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THE PERFECT STORM
Whipping
up a storm!
It is a rare occurance of nature that three storms come
together to create a big storm, and one such storm happened
in Halloween of 1991. The Perfect Storm, directed by
Wolfgang Peterson, is about that storm. An epic drama,
the film is based on Sebastian Junger’s best-seller,
and stars George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and Diane Lane
in lead roles.
The book tells the story of the courageous men and women
who risk their lives every working day, pitting their
fishing boats and rescue vessels against the capricious
forces of nature. Their worst fears are realised at
sea one fateful autumn, when they are confronted by
three raging weather fronts, which collide to produce
the greatest, fiercest and most destructive storm in
modern history.
The film has as its cinematographer Academy award-winner
John Seale (The English Patient). Industrial Light &
Magic provides ground-breaking, state-of-the-art effects,
supervised by Stefen Fangmeier (Twister), of a storm
beyond human experience.
Director Peterson felt that making a film on fishing
industry was challenging. “The fishing industry,
in which you must include the sea and air rescue teams
that support it, is more dangerous a business than law
enforcement, fire-fighting or any other you can think
of,” explains the director, “More people die
on fishing boats, per capita, than working in any other
job in the U.S. Every journey a fishing boat makes can
be an all-or-nothing risk. It is life at its most exhilarating
and its most terrifying. Our movie is about a moment
in time when a diverse group of people, who work at
sea, had to summon every ounce of their strength and
courage to try to save themselves from the most powerful
weapon that nature ever devised.”
For centuries, Gloucester, Massachussetts, has been
one of the major fishing ports in the North Atlantic.
In October, 1991, it is home to a sword-fishing boat
called the Andrea Gail, captained by Billy Tyne (George
Clooney), a veteran fisherman who has had a run of disappointing
catches. It docks beside the Hannah Boden, captained
by Linda Greenlaw (Elizabeth Mastrantonio), who has
been hugely successful with recent hauls.
Bobby Shatford (Mark Wahlberg) has a divorce laywer
to pay off and a new life to build with his girlfriend,
Christina ‘Chris’ Cotter (Lane). Fishing is
the only job he knows that will pay the kind of money
he needs. So, against Chris’ wishes, he’s
going to sign on again with Billy for one last trip
this season. Four other men will join them.
Tyne is convinced that he can change his run of bad
luck by going beyond the normal reach of New England
fishing boats to the Flemish Cap, a remote area known
for its rich fishing prospects. Once out at sea, he
hears about the storm building offshore. But unlike
Greenlaw, who determines to play it safe, Billy thinks
he can beat the storm back to Gloucester, taking an
enormous catch with him. If he doesn’t try, his
crew will come away empty-handed on this last trip of
the season. It is nothing out of the ordinary for fishermen
to wager their lives against their livelihoods.
What is out of the ordinary is the disturbing weather
pattern that emerges once the Andrea Gail is out to
sea. Local TV weatherman Todd Gross (Chris McDonald)
tells his viewers it began with Hurricane Grace, a powerful
southern storm front heading up the Atlantic. Grace
is on a collision course with two other weather fronts,
gathering strength as they plow forward through the
sea. When the three meet, there will be a storm more
terrifying than anyone has imagined, greater than any
that has ever been recorded in modern history.
It will come to be called ‘The No-Name Storm’
or ‘The Halloween Storm’, coming as it does
on that legendarily fearsome night. In fact, it will
form with such suddenness that the National Weather
Bureau doesn’t have time to call it anything. They
barely have time to send out a warning to all vessels
at sea. The crew of the Andrea Gail never receives that
warning. They never know what is about to hit them.
While the Andrea Gail and other boats, including a giant-tanker,
a cargo ship and a 32-foot sailboat, struggle to make
their way back to shore, another set of personnel carriers
are following a course directly into the storm. These
are the courageous Air Force and Coast Guard airplane,
helicopter and cutter rescue teams who are fully and
frighteningly aware of what they are up against.
Petersen became fascinated by Sebastian Junger’s
best-selling non-fiction book when he first read it.
“I’ve always been drawn to the sea,”
says the director, who garnered two Academy Award nominations
for his breakthrough film, the submarine drama Das Boot
(Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay), “I think
maybe it’s the last frontier for people to go out
and have adventures. It’s an unknown world that’s
constantly changing. I grew up around up around boats
in Hamburg, Germany.”
Faced with the challenge of putting the story of such
power and scope on screen, Petersen realised he would
have tremendous hurdles to overcome. He says, “This
is a story with many characters, all of them heroic
in their own way, all of them with individual stories
that play out at the same time: some at sea, some on
land, some in helicopters, many of different boats.
And, of course, the storm itself is a major character.
We were fortunate to find writers who could weave all
those storylines together.”
The filmmakers realised that what they wanted to do,
from a technical standpoint, had either never been done
or never been done successfully. “We had to create
a storm at sea that was absolutely believable,”
Petersen notes, “Weather and, especially, water
are the most difficult things to make look realistic
on film. So, we came up with a plan that we thought
could avoid many of the complications that have affected
other water movies. And, with a little bit of luck,
we were able to successfully follow that plan.”
Petersen’s vision for The Perfect Storm hinged
on creating a cinematic experience on par with the staggering
reality of what the story’s true life characters
lived through. Unsatisfied with the digital simulation
of water that has thus far been seen in movies, Petersen
knew that the production would have to cross one of
the last frontiers in visual effects in order to bring
to life the most powerful and dominating character in
the piece - the storm-sweept ocean.
With the encouragement of the filmmakers, Industrial
Light & Magic pooled its resources to make a true
cinematic breakthrough. Led by visual effects supervisor
Fangmeier, ILM assembled its largest team of technical
directors ever devoted to a non-science fiction film.
This crew of computer graphics artists used ground-breaking
techniques, devised by the company’s cutting-edge
software designers, to bring to life the dynamically
simulated weather phenomenon at the heart of the story.
In accordance with what he knew would be a physically
gruelling schedule, Petersen selected his cast as carefully
as if he’d been a fishing boat captain, picking
a crew on whom he could count at sea. The first in line
was George Clooney. “George Clooney is a tremendous
actor as well as being a movie star,” the director
relates, “What I needed for this role was the commanding
presence of a man who was unquestionably in charge.
But I also needed an actor who is subtle enough to play
a part in an ensemble - not so dominating that the audience
is thinking, ‘Ah, there’s a movie star’
when they should be thinking, ‘Ah, there’s
a swordboat captain.”
Unlike Petersen, Clooney had not grown up around boats.
As part of his preparation for the role, Clooney set
out to learn how to pilot a 72-foot-long commercial
fishing craft. “I spent about three weeks taking
out our Andrea Gail,” Clooney recalls, “I
had to parallel park it at a few different docks. Fortunately,
I didn’t screw it up and wipe out the dock, which
is something they encourage captains not to do. We did
some long-line fishing as well, and spent a few nights
out at sea. It gave me a new appreciation for how fishermen
make their living. I grew up in Kentucky and during
the summer, the way you earn money is cutting tobacco.
It’s hard labour, but if something goes wrong,
the chances of you dying are very slim. In fishing,
there are a lot of ways that things go wrong and you
get killed. It’s just a different world.”
It was Clooney who suggested Wahlberg’s name to
director Peterson. “George mentioned to me that
Mark Wahlberg was so great in Three Kings, but I remembered
him from Boogie Nights,” Petersen recalls, “I
had all kinds of other people in mind but I met him
and liked him, plus George liked him, and he was perfect
for the part.”
A native of the Boston suburbs, Wahlberg certainly knew
the territory and had little trouble adapting to the
slightly different regional accent. To prepare for the
role of a fisherman, he spent several weeks going out
on fishing boats and learning the particular skills
of a long-liner.
Diane Lane had been a big fan of the book and was delighted
to learn she was Petersen’s choice to play Christina
Cotter. “George and Mark are just painfully fun
to work with,” says Lane, “And you couldn’t
find a nicer, more talented director than Wolfgang.
This might be as good as it gets. I couldn’t wait
to get to work every day. Of course, at the end of the
day, I couldn’t wait to get home because my back
was killing me from sitting on a bar-stool for seven
straight hours during the Crow’s Nest scenes. Naturally,
I didn’t dare complain about that to the guys who
were literally having tons of water crashing over them
for weeks on end.”
Lane’s first day of shooting involved a love scene
between herself and Wahlberg. “It was a little
awkward, but we surrendered to it, and it was fine,”
she notes with a laugh, “I made a few Boogie Nights
jokes to break the ice.”
The art department painted another boat, Lady Grace,
to transform her into the Andrea Gail and the boat,
with a crew of four men, set off for Los Angeles, where
filming was to begin in June.
The rescue portion of the filming was among the most
complicated of all the movie’s complex sequences,
in large part, because it simulated actual emergency
operations which involve many different government resource
and information services, and several military agencies,
each simultaneously performing distinct and urgent functions.
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