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Master and commander
Peter Weir and Russell Crowe navigate uncharted waters
BY GARY SUSMAN

NEW YORK — "This is a $135 million art film," Russell Crowe says at a press conference for Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, marveling that the three studios who financed the film trusted director Peter Weir with such an odd undertaking. Maybe the reason was that though Weir (The Truman Show) may have been the master, A-lister Crowe (who plays novelist Patrick O’Brian’s British naval hero, Captain Jack Aubrey) was the commander.

"Obviously, it’s a director’s medium, and I’m there to work for the director," the Oscar-winning actor (for Gladiator) says. "That’s why directors hire me, mate. But they also know I’m going to take a certain amount of pressure off their hands and take on certain responsibilities. There are certain things you’d want the captain to tell the men, as opposed to its coming from Weir, because it keeps the fantasy alive."

During the seven-month shoot, at the same Baja (Mexico) water tank where Titanic was filmed, Crowe whipped his crew into shape. "Day one, they got three shirts, three name badges, a needle, and a piece of thread. The next day, myself and the other officers checked all the name badges. If they could come off with one finger, then they had to all be taken off and sewn on again." Crowe wanted to create an esprit de corps; he even staged battles on the rugby field between Aubrey’s sailors and the stuntmen playing their French enemies. "With everything you do, there’s always a mercenary reason. Yes, we wanted teamwork and camaraderie, but we also wanted everyone to be fit so nobody hurt themselves in the final battle scenes."

That kind of verisimilitude, whether it showed up on screen or not, was also important to Weir, who says he wanted to be just as meticulous as O’Brian. "The novels gave me a feeling that this was well-researched and therefore truthful. I believed the world, and therefore I believed the characters within the world. And if that was part of my own pleasure in reading the books, I should reproduce that for the viewer."

To that end, the production bought a ready-made 19th-century-style schooner, the Rose, and spent 10 days shooting at sea. "It was one of the funniest 10 days I’ve ever spent in my life" says Paul Bettany, who plays Aubrey’s best friend, Dr. Stephen Maturin. "Watching people being seasick is one of the funniest things in the world." Bettany studied with surgeons and naturalists to get into the mind set of his pre-Darwin scientist character. "You’ve been given this extraordinary detail that nobody who sees the movie is going to get, but it’s been given to you to hold and know and hopefully layer your performance."

The production also hired a ship to sail around the coast of South America, as the HMS Surprise does in the film, so as to be able to shoot the distinctive waters in each stretch of ocean. "Perfect Storm, that’s CGI water," Crowe says dismissively. But after seeing this film, he points out, "old sailors have come up to me and said, ‘How did you get that water around Cape Horn?’ And I’d say, ‘Well, that is the water around Cape Horn.’ "

The water is important, since except for a brief interlude on the Galápagos Islands, the entire movie takes place at sea. To Weir, this makes the film as much like a science-fiction movie as a historical drama. "I did want to reclaim the space movie. That’s why I clipped out any land-based stuff. They’re venturing into the unknown, and the Galápagos is like a planet. We’ve been looking at space exploration in recent decades with awe and wonder and fear and fascination, but that is also applied to the sea. It’s still extremely mysterious."

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World opens next Friday, November 14, at theaters to be announced.


Issue Date: November 7 - 13, 2003
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