In conversation, Geoffrey Rush is emphatic. His melodic basso voice has authority to spare, but add to that his habit of using triplets to highlight his conversational points and you have someone who knows how to play to an audience.

He says Patrick White, the author of the novel Eye of the Storm, on which his new film is based, has a “curmudgeonly, acerbic, mordant” wit. He states co-star Judy Davis “writhes and seethes and stumbles” in comedic discomfort throughout much of the movie.

Rush comes across the charmingly theatrical way of speaking honestly. Since 1971 he has performed on stage in everything from Waiting for Godot (opposite his roommate Mel Gibson) to Troilus and Cressida and The Marriage of Figaro. Even as he began making films he still returned to the stage (he won a Drama Desk award in 2011) and that’s where he encountered White’s work.

“I knew Patrick White as an author,” he says. “I appeared in two debut productions of some later plays that he wrote in the 1980s. Patrick also had a very close association with a number of theatre directors I’ve worked with.”

But that wasn’t why he signed on to not only star in, but produce Eye of the Storm. It wasn’t even that the novel was Australia’s only ever recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature.

The Toowoomba, Queensland native was drawn to the dark and sometimes savage look at a wealthy but ill mother (played by Charlotte Rampling) and her dysfunctional children Basil (Rush) and Dorothy (Judy Davis) “primarily because it’s an Australian film.” “Also,” he adds, “I knew Charlotte was going to be involved and Judy Davis and I thought, ‘How many more boxes do you have to tick before you say I’m going to leap on this project?’”

Eye of the Storm is ripe with juicy characters.

Although Rush may be best known as Captain Hector Barbossa in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, or for his Oscar nominated turn as Lionel Logue in The King’s Speech, he savoured the chance to take on the complex character in the new film. 

“I think all the classical writers are regarded as great,” he says, “because they can put extreme contradictions in the same character because that’s the human make-up. You never meet anyone who is completely nice or who has one personality quality. Patrick is particularly brilliant at that.”