Six years ago, Guy Pearce was the man. He'd given an acclaimed performance in "L.A. Confidential" and was getting mad publicity for his role in the indie breakout hit "Memento." And then, without warning, it all went wrong. Big-budget misfires such as "The Time Machine" and "The Count of Monte Cristo" sent Pearce fleeing from Hollywood's glare back home to Australia. Sitting down in a Beverly Hills, Calif., hotel (sans shoes mind you), Pearce tells the Hitlist he needed the private time ... badly.

"I took a year off," Pearce says. "I told my agent I didn't want to read anything ... I just needed to collect myself and refocus."

It was during this period that noted musician and writer Nick Cave approached Pearce about his new Australian Western, "The Proposition."

"Nick somehow tracked down my number and rang me up," Pearce says. "I read the script and thought, 'Wow, this is pretty good. This is something I should do.'"

Unfortunately, although Pearce was ready for his comeback, the rest of the production wasn't. It took two years to get the movie off the ground. Pearce's participation in the project opened the doors to the rest of the fine cast, which includes Emily Watson, Danny Huston, Ray Winstone and John Hurt. And how did Pearce feel knowing his name sold them on the project?

"Well, a lot of other people said 'No,'" the self-deprecating 38-year-old deadpans.

All humility aside, Pearce believes Cave's script brought everyone on board. Cave and director John Hillcoat have crafted a picture that elegantly and brutally depicts life in the Australian frontier. As the middle brother of the fictional Burns brothers' gang, Pearce's character is coerced into finding his insane older brother (Huston) and bringing him back to the authorities to save his naïve younger brother. Hillcoat brings a harsh realism to the setting that is almost uncomfortable to watch. In one shot, a fly sits on Pearce's lip for a good minute before the actor ever notices its presence. It was par for the course for a method actor like Pearce.

"There's been films made in the Outback before, and you don't detect the flies as much as you did in this," Pearce says. "John really sort of honed in on them and focused on them. There were a couple shots of the townspeople with sort of a blanket of flies across their shoulders and they were really there."

"The Proposition" is just the first in a series of new films Pearce will star in as he makes a careful return to the big screen. He's avoiding studio movies if he can. Pearce just finished shooting "Factory Girl" where he plays Andy Warhol (he didn't want to talk about it) and is about to star as Harry Houdini opposite Catherine Zeta-Jones in Gillian Armstrong's "Death Defying Acts" later this summer. With intriguing features such as those on his agenda, Pearce may just be "the man" again.

"The Proposition" opens in New York and Los Angeles on May 5.