Arlius
09-05-2002, 03:18 PM
The making of this film is now being compared to the enormous task of putting the LOTR books on film. This article was originally in the Washington Post, but it is now making the rounds in other papers...
'Lucky Jack' Aubrey's Latest Port: Hollywood
Can Russell Crowe Handle Sea Saga's Great Surprise?
By Ken Ringle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 23, 2002;
ROSARITA, Mexico -- Fox Studios Baja sits beside one of Mexico's dirtiest, most litter-strewn roadways about 25 miles south of the U.S. border. Across the street teeters a phalanx of thrown-together shack-stands crowded with rusting lawn ornaments, terra-cotta palm pots, and other flotsam and jetsam of the tourist tide.
Within the guarded studio gate, a 20-foot-tall inflatable monkey wobbles astride the replica turret blown from the replica battleship Arizona in Fox's cinematic version of "Pearl Harbor," which was filmed here. Those in search of metaphors can make of that what they will.
It's a stunningly improbable setting in which to contemplate the novels of Patrick O'Brian, whose highly literate 20-book Aubrey/Maturin saga celebrates the wondrous, the noble and the poignantly heroic in man, and is currently being filmed, at least in part, here in Rosarita.
The $135 million motion picture is "The Far Side of the World," a cinematic treatment of the 10th of O'Brian's tales of the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. It stars Russell Crowe, the Oscar-winning actor of "A Beautiful Mind," as Capt. "Lucky Jack" Aubrey and is directed by Australian Peter Weir, whose long list of acclaimed films include "Gallipoli," "The Year of Living Dangerously," "Dead Poets Society," "Witness," "The Mosquito Coast" and most recently "The Truman Show."
In addition to Crowe, the cast includes Paul Bettany (Crowe's college roommate in "A Beautiful Mind") as Aubrey's surgeon-spy companion, Stephen Maturin, and Billy Boyd (Pippin in "The Lord of the Rings") as Aubrey's coxswain, Barret Bonden. Shooting began in June and is forecast to conclude by November with release of the film possible late next year.
For O'Brian's millions of passionate worldwide fans, who for decades have debated both the wisdom and the possibility of transforming his work to film, what's happening here is a constant subject both of hope and of horror. The fear has been that no film project could ever do justice to O'Brian's novels, whose mischievous erudition resembles an improbable blend of Jane Austen, C.S. Forester, Charles Dickens and Marcel Proust.
The books carry Aubrey and Maturin on a series of global adventures afloat and ashore during a somewhat elastic 15-year period when the Royal Navy is contending with Napoleon's ambitions in Europe and, for a while, with the fledgling U.S. Navy as well. But layered beneath the episodic plot lines charting Aubrey's erratic climb through the naval ranks are profound explorations of life and the human heart. Richard Snow, editor of American Heritage Magazine, writing in the New York Times, described the series on which the film is based as "the greatest historical novels ever written."
So ardent and proprietary are O'Brian readers that long before the author died in Dublin two years ago, entire Web sites were devoted to debating what is known as "the casting thread": fantasy suggestions for which actors, living or dead, could best play the swashbuckling Aubrey or the secretive Maturin or any in O'Brian's galaxy of other memorable characters, large and small.
With the exception of "Harry Potter" and "Lord of the Rings," it's hard to think of a recent book-based motion picture anticipated in the literary world with comparable fascination. Some have compared the challenge faced by Weir to that met in 1988 by director Philip Kaufman in filming Milan Kundera's complex philosophical novel "The Unbearable Lightness of Being."
But rather than reassuring or involving this literary fan base, as Warner Bros. did with pre-"Harry Potter" info blitzes, Fox has reacted to O'Brianites' interest by attempting Fort Knox-level secrecy. Inquiries about the film have been met with silence, indirection or worse. Last November, for example, a designated spokesman for the studio was insistently denying that any O'Brian picture was in preparation even as Weir's wife confirmed from Australia that the director was in London casting the film.
Nine months before, the studio had spent $1.5 million to purchase HMS Rose, a replica of an 18th-century British warship, to be cast as Aubrey and Maturin's favorite ship, the frigate HMS Surprise.
Today the Rose is docked south of here in Ensenada, intriguingly and rather beautifully remade as the Surprise, and anyone spending a little time here can easily learn something about the film, despite what Fox publicist Sandy O'Neill concedes is "real paranoia" among studio executives about maintaining a closed set.
More than 300 extras have been hired for the fight scenes alone, craft unions in Hollywood are more than unhappy that the studio is using far cheaper Mexican workers, and a reasonably clear picture of the moviemaking soon emerges from willing, if cautious, cast members and workers despite the best efforts of studio lawyers and the "40-some" executives O'Neill says must approve any statement to or access by the press.
"What everybody but Fox executives seems to realize," said one extra, "is that with 5 million O'Brian books in print in this country, never mind those worldwide, O'Brian's readers are in a position to either make or break this film. And that decision is presently balanced on a pinhead."
That pinhead is the mysterious script, a 400-page document penned by Weir, John Collee and Larry Ferguson, but so dynamic it reportedly changes daily. By best accounts it is a kind of O'Brian pastiche, in which the more provocative ingredients of the 20-volume novel that the Aubrey/Maturin books comprise, are pasted onto a plot drawn largely from "The Far Side of the World."
In O'Brian's hands, "FSW," as the studio's directional signs refer to it, sent Aubrey, Maturin and the Surprise around Cape Horn during the War of 1812 in an effort to sink or capture an American warship named the Norfolk preying on British whalers in the Pacific. Weir apparently decided that compared with the fleet actions, exotic locales, and intricate and crowded period settings of most O'Brian books, the more limited scope of "Far Side of the World" lent itself better to budgetary realities while providing a cinematic vehicle for both action and ideas.
Fox marketers, however, reportedly worry that, abbreviated on theater marquees, "Far Side" might lead moviegoers to think it's a Gary Larson movie. They also decided that the American public would never hold still for the United States as the enemy (have they never heard of "Madama Butterfly"?), so the Norfolk has been renationalized as the French vessel Acheron. It stands within the studio compound in somewhat truncated form, its masts and rigging abbreviated, its bowsprit ending in splinters, propped up with scaffolding near the open air 8 1/2-acre seaside pond/tank where "Titanic" met her iceberg.
Apparently the Acheron facade will be used only for close-up deck and warfare scenes, with its missing parts off camera.
In the tank itself (which rents for $70,000 a week) sits a full-size replica of the Rose/Surprise. It's perched on a giant underwater tripod equipped with pneumatic gadgets to rock the ship, tilt it, spin it and shake it while house-size fans and jets pummel it with storm wind. Nearby stand four 50-foot-high, 400-gallon water tanks that can be triggered to vomit giant waves.
The fake storms will be augmented by shots of real ones captured last spring by a film crew that rounded Cape Horn in the Endeavor, a square-rigged replica of the vessel that carried the celebrated British explorer Capt. James Cook around the world in the 1760s.
Aside from cut-rate Mexican craft salaries, the tank built for "Titanic" is the biggest reason for shooting here. It's an intriguing optical illusion. When filled to the brim, its seaside edge disappears and its surface appears to stretch unbroken to the far ocean horizon.
The actors are shuttled between work here on the facade ships and adjacent stages to Ensenada, where they board the real Rose/Surprise to sail offshore for helicopter shots of sail-furling, cannon-firing and other maneuvers.
And if while hard-core O'Brianites continue to fear a generic Hollywood dumbing down of the books and characters they love ("none of the Fox people has read the books," claims one terminally pessimistic insider, "and they wouldn't understand them if they had"), Weir, at least, appears deeply immersed in O'Brian's world. He reportedly rejected the "California" look of most Hollywood actors to comb Britain, Canada, Scandinavia and even Poland in quest of the "tired faces" characteristic of 18th-century sailors.
He returned, by all accounts, with a treasure trove of visages. Cast members report particular delight with actor David Threlfell, a purse-faced redhead whose petulant performance as Aubrey's notoriously shrewish steward, Preserved Killick, has been declared worthy of one of O'Brian's greatest characters.
The hundreds selected as extras have been sent to schools for both sword fighting and hand-to-hand combat in preparation for "epic" battle scenes and, since Aubrey and Maturin while away evenings making chamber music in the Surprise's after-cabin, Crowe has taken violin lessons from Australian Chamber Orchestra violinist Richard Tognetti.
Just how all this will come together, of course, remains to be seen. Though some in the cast fret that 6-foot-3 Bettany may prove problematic as the small, physically nondescript Maturin, one skeptic who has seen some of the film shot so far confesses to finding it "absolutely stunning."
Just what O'Brian would think of all this is not hard to guess: He wouldn't. The reclusive writer, who lived in France and so immersed himself in Aubrey and Maturin's time that he occasionally wrote with a quill pen, was not known as a habitue of motion pictures. Few friends could be located who remember him going to the movies at all.
He sold the film rights to his first Aubrey/Maturin book, "Master and Commander," to Samuel Goldwyn Jr. before his second U.S. book tour in 1995. Goldwyn also purchased options to film the rest of the series. But since O'Brian was then 80 and only beginning to understand the long-delayed fame then engulfing him, the author clearly never expected to see any of his books on the screen.
As for the moviemaking process, O'Brian's innocence of that was perhaps best conveyed during an April 1995 interview on National Public Radio. From New York, he told interviewer Neil Conan, he was flying to San Francisco. "And then I'm going to the city that always escapes me . . . somewhat to the south near Mexico."
"San Diego?" suggested Conan.
"Not quite. It's where they make films."
"Los Angeles," Conan said.
"Just so," replied the author.
'Lucky Jack' Aubrey's Latest Port: Hollywood
Can Russell Crowe Handle Sea Saga's Great Surprise?
By Ken Ringle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 23, 2002;
ROSARITA, Mexico -- Fox Studios Baja sits beside one of Mexico's dirtiest, most litter-strewn roadways about 25 miles south of the U.S. border. Across the street teeters a phalanx of thrown-together shack-stands crowded with rusting lawn ornaments, terra-cotta palm pots, and other flotsam and jetsam of the tourist tide.
Within the guarded studio gate, a 20-foot-tall inflatable monkey wobbles astride the replica turret blown from the replica battleship Arizona in Fox's cinematic version of "Pearl Harbor," which was filmed here. Those in search of metaphors can make of that what they will.
It's a stunningly improbable setting in which to contemplate the novels of Patrick O'Brian, whose highly literate 20-book Aubrey/Maturin saga celebrates the wondrous, the noble and the poignantly heroic in man, and is currently being filmed, at least in part, here in Rosarita.
The $135 million motion picture is "The Far Side of the World," a cinematic treatment of the 10th of O'Brian's tales of the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. It stars Russell Crowe, the Oscar-winning actor of "A Beautiful Mind," as Capt. "Lucky Jack" Aubrey and is directed by Australian Peter Weir, whose long list of acclaimed films include "Gallipoli," "The Year of Living Dangerously," "Dead Poets Society," "Witness," "The Mosquito Coast" and most recently "The Truman Show."
In addition to Crowe, the cast includes Paul Bettany (Crowe's college roommate in "A Beautiful Mind") as Aubrey's surgeon-spy companion, Stephen Maturin, and Billy Boyd (Pippin in "The Lord of the Rings") as Aubrey's coxswain, Barret Bonden. Shooting began in June and is forecast to conclude by November with release of the film possible late next year.
For O'Brian's millions of passionate worldwide fans, who for decades have debated both the wisdom and the possibility of transforming his work to film, what's happening here is a constant subject both of hope and of horror. The fear has been that no film project could ever do justice to O'Brian's novels, whose mischievous erudition resembles an improbable blend of Jane Austen, C.S. Forester, Charles Dickens and Marcel Proust.
The books carry Aubrey and Maturin on a series of global adventures afloat and ashore during a somewhat elastic 15-year period when the Royal Navy is contending with Napoleon's ambitions in Europe and, for a while, with the fledgling U.S. Navy as well. But layered beneath the episodic plot lines charting Aubrey's erratic climb through the naval ranks are profound explorations of life and the human heart. Richard Snow, editor of American Heritage Magazine, writing in the New York Times, described the series on which the film is based as "the greatest historical novels ever written."
So ardent and proprietary are O'Brian readers that long before the author died in Dublin two years ago, entire Web sites were devoted to debating what is known as "the casting thread": fantasy suggestions for which actors, living or dead, could best play the swashbuckling Aubrey or the secretive Maturin or any in O'Brian's galaxy of other memorable characters, large and small.
With the exception of "Harry Potter" and "Lord of the Rings," it's hard to think of a recent book-based motion picture anticipated in the literary world with comparable fascination. Some have compared the challenge faced by Weir to that met in 1988 by director Philip Kaufman in filming Milan Kundera's complex philosophical novel "The Unbearable Lightness of Being."
But rather than reassuring or involving this literary fan base, as Warner Bros. did with pre-"Harry Potter" info blitzes, Fox has reacted to O'Brianites' interest by attempting Fort Knox-level secrecy. Inquiries about the film have been met with silence, indirection or worse. Last November, for example, a designated spokesman for the studio was insistently denying that any O'Brian picture was in preparation even as Weir's wife confirmed from Australia that the director was in London casting the film.
Nine months before, the studio had spent $1.5 million to purchase HMS Rose, a replica of an 18th-century British warship, to be cast as Aubrey and Maturin's favorite ship, the frigate HMS Surprise.
Today the Rose is docked south of here in Ensenada, intriguingly and rather beautifully remade as the Surprise, and anyone spending a little time here can easily learn something about the film, despite what Fox publicist Sandy O'Neill concedes is "real paranoia" among studio executives about maintaining a closed set.
More than 300 extras have been hired for the fight scenes alone, craft unions in Hollywood are more than unhappy that the studio is using far cheaper Mexican workers, and a reasonably clear picture of the moviemaking soon emerges from willing, if cautious, cast members and workers despite the best efforts of studio lawyers and the "40-some" executives O'Neill says must approve any statement to or access by the press.
"What everybody but Fox executives seems to realize," said one extra, "is that with 5 million O'Brian books in print in this country, never mind those worldwide, O'Brian's readers are in a position to either make or break this film. And that decision is presently balanced on a pinhead."
That pinhead is the mysterious script, a 400-page document penned by Weir, John Collee and Larry Ferguson, but so dynamic it reportedly changes daily. By best accounts it is a kind of O'Brian pastiche, in which the more provocative ingredients of the 20-volume novel that the Aubrey/Maturin books comprise, are pasted onto a plot drawn largely from "The Far Side of the World."
In O'Brian's hands, "FSW," as the studio's directional signs refer to it, sent Aubrey, Maturin and the Surprise around Cape Horn during the War of 1812 in an effort to sink or capture an American warship named the Norfolk preying on British whalers in the Pacific. Weir apparently decided that compared with the fleet actions, exotic locales, and intricate and crowded period settings of most O'Brian books, the more limited scope of "Far Side of the World" lent itself better to budgetary realities while providing a cinematic vehicle for both action and ideas.
Fox marketers, however, reportedly worry that, abbreviated on theater marquees, "Far Side" might lead moviegoers to think it's a Gary Larson movie. They also decided that the American public would never hold still for the United States as the enemy (have they never heard of "Madama Butterfly"?), so the Norfolk has been renationalized as the French vessel Acheron. It stands within the studio compound in somewhat truncated form, its masts and rigging abbreviated, its bowsprit ending in splinters, propped up with scaffolding near the open air 8 1/2-acre seaside pond/tank where "Titanic" met her iceberg.
Apparently the Acheron facade will be used only for close-up deck and warfare scenes, with its missing parts off camera.
In the tank itself (which rents for $70,000 a week) sits a full-size replica of the Rose/Surprise. It's perched on a giant underwater tripod equipped with pneumatic gadgets to rock the ship, tilt it, spin it and shake it while house-size fans and jets pummel it with storm wind. Nearby stand four 50-foot-high, 400-gallon water tanks that can be triggered to vomit giant waves.
The fake storms will be augmented by shots of real ones captured last spring by a film crew that rounded Cape Horn in the Endeavor, a square-rigged replica of the vessel that carried the celebrated British explorer Capt. James Cook around the world in the 1760s.
Aside from cut-rate Mexican craft salaries, the tank built for "Titanic" is the biggest reason for shooting here. It's an intriguing optical illusion. When filled to the brim, its seaside edge disappears and its surface appears to stretch unbroken to the far ocean horizon.
The actors are shuttled between work here on the facade ships and adjacent stages to Ensenada, where they board the real Rose/Surprise to sail offshore for helicopter shots of sail-furling, cannon-firing and other maneuvers.
And if while hard-core O'Brianites continue to fear a generic Hollywood dumbing down of the books and characters they love ("none of the Fox people has read the books," claims one terminally pessimistic insider, "and they wouldn't understand them if they had"), Weir, at least, appears deeply immersed in O'Brian's world. He reportedly rejected the "California" look of most Hollywood actors to comb Britain, Canada, Scandinavia and even Poland in quest of the "tired faces" characteristic of 18th-century sailors.
He returned, by all accounts, with a treasure trove of visages. Cast members report particular delight with actor David Threlfell, a purse-faced redhead whose petulant performance as Aubrey's notoriously shrewish steward, Preserved Killick, has been declared worthy of one of O'Brian's greatest characters.
The hundreds selected as extras have been sent to schools for both sword fighting and hand-to-hand combat in preparation for "epic" battle scenes and, since Aubrey and Maturin while away evenings making chamber music in the Surprise's after-cabin, Crowe has taken violin lessons from Australian Chamber Orchestra violinist Richard Tognetti.
Just how all this will come together, of course, remains to be seen. Though some in the cast fret that 6-foot-3 Bettany may prove problematic as the small, physically nondescript Maturin, one skeptic who has seen some of the film shot so far confesses to finding it "absolutely stunning."
Just what O'Brian would think of all this is not hard to guess: He wouldn't. The reclusive writer, who lived in France and so immersed himself in Aubrey and Maturin's time that he occasionally wrote with a quill pen, was not known as a habitue of motion pictures. Few friends could be located who remember him going to the movies at all.
He sold the film rights to his first Aubrey/Maturin book, "Master and Commander," to Samuel Goldwyn Jr. before his second U.S. book tour in 1995. Goldwyn also purchased options to film the rest of the series. But since O'Brian was then 80 and only beginning to understand the long-delayed fame then engulfing him, the author clearly never expected to see any of his books on the screen.
As for the moviemaking process, O'Brian's innocence of that was perhaps best conveyed during an April 1995 interview on National Public Radio. From New York, he told interviewer Neil Conan, he was flying to San Francisco. "And then I'm going to the city that always escapes me . . . somewhat to the south near Mexico."
"San Diego?" suggested Conan.
"Not quite. It's where they make films."
"Los Angeles," Conan said.
"Just so," replied the author.