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Big buzz for The Perfect Storm -- Will it sink Titanic’s record collections?
Everything
about the chilling Warner Bros.film The Perfect Storm is big.
The Time Warner unit is betting that the $120 million special-effects-filled
film, starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, along with heart-stopping
100-foot waves, will rival box-office blockbuster Titanic.
It is no mean task to take on the film about the great liner that struck
an iceberg and sank, and went on to become the biggest-grossing film of
all time, collecting an estimated $1.8 billion worldwide. But the producers
of The Perfect Storm are willing to try, and have mounted a publicity
campaign as huge as those monster waves in the film.
Much like the storm itself — documented with deadly precision in
Sebastian Junger’s best-selling book The Perfect Storm — the
studio’s PR machine unleashed wave after wave of television, radio,
print and online publicity.
The down-at-the-heels New England port, which has been fishing since before
there was a United States, serves as a backdrop and sometimes a key player
in the tragedy. “The story belongs to the town. It belongs to those
six guys and the people who survived,” writer Junger said, referring
to the six-member crew of the sword-fishing boat Andrea Gail. The Perfect
Storm is the story of their hair-raising struggle at sea to survive a
furious October 1991 gale: a Halloween tempest spawned by a rare meteorological
combination — that brought monster waves and wind, and spread havoc
across the Atlantic seaboard. “I knew nothing of this, of the long-line
fishing and the life they live and how dangerous it is,” said George
Clooney, who plays Billy Tyne, the Andrea Gail’s captain.
The movie opened in Australia on June 29, across the United States on
June 30, and in Europe and Asia it will be released in July.
Filmmakers spent about three weeks in Gloucester shooting exteriors and
some water scenes, but most of the movie was filmed on a specially reconstructed
sound stage on Warner Bros. lot.
“Brutal” is how Clooney described the filming that required
most of the cast to be cold and wet for six months, as they were thrown
from one side of the battered ship to the other. Wahlberg said he sometimes
“wished there was a SAG rep on the set,” referring to the Screen
Actors Guild union. Sometimes, after a 12-hour day being slammed into
bulkheads and blown across and off the decks by wave machines and water
dump tanks, he said he would go back to his trailer and just cry. But
he, like all the actors in the film, said they would not hesitate to work
with director Petersen again.
A German director who first gained international acclaim with another
watery film, Das Boot (The Boat), Petersen conceded he might have “gone
overboard with (the actors).” The director added, “This is a
physical movie. This means you only get it right if the audience feels
that you go through hell here, that you fight the elements and the elements
are really there, and the actor goes through hell with these elements.
... They were, at some points, at the end of their endurance.”
But Petersen did not test Warner’s financial endurance. “The
studio, they really like me,” he said gleefully after boasting he
brought the film in for $600,000 under budget. “In a film like that,
the studio always braces for at least between $10 and $15 million over
budget, because that’s normally what happens with a film like that,
especially with water films. We all know the Waterworld case or Titanic,”
he pointed out.
Waterworld (1995), starring Kevin Costner, cost $170 million to make,
a record at the time, and barely broke even at the box-office. Titanic
wound up costing $200 million, but unlike Waterworld it set box-office
records.
More than half of Petersen’s budget was spent on special effects,
and most of that went to George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic,
whose computerised special effects create things that are impossible to
create in real life — like dinosaurs for Jurassic Park — or
things that are too dangerous to re-create in real life, like tornadoes
for Twister.
The key to doing this film, both from an economic and safety standpoint,
was the computer. “We had so many computer people, you wouldn’t
even know,” Petersen said, “Sometimes you see people on the
Andrea Gail, and they’re ducking down with the plywood, and they’re
computer-generated people — small, but great actors. A cast like
that keeps commissary costs down and does not complain. You don’t
need trailers and they work beautifully and they act beautifully.”
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