one of his sons.

“As a father of two boys, this hit me at a very essential level,” Crowe said. “The Battle of Gallipoli is a cultural touchstone in my country.

“It was also a movement, in those times, where young men would go away from home to have an adventure,” he continued. “Young men from Australia who came from small towns were encouraged by everyone, including their parents, to go off and see the world. I play a father in this movie who shouldn’t have been so encouraging.”

The story is about World War I and its aftermath, Crowe said, but also much more.

“It’s a story of love, loss, grief and adventure for everybody on that beach and in those trenches,” he said. “It’s about that thin line between good and evil which is love.”

To shape his performance as Connor, a warm and intuitive father, Crowe drew on his feelings for his own sons, 11-year-old Charles and 8-year-old Tennyson.

“Once you become a parent, everything in your life is seen through that prism,” the actor said. “You do develop your natural intuition that’s basically available to all of us.

“I think women believe in intuition more,” Crowe continued, “but it’s available to everyone. Yet you talk to young women who tell you that someone became an ex-boyfriend because that person wasn’t in the right place.

“That’s also intuition,” he said with a laugh.

“The Water Diviner” was shot on a budget of US$22 million (RM81.34 million), but Crowe did everything he could to foster an indie-film dynamic on the set.

“I didn’t want this to become some big Hollywood production,” he said. “It needed to stay an indie film and it had to be shot in Australia, because that served the story. It was also the right thing to do.”

That said, few indies have 53 days to shoot and take their actors from Australia as far afield as Laos and Turkey. The film began to take shape, however, in a more down-to-earth venue: Crowe’s farm in Australia, where he conducted a boot camp of sorts for Ryan Corr, James Fraser and Ben O’Toole, the young men who played Connor’s sons.

“I got down to 12 actors who could play my grown sons,” he recalled, “and took each through a nine-hour audition process. I tested them intellectually. I wanted to know who was still trying at hour eight. Who was still coming up with ideas?”

After the actors were cast, Crowe brought them to his farm for a taste of what life on a farm in rural Australia was like in the 1910s.

“It was torture,” he joked. “Honestly, I put them through their paces. They woke up early and did yoga and then rode horses. There were lessons with weapons, followed by a 50-k bike ride. If you didn’t hit a bulls eye, you might not get dinner that night.

“At night I’d have lectures where I’d fill their hearts and minds,” Crowe went on. “You give them knowledge, so they have depth behind their eyes when the cameras are rolling. When a man knows the history of the times, you can see it in his face.

“So basically I took some young men back in time.”

The “boot camp” idea became more literal during the scenes recreating the battle, in which the Australian forces were trapped in their trenches between the Turks and the sea, under constant bombardment and withering machine-gun fire.

“I told the young men, ‘Don’t get up. Don’t get up to get a cup of coffee between takes. Don’t go to the toilet,’” he recalled. “I told them, ‘Just lie there and contemplate the moment.’”

That was a lesson he’d learned from one of his directorial mentors.

“That came from Ridley Scott,” said Crowe, who has worked for Scott on “Gladiator” (2000), “A Good Year” (2006), “American Gangster” (2007), “Body of Lies” (2008) and “Robin Hood” (2010). “He sets up the world for you. He makes you contemplate the moment.”

It also reflected the philosophy of one of Crowe’s favourite actors, Peter O’Toole.

“Once, when Peter O’Toole was talking about acting, he said that the best moments are in the quiet contemplation,” Crowe said. “Those moments are what give you the power.”

Directing himself was a heady experience, he added.

“There were crazy moments where I found myself talking to myself about myself in the monitor,” he admitted with a laugh.

That said, Crowe found that the transition from acting to directing felt natural to him.

“It was a simple progression,” he explained. “I speak the same language as directors, and I’ve accumulated so much knowledge from being on amazing sets. Those were each unique learning experiences.”

Crowe was born in Wellington, New Zealand, as the son of parents who worked as movie-set caterers. He was still a boy when the family moved to Australia, which had a far more substantial film industry, and it was natural that he began to act in local stage productions.

He made his professional debut on an Australian television show called “Neighbours” (1987), and caught Hollywood’s eye as a violent skinhead in “Romper Stomper” (1992). He went on to such films as “The Sum of Us” (1994), “The Quick and the Dead” (1995), “Virtuosity” (1995), “L.A. Confidential” (1997), Michael Mann’s “The Insider” (1999), “Proof of Life” (2000), Ron Howard’s “A Beautiful Mind” (2001), Peter Weir’s “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” (2003), Howard’s “Cinderella Man” (2005), “Les Miserables” (2012), “Man of Steel” (2013) and “Noah” (2014). He earned an Academy Award as Best Actor for his performance as the title character in Scott’s “Gladiator.”

Next up is “Fathers and Daughters,” in which he stars as a Pulitzer-winning writer who suffers a mental breakdown. Aaron Paul and Amanda Seyfried co-star.

The actor admits, however, that these days his eyes are turning increasingly toward behind-the-camera work.

“I’m buying my freedom,” Crowe said. “For 25 years I’ve been a gun for hire. I’ve travelled the world for film shoots. Now I have an 8-year-old and an 11-year-old. It suits me to run the show, because directing a film is a three-years process. The majority of time is spent at home, where my children are, and I can see them grow up. If I feel like there is a problem at school, I can talk to them in person in the afternoon and say, ‘Tell me what’s going on, because I have a feeling there is a problem.’

“That’s where my heart is.” — New York Times