The Perfect Storm: Not just another disaster movie

By ROBERT WARD

A fishing-boat skipper had a warning for Wolfgang Petersen when the director turned up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, last year to make The Perfect Storm.

A little drunk, the skipper came up to him in a bar, put his arm round him and, "with a little bit of a threat," says Petersen, told him: "Make it real."

The Perfect Storm is based on terrifyingly real events that took place in October 1991. Three cyclone systems collided in the North Atlantic and the resulting "perfect storm" - because it could not have been worse - created 30m waves driven by 190km/h winds.

Into this maelstrom steamed the Andrea Gail, a 22m swordfishing boat from Gloucester with six men on board.

Journalist Sebastian Junger wrote a bestselling account of events leading to this encounter and The Perfect Storm became the film-makers' bible.

No one knows exactly what happened to the Andrea Gail, but Junger presented various scenarios of what had happened on other boats in similar conditions.

The film selects some of these incidents and sets them on the Andrea Gail, going one step further than the book by taking audiences on board and into the eye of the storm.

George Lucas' special-effects house Industrial Light and & Magic says it made a technological breakthrough in the computer rendering of water which enabled it to create The Perfect Storms photo-realistic ocean with mountainous seas.

But computer technology didn't shield Petersen's cast from the elements.

Three weeks were spent in Gloucester, a small fishing port with a population 28,000, 75km north of Boston.

Eight days were spent at sea and during that time Hurricane Floyd blew in.

Members of the cast, including Mark Wahlberg (Three Kings, Boogie Nights) thought they'd get a day or two off, but Petersen decided to take out a boat and take advantage of the 5m seas.

While Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, playing the skipper of the Andrea Gail's sister ship, delivered her lines in the wheelhouse, the crew outside was strapped down. They lost their lunches in the rough seas, but Mastrantonio claims she didn't.

Worse was to follow when the production moved to Southern California for two weeks of shooting off Dana Point.

A clash had to be filmed in the Andrea Gail wheelhouse between George Clooney (as skipper Billy Tyne) and Wahlberg (as crewman Bobby Shatford).

Clooney says the chop was only 1.5m but that they had to shoot the scene repeatedly because Wahlberg was so seasick that he had to keep stopping to rush out to the railing. In one take he didn't make it outside, vomiting at Clooney's feet. Clooney had to lean backwards out of the frame and then back in to continue his lines.

"It's the best acting I ever did," says Clooney, "avoiding getting barfed on."

Petersen knows a thing or two about working in water. He grew up in Hamburg, in the north of Germany, around boats and water, and he shot scenes of his definitive submarine movie, Das Boot, in the North Sea.

Oscar nominations for that film led Petersen to a career in Hollywood, where his films include In the Line of Fire and Air Force One.

"If you do a film with water," he says, "maybe your worst enemy is to work out on the sea and deal with seasickness. All the other stuff you can somehow manage and organise, but not that."

Worse was to come for the The Perfect Storm cast. Petersen had a Warner Brothers soundstage water-tank enlarged to 30m wide and deepened to 7m.

The Lady Grace, a sister ship of the Andrea Gail that substituted for the film, was mounted on a gimbal so it could be lifted, dropped and tilted.

Clooney and Co would don wetsuits at 6.30 am then spend 12 hours being drenched with water crashing down from huge dump tanks, blasted by water cannons and blown over by wind machines wound up to create Force 12 gales.

Though Diane Lane (A Walk on the Moon), as Bobby Shatford's girlfriend Christina Cotter, had scenes only on dry land and all she was heard to complain about was backache from spending long hours sitting on a bar stool. But she visited the tank to see what the lads were doing and was blown away by the scale of it all.

She saw huge weights dropped in the tank to create enormous waves, and the actors not being able to hear instructions from gigantic speakers because the wind machines were so noisy. "Poor Mark had an ear infection and he lost his voice. Good thing he has his youth [Wahlberg is 29], because that pulled him through. George [Clooney is 39] was just battered."

Petersen is proud of his actors' endurance and the realistic effects. "Most of the water that crashes over the boat is the real water on stage," he says. "Most of the other stuff that you see is the ILM, computer-generated water, the big waves and the storm, the tossed waves in the background. "Sometimes they added to our foreground water to make it seamless with the background, but most of the big water in the foreground we created on stage. The actors really were in the water."

The biggest challenge of making The Perfect Storm real was doing justice to the people of Gloucester and their hard lives in the declining fishing industry.

Petersen and his cast met the Andrea Gail crewmen's families and townspeople worked on the movie as extras and helped the crew. So the film-makers felt a huge responsibility to tell their story as accurately as possible.

Meeting the families was a humbling experience, says John C. Reilly (Magnolia, Boogie Nights), who plays an Andrea Gail crewman. "It made me want to do it very truthfully and honestly and not do some kind of Hollywood cheesy job on it."

Wahlberg, who went out for a couple of days and nights fishing on a longliner similar to the Andrea Gail, says, "It was the most backbreaking work I've ever done in my life. I take my hat off to these guys.

"If you work on a construction site operating a jackhammer all day you know you'll be paid. For these guys there is no guarantee because fishermen's pay is determined by the catch.

Wahlberg also spent a lot of time with Ethel and Ricky Shatford, the mother and brother of his character Bobby, and lived upstairs in the Crow's Nest, the local pub where Ethel was a barmaid, in the same room Bobby had used.

"The only people that I felt responsible to were my character's family and loved ones in this town," Wahlberg says. "They really wanted to share as much as they possibly could with me because they knew that it would help and make it a little bit more real."

His sense of responsibility is sharpened by the fact that he lives south of Boston within striking distance of Gloucester. Wahlberg is nervous about attending the first screening of the film in the town, "because this is their lives, and they'll come and kick my ass if they're not happy."

* The Perfect Storm starts at cinemas on Monday.