Movieline Magazine

(Transcription thanks to Paulast at the Glad BB)

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

It's difficult to package a prestige project better than this: Take a volume of Patrick O'Brian's celebrated, addictive, literary-pulp Aubrey-Maturin sea saga, hand it to Peter Weir and cast Russell Crowe as the headstrong man-in-charge of the ultimate buddy movie. (His pal is Paul Bettany, of A Knight's Tale and A Beautiful Mind.) Early 19th-century British Fleet swashbuckling, historical-costume-drama hijacks, an ironclad and meticulously researched source narrative, a built-in audience of several million well-read ticket-buyers -- what could be bad? If we show up with our money read -- a vital prerequisite -- the Academy just might have a sweep on its hands.

Never underestimate the Academy's genuflection before historical epics in which bags of spent cash are readily visible to the naked eye. Not to mention that Weir, one of the best image-smiths in Hollywood, if not a faultless judge of screenplays, is ridiculously overdue for an Academy benediction. If you want to hand Weir some gold, you don't hand it to him for the Truman Show (too cerebral), Fearless (too painful), Green Card (too awful) or Dead Poets Society (too Robin Williams). You hand it to him for a pirate epic that will at least have huge ships, smart talk and derring-do.

ROCKING THE BOAT

Who Weekly Magazine
September 1, 2003

The history of the film itself is an epic, spanning 10 years and five studios (it began at Samuel Goldwyn, then moved to Disney, and moved again to 20th Century Fox, which brought in Universal and Miramax as co-producers) and costing boatloads of cash ($US135 million, spent mostly in Mexico, where Master was shot).  And now, with a November 14 US release date looming (it opens in Australia on December 4), it's sailing into the most treacherous waters yet, with fans of O'Brian's 20-novel series already circling cinemas like sharks.  A fiercely loyal lot - they exhaust nearly as much bandwidth with their web pages as Trekkies - they've been grousing about the film's patchwork plot (combining elements of the 1st and 10th novels), complaining about  the casting of the too tall Paul Bettany (Crowe's A Beautiful Mind co-star) as Aubrey's diminutive shipmate Dr Stephen Maturin, and even raising questions about Crowe, or at least his waistline.

Who:  You didn't jump at this part did you?
Crowe: I walked away from it a number of times.  When I first heard about it, I thought it sounded like something Harrison Ford should do.

Then I read the books and I thought it would be impossible to do.  The expense would be too enormous.  then I saw the script, and it didn't read that well to me.

 So why'd you end up doing it?
 It comes back to Peter Weir.  I remember as  kid seeing The Last Wave (his 1977 fantasy thriller about an Australian apocalypse) and there were scenes of (Sydney) getting flooded.  I'm sitting in the cinema and I see my school bus being flooded.  Not a yellow American bus or a red double-decker bus, but the same bus I caught every day to school.  that affected me.   From that point on he was my childhood filmmaking hero.

What did you have to do to make the script work for you?
It wasn't a matter of pulling apart what Peter had done but of putting things back.  Making it a truer reflection of the books and the spirit of the characters.  Making people understand what it was like to be on one of those ships.  I mean this was the NASA of the time.  Being on these ships was the inter-planetary travel of the 19th century.

The seafaring jargon in the books can be impenetrable.  Stuff like "hands to the jears:" and tops'l clewlines". It's like a different language
But that jargon is important to the genre and to accuracy.  And there's no point in translating it.  People have to come along for the ride. And, you know, you could say the same thing about Star Wars.  George Lucas made up a whole bunch of stuff to make that world fully exist for people.

But have you taken some other liberties with the books?  The bad guys are French not American.  And some fans have been upset with the casting  of Paul Bettany.
There are fans out there who are disgruntled because I didn't do the role at 17 stone (108kg).  In the books Aubrey ranges from 14 to 17 stone, sometimes on the same voyage.

Did you gain that much weight for the role?
We were going in that direction.  But about six weeks out Peter said, "You know what, I think we should cut down the weight".  He wanted Aubrey to be active, to be able to go up the rigging, and be a sailor.

How big were you thinking of going? Brando big?
No, but that's what 17 stone would have looked like on my frame.  And that would have been untenable, just in terms of getting up and down the f**king stairways.  So we didn't go that far. I'm not Adonis, but I'm not Rumple of the Bailey, either.

What else did you do to get into character?
First day of rehearsals, I got every man in the  cast three shirts.  Different colours, depending on what rank they were on the ship.  And I gave them name tags, a length of thread and a needle. They had 12 hours to report back in uniform with name tag sewn on.  It wasn't for my ego.  I just felt that the experience would be bigger and better if we all allowed ourselves to play the game.  To get into character and remain that way because those small details of belief will translate on the screen.

Did any of the actors mutiny over the shirts?
There war a couple of who did a sloppy job.  They were talked to.

THE AGE/ ENTERTAINMENT/FILM

December 6, 2003

Patient, charming and obedient, Peter Weir discovered the inner Russell Crowe, writes Anne Thompson.

Every once in a while, a Hollywood studio throws out the hit-formula playbook and bets that smart movie-goers will go along for the ride. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is that rare case.

"It’s a $200-million art film," says Russell Crowe, who is winning praise for his robust portrayal of Patrick O’Brian’s seafaring hero, the captain of HMS Surprise, Jack Aubrey. "I’m confident the audience exists."

But while Crowe has a reputation for strong headedness, it was evident who was commanding this particular vessel. In late 2001, when director Peter Weir first offered the role to Crowe, he was interested in playing the tough but benevolent Captain Aubrey but was already committed to Ron Howard’s boxing film Cinderella Man. Any chance the director could wait a year? No, Weir firmly told him: "The ship sails with the tide." So Crowe made himself available.

Weir and Crowe worked closely for several weeks with the Oscar-winning screenwriter of A Beautiful Mind, Akiva Goldsman, to beef up the relationship between the violinist captain and the cello-sawing Dr Maturin, played by Paul Bettany. "I love the contrast and the contradiction," Weir says. "Russell was interested in adding Jack’s confusions, metaphors and aphorisms."

Crowe lived in fear of seasickness and at one point climbed the 42-metre mast for a shot of the wind blowing through his hair. But his "most difficult stunt" — learning to play the violin. "I just made a pact with myself at the beginning of the shooting process that I had to at least know in my heart that I can make a beautiful sound out of the violin," he said recently.

He has also admitted that when Weir first mentioned the part, "I wasn’t really excited about the project" — not having read the books didn't help, for a start. But Crowe, who had bumped into Weir in a Sydney bar in 2000 and discussed the possibility of working on something together, says he persisted with the project because of Weir's reputation.

If Weir hadn't taken it on, in fact, it is unlikely Master and Commander would have ever been made. Three years ago, Tom Rothman, then the production president of Fox studios, seized an opportunity. Weir was dropping by the studio to see what projects it might have for him. He had directed only 12 movies in 26 years, including Gallipoli, Witness, Dead Poets Society and The Truman Show. The director, who has received three Oscar nominations, was notorious for turning things down, including Gladiator, for which Crowe won an Oscar for best actor. Weir had even passed on Master and Commander seven years before, when Rothman was at the Goldwyn Co. Fox was now developing the project, so Rothman decided to try again.

"It's a rare property, and it took a rare director to do it right," he recalled. "Peter, for the length of his career, has been able to enliven a genre with character, which is exactly what Patrick O'Brian did."

At the end of their meeting, Rothman reached behind his chair. "What I really think you should do," he said, pulling out a mock captain's sword and presenting it to the director, "is take command of the Surprise." Weir asked if he could keep the sword.

It is not known whether he used it to persuade Crowe to take the role, but having seduced his leading man one way or another to accept the part, Weir then took on the studio, demanding several un-Hollywood-like concessions. He concentrated on the action from the 10th book in the O'Brian series, drawing elements from the first. He demanded enough post-production time to make the computer-graphic effects look so real as to be invisible, forcing the studio to give up a prime June slot and push the release back to November. Weir researched tall ships in England, then asked Fox to buy a reproduction of an 18th-century frigate, the Rose, which eventually was re-fitted as the Surprise for the movie, even before he had a deal to make the film.

Weir persuaded Fox to let him place the story almost entirely on the open sea. And he refused to make changes in the rough cut that were demanded by 20th Century Fox's financial partners, though it meant a daunting marketing challenge. Surprisingly, the studio's most powerful marketing tool turned out to be Crowe, who spent five weeks tirelessly campaigning in Los Angeles, Chicago, Texas, New York and at the world premiere in San Diego. To soften his bad-boy image, the studio booked him for an entire Oprah show, on which he provided a charming taped tour of his Australian cattle ranch and wedding chapel, and revealed his bookish nature.

Finally, Master and Commander eschews more Hollywood conventions than most such mega-budget epics. The film even goes so far as to leave a love interest out of the story; the captain looks longingly at one sultry native, but that's it. And the French captain, whom Aubrey is relentlessly pursuing, is not demonised. You hardly see him. He and his ship, the Acheron, are phantoms, the objects of fearful superstition on the part of the overmatched Surprise crew roaming the seas off South America in the age of Napoleon (a shift from the book's action, which was set during the 1812 war between Britain and the United States).

"This was quite something to push through the studio system," Weir says. "I look back and feel like I just stepped off a high wire stretched over the Grand Canyon."

*CINELIVE APRIL 2003 (REPORT IN ENGLISH)

*Casting the film/ a realists approach (Ceilidh)

* On The Seas Again, Guided By A Star, By Rick Lyman (October 13, 2002) (Maximum Crowe)

* Taking command  (The Age)

* CINELIVE (ABRIL DEL 2003) (ARTÍCULO EN ESPAÑOL)

* IMÁGENES DE ACTUALIDAD (MARZO 2003) (EN ESPAÑOL)

* De nuevo en los Mares, Guiados Por una Estrella
por Rick Lyman (13 de octubre de 2002) New York Times

* DATOS DEL PROYECTO

* INVESTIGACIÓN HISTÓRICA Y DE LOS PERSONAJES