Hollywood star Crowe trashes 'method' acting

Hollywood giant Russell Crowe rubbished the basis of "method acting" as he gave some forthright advice to aspiring actors Sunday at the Cannes film festival.

"It is not complicated. Work it out yourselves," said the famously grumpy "Gladiator" star.

He had earlier "trashed 100 years of tradition" by ridiculing the Stanislavsky method, the basis of modern theatre and movie acting.

Crowe, in Cannes with his new comedy thriller "The Nice Guys" in which he plays a leg-breaking Los Angeles debt collector, said, "I don't even know what the Stanislavsky method may be ... and I don't care to know.

"You just trashed 100 years of tradition," the director of the comic thriller Shane Black laughed.

"Seriously, it's not that complicated," Crowe replied. "If you want to be an actor. Work it out yourselves.

"I like the quote by the (great British actor Sir Laurence) Olivier," New Zealand-born Crowe added. "Learn your dialogue and don't bump into the furniture," a maxim in fact attributed to the Hollywood great Spencer Tracey.

"I use the Russell Crowe method. I have never been to drama school, man," the actor had earlier told a reporter who asked if he used the great Russian-born drama theorist Konstantin Stanislavsky's methods.

Stanislavsky's ideas were the basis of Lee Strasberg's later "method" school, which actors from Al Pacino and Jack Nicholson to Johnny Depp still use.

"The only formal training I did was to study classical texts for about three weeks," Crowe added.

"But I have been acting since I was six years old. Over time you get more efficient at getting to the centre of the character you are portraying."

"The Nice Guys" is showing out of competition at the 12-day festival.