HUGO WEAVING has lashed out at the NSW Government for failing to support the state's film industry.

The star of the Matrix and Lord Of The Rings trilogies said it was "a real shame" that his latest film, the underworld drama The Tender Hook directed by Jonathan Ogilvie, was forced to shoot in Melbourne despite being set in 1920s Sydney.

"It was just financially more viable for the film-makers to switch even after having found the locations in and around Sydney that they wanted to shoot," he told the Herald's film writer, Garry Maddox, yesterday.

"It would pay off to have a little bit more connection with the film industry. I think the State Government has been neglectful … probably not wilfully neglectful, just probably ignorant of film and what it can do for the industry and for the state in a broader way."

The film, a love triangle between a scheming boxing promoter, his glamorous girlfriend, played by Rose Byrne, and a young fighter played by Matt Le Nevez, uses archival footage to show Sydney in the jazz age. The rest was shot in a Melbourne studio and various locations around the southern city.

Weaving, who is just back from filming another Australian film, The Last Ride, in South Australia, plays "a colourful Sydney businessman" in The Tender Hook, whom he compares to Abe Saffron.