October 13

On The Seas Again, Guided By A Star

By Rick Lyman

The New York Times

October 13, 2002

ROSARITO, Mexico - Russell Crowe peeled off his British naval tunic, slipped a pack of cigarettes into his pocket and pulled himself onto the thick rigging running up the starboard side of the HMS Surprise. "You want to go up?" he asked.

Say what?

The swaying web of horizontal ratlines and vertical shrouds converged on a wooden platform wrapped around the central mast, about 65 feet in the air. From down below, the platform looked the size of a slice of bread.

"The trick is to put one leg on either side of one of these thick vertical lines," Crowe said, swinging out over the blue-green water of the eight-acre oceanside tank at Fox Baja Studios, a half-hour drive south of the U.S. border on Baja California's Pacific coast. The Surprise, actually a life-size replica of a tall-masted frigate, was resting on an underwater gimbel capable of making it rock, sway and dart across the tank. "Then you hold onto that line and climb," he said.

With that, he scurried skyward, seeming oblivious to the height, while a platoon of nervous producers and publicists watched from below. "Oh, my heavens," one of them gasped. Following, a few feet behind, was an older, heavier and much less acrobatic newspaper reporter.

Crowe, 38, is playing Capt. Jack Aubrey - Lucky Jack, to the Surprise crew - in "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World," an adaptation of Patrick O'Brian's widely beloved 20-volume cycle of seafaring sagas set during the Napoleonic Wars. The $120 million movie - which 20th Century Fox hopes to transform into a multi-chapter "Master and Commander" franchise - draws its central plot from the 10th book in the O'Brian cycle, "The Far Side of the World," although some characters and incidents will be borrowed from other installments, according to the producer Duncan Henderson. ("Master and Commander" is the title of the first novel in the series.) Crowe has expressed interest in continuing to play Aubrey, if the first movie succeeds. The film will become one of Fox's major releases of 2003; whether in the summer or holiday season has not been decided.

Hollywood is on a binge of epic moviemaking at the moment. Baz Luhrmann is working up an "Alexander the Great" with Leonardo DiCaprio. Brad Pitt and Eric Bana will play Achilles and Hector in "Troy" for the director Wolfgang Petersen. And Vin Diesel is preparing to play Hannibal in a movie about the Carthaginian general who crossed the Alps on an elephant.

Indeed, "Master and Commander" is not even alone in its attempt to resurrect the seafaring genre. Disney is also in production on "Pirates of the Caribbean," a family-oriented swashbuckler based on the Disney theme park attraction.

Once one of Hollywood's most durable genres - back in the days when "Mutiny on the Bounty" was winning the best picture Oscar and Errol Flynn was packing them in as "Captain Blood" - the seafaring epic has fallen in recent decades, along with the western and other pre-science-fiction action forms, into a kind of Bermuda Triangle. Among the expensive shipwrecks were Roman Polanski's "Pirates" with Walter Matthau in 1986 and Renny Harlin's "Cutthroat Island" starring his wife at the time, Geena Davis, in 1995. When the latter bombed, many predicted that the swashbuckler would never rise again.

"It's really very depressing to think about," said Peter Weir, the director of "Master and Commander," as he contemplated the task of re-igniting audience interest in the genre. This soft-spoken, sun-reddened Australian director of such films as "Gallipoli" (1981) and "The Truman Show" (1998), added: "So I try not to think about it."

Despite the recent failures, however, Weir and his bankrollers at Fox are convinced that the time is right for sea epics to be reborn and that a new "Master and Commander" film series is the perfect vehicle for it. They point to the strong fan base for O'Brian, who died in 2000, the depth of fascinating historical detail in his stories and the recent advances in digital computer effects that allow filmmakers to recreate vanished eras more easily.

The book on which this film is based is but one volume in what are known as the "Aubrey-Maturin" novels - named for the captain and his closest friend, the ship's doctor and secret agent Stephen Maturin (played here by Paul Bettany, who was Crowe's Princeton roommate in "A Beautiful Mind"). The novel follows Aubrey's chase of an American warship around Cape Horn during the War of 1812.

In Weir's version, the date is shifted to 1806 and the enemy transformed into a French super-frigate, the Acheron, in part because of nervousness about whether post-Sept. 11 audiences would feel uncomfortable cheering for the sinking of the Stars and Stripes. And the story begins not with Aubrey's political wheeling and dealing in Gibraltar but at sea, where the Surprise is attacked by the Acheron and barely escapes.

Thus, Aubrey's obsessive chase around a typhoon-tossed Cape Horn and up to the Galapagos Islands becomes one of payback, with the Acheron making several mysterious appearances along the route that spook the superstitious crew.

Many of O'Brian's characters appear in the story, including Killick, Aubrey's surly servant (David Threlfall) and the coxswain Barret Bonden (Billy Boyd, who plays Pippin in the "Lord of the Rings" series).

O'Brian fans, who are both legion and literate, have been especially watchful of this production, encouraged by the presence of Weir and the casting of the Oscar-winning Crowe as their beloved Aubrey, but also worried that Hollywood will tarnish and simplify the series.

The project began about 10 years ago when Tom Rothman, currently co-chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment, read one of O'Brian's books during a rainy Connecticut vacation. He urged his boss at the time, the producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr., to pursue the movie rights.

After the film spent several years in unsuccessful development at Disney, Goldwyn reacquired the rights and took them to Rothman, by then the head of production at Fox. And Rothman approached Weir, who is a fan of the O'Brian series.

All of the earlier attempts at a script had been adaptations of "Master and Commander," but it was Weir's suggestion to start with the 10th book in the series, which he felt had the cleanest, simplest plot line. Crowe said he was immediately keen to work with Weir, a fellow Australian. But he was not acquainted with the O'Brian books, and not altogether taken with the script he was sent.

"When I'd officially walked away from it last December, what kept me up at night was thinking, what am I doing?" Crowe said. "Do I really want to give up a chance to work with Peter Weir, something I used to dream about doing?"

So he read the books and fell in love with Aubrey (to the point where he says he's a little angry over the way O'Brian transformed the character into something of a buffoon in the last few installments). And he convinced Weir and his co-writer John Collee to flesh out the script and add some scenes, particularly a couple showing Aubrey's teacher-student relationship with the young midshipmen on the Surprise.

"I wanted to show the responsibility of having these kids on board," Crowe said.

The filmmakers said they were steeling themselves for criticism from O'Brian purists. "My feeling is that as long as you are true to the spirit of the book and the spirit of the characters, then you'll be all right," Rothman said.

All of the actors went through a kind of boot camp of basic 19th-century seamanship, except Bettany, whose character is relatively unfamiliar with the sea. "It wasn't so much that I was given a pass as that I sort of took one," he said. "That boot camp looked like far too much hard work, so I backed off and learned about cutting up fish and how to perform amputations."

Gordon Laco, a tall-ship specialist and O'Brian enthusiast, leads the movie's three-man team of technical advisers. He said he had been impressed with the production's commitment to historical accuracy, within the confines of the moviemaking process. There have been long discussions about details, he said; for example, which of the ship's officers would have been permitted to use the captain's privy.

Another debate concerned the proper accent for Aubrey. Historians were consulted and said that Crowe's own Australian accent was as valid as any, but the actor rejected that idea, fearing that audiences wouldn't accept it. Crowe said he had thought about Aubrey's upbringing, as revealed in the books - he was the son of a successful naval officer - and decided that Aubrey had probably had a solid, upper-middle-class British accent.

Crowe said he was not overly concerned about maintaining fidelity to O'Brian's canon. If something works better on the screen, then so be it. "The way I figure it, Patrick O'Brian is dead," Crowe said. "And anyway, we're making a movie here."

There was something of the captain in Crowe's bearing, both on and off camera, during the long day of shooting in Rosarito - a combination of absolute confidence and polite correctness, whether he was making almost formal introductions of the other cast members or positioning himself at the bottom of a tricky ladder to help people onto a ferry barge.

"Be careful there," he'd say, "the last step is a big one."

When he organized Sunday football games for the cast and crew, one player was aghast when told that the real reason was to build them up for the physical scenes at sea. "I told him, 'Hey mate, it's all about the work,'" Crowe said. "Everything is about the work."

This was not the Russell Crowe of tabloid reports, scowling at reporters and engaging in beer-fueled fisticuffs around the globe. The New York Post, whose gossip columns feature frequent items about Crowe, said in March that the actor "doesn't give a damn what anyone thinks of him." In August, The Daily News of New York said that he "prides himself in his hatred of the press."

And in the last year alone there have been reports of a yelling and shoving match with the television producer of the British film awards (for which he apologized), an altercation with a photographer at a pre-Oscar party whom he mistook for a paparazzo, and an alleged shoving match with the pop musician Moby. The British Daily Star reported that a female karate champion saved him from a barroom brawl in Rosarito this summer, while The Washington Post had a woman stepping in to restrain him from tussling with one of the other "Master and Commander" actors.

But Crowe said that while he is certainly no saint, the rowdy rumors about him have taken on a life of their own.

"You know, there are people out there who call themselves journalists who don't do what real journalists do," Crowe said. "I'm supposed to have done all these things or been places, and it never happened. It's like there's another bloke out there and he's doing all these crazy things.

"A guy in the crew came up to me recently and said, 'Hey, I read this story that you were in a fight in a bar on Saturday night, but then I remembered that you were with me on Saturday night.' I told him, 'Hey mate, welcome to my life.'"

He gave the whole subject a dismissive wave.

"I don't mean to give the impression that it bothers me or that I give it a whole lot of thought," Crowe said.

Still, he added, there is something similar about him and the character he is playing, the master seaman whose shore life is a tangle of debts and missteps.

"At sea, he is extremely able, but on land, he is pretty much hopeless," Crowe said. "Just like me, I guess."

Shooting began on June 17, the schedule calling for 18 weeks in Mexico and one more in the Galapagos. The HMS Rose, a British frigate not unlike the fictional Surprise, was a floating museum in Bridgeport, Conn., when the filmmakers bought it and had it sailed through the Panama Canal to Baja. Meanwhile, the full-scale replica of the Rose was built in the same oceanside tank where "Titanic" was filmed in Rosarito.

The shots at sea were done off Baja, using the Rose, while more intimate scenes were filmed in Rosarito. And it was here, on a bright, cloudless afternoon, that Russell Crowe was occupying his time between shots by climbing high in the rigging with a visiting reporter.

"Take your time," he said. "You've got two hands and two feet connecting you to the ropes. Only move one at a time."

Unabashedly confident, Crowe brushed Aubrey's long, blonde locks from his face and said that he had little patience for those who did not take the work as seriously as he did. And he chafed when asked if he considered the state of film acting to be as high today as it has been in the past.

"What about Daniel Day-Lewis, or Sean Penn or Robert Downey Jr.?" he said. "They're doing work as good as anyone has ever done. They just don't play the game."

Crowe does not seem to have much affection for the game - the image burnishing and career shaping that consume most major stars.

A happy smile spread across his face only when he talked about the work, such as when he described his struggles to learn the violin so that he could convincingly play the scenes of late-night duets in the captain's cabin between Aubrey on violin and Maturin on cello.

"I have gotten to the point where I know that I can make a beautiful sound," he said, proudly. (Bettany also studied the cello, but has no such warm feelings for it. "It's a ghastly instrument," he said.

Casually, he reached his arms around the edge of the wooden platform - to do this, one must traverse the final six feet by climbing out and around the edge, hanging back out over empty space at a 25-degree angle - and pulled himself on top. The reporter stalled a few feet short.

"Don't worry, mate," he said. "But just take a second. Look around. It's quite a wonderful view from up here."



STATEMENT BY 20TH CENTURY FOX regarding the above article:

"There will be an article running on October 13th in the New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure section on our upcoming film "Master and Commander: Far Side of the World ." It's a great article, but there are two things that we would like to clarify to the fans of Patrick O'Brian's books.

When Crowe is explaining how he and the director chose his speaking voice for the movie, it should have said that the choice was made because Aubrey was the son of an Army officer, not a Navy officer as stated in the article.

There is also a quote in the article that ran incomplete. The entire quote from Crowe was "The way I figure it, Patrick O'Brian is dead, and although the books will still be here, there won't be any new ones; but O'Brian's world and the characters he created can live on in films. However, why should a filmmaker shoot the exact same stories you can get in the books - these are fictional characters, and after all, we are making a movie."