If any of the thousands of souls buried in the Mountain View cemetery in the San Gabriel foothills on the outskirts of Los Angeles ever uttered the phrase "over my dead body", they might never have imagined filming going on above them this week in the very grounds where they are taking the big sleep. Rachel Griffiths, the Australian actress best known for Hilary and Jackie, Muriel's Wedding, and My Son the Fanatic is filming the pilot of Six Feet Under, a TV series written and directed by Alan Ball, the Oscar-winning writer of American Beauty. She will be back on British screens next week in Me Myself I, which has won further recognition for her presence, wit and versatility.
In this Australian-French production directed by Pip Karmel, Griffiths plays a high-powered and stressed-out journalist who, through a freak event, gets the opportunity to rewind her life - as it were - and live it differently. Since she first came to international attention in Muriel's Wedding in 1994, Griffiths has had ample opportunity to study journalists at close quarters, but playing one remained a challenge.
"I was on a junket [a press publicity event beloved of LA film publicists] for something just before I started filming so I used it as a research tool and ended up interviewing the journalists," says Griffiths, sitting on the cemetery grass in the afternoon sun. "I would say things like: 'Are you happy in your job?' which would freak them out because most are not. The other thing that really struck me was what an intensely competitive and ungenerous field it is. I think journalists think that the movie business is like that, but on a film it's usually profoundly the opposite of competitive. It's very collaborative and very emotionally supportive. I had not considered how journalism is really the opposite, how few journalists had really great friends in the same field and how the new young guy in the corner desk is eyeing your job. I think that creates a necessity of hardness and I explored some of those themes in Me Myself I; what it means when you can't bring your emotional life or your vulnerability to work at all.
"I think politics and journalism are two areas which are totally unforgiving and I thought what effect it must have on a human being," she continues. "I found that much more interesting than the more obvious stuff about manipulating the stories. I came to understand what a brutalising profession it is."
So far, she says, she had had few bad personal experiences with the press. "I never became an actor to become famous and it's not something I really engaged in. I was very naive. I think celebrity has been building as a substitute for meaning - but then you read books about Byron who was totally a celebrity and everyone wanted to know who he had sex with last night and what country he was in and who he owed money to and was he sleeping with his sister - and that was hundreds of years ago.
"Me Myself I, she says, "seemed to plug into a lot of things women in their 30s are feeling at the moment. It's that feeling of: 'If I have everything that my grandmother could only have dreamed of achieving, why aren't I happy?' I think men have that as well. So many people are overworked with no sense of security. I think the film in the end is about how work can only be so meaningful no matter how successful you are.
"I found it charming that my character got a chance to live another life, but it was more the idea that she realises the way she had been dealing with herself. Sometimes it's not till you get what you want that you realise it's not going to fulfil what you imagined it might. I can kind of relate to that and see many of my friends in that - the whole Bridget Jones and Sex and the City thing. There is a real nerve that these things are touching."
Another attraction of the film was the chance to do something with a lighter touch. "I had been doing this really intense stuff like Hilary and Jackie and My Son and Among Giants, and then I went home and did The Doll's House - as if I hadn't suffered enough! I wanted to have a good time again and get back to a playfulness with my work. Then this film came along and I wanted to work back home as well."
Since Russell Crowe's latest critical thumbs-up in Gladiator and the arrival of Heath Ledger in The Patriot there has been much breathless copy about the new wave of Australian actors. The Queensland-born Griffiths points out that it's nothing new. "Mel (Gibson) and Judy (Davis) were there such a long time ago and you can go back to Errol Flynn and Peter Finch. I think that Australian men are really powerful energies on screen. And the actresses in the last 10 years have been making a lot of international noise - Toni Collette and Cate Blanchett - but it's also a credit to our very fine drama schools. I think we produce very unmannered actors and the world responds to that. The women are not coy; we have to kind of match the men we produce! Russell has been successful in our eyes for a very long time - he had been doing very fine work well before LA Confidential - and I grew up watching Geoffrey (Rush) in the theatre and just blowing my mind and inspiring me to be that kind of actor - and he made his first film at 38."
Griffiths grew up with an artistic mother who took her to everything from Japanese Kabuki and Noh theatre to Indian dance and the Royal Shakespeare Company. She is happy to be working in the US now, she says, as she admires Alan Ball's work a lot - she has seen American Beauty seven times - and mentions Rushmore and Election as films that had stood out for her in the past year. "I think American film at the moment is original, daring, unpredictable and I can't imagine saying that five years ago."
The making of Six Feet Under - she plays the girlfriend of a young man who inherits a funeral business in this series made for American cable channel HBO, which is being tipped as their next hit to follow The Sopranos - means that California will be her home for five months; but she does not envisage the final leap to live there, keeping one base in London and another in Sydney. "There are so many things about the Californian lifestyle that I have in Sydney, but it's much cleaner. I feel a great warmth towards the British and I find it very stimulating and different and there's nothing I enjoy more than sitting for eight hours in a pub with a bunch of people and talking and then I go home to Sydney and go canoeing with my friends and don't talk. But two lives are enough. So I use California like a spa town: do four yoga classes a week, go vegetarian, get off the Guinness for a while."
She is also writing a short film which she will direct, but has no intention of giving up a day job that has allowed her to play such a range of characters and nationalities in everything from My Best Friend's Wedding to Divorcing Jack.
Another run-through, another call. Rachel Griffiths heads off between the gravestones of Mountain View, very much one of the living.
• Me Myself I is released next Friday
