0.cached.png
By Daniel McGinn
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
For the people of Gloucester, Mass., it's an eery sight, akin to a ghost ship. Floating dockside is a 72-foot boat christened the Andrea Gail, a Warner Bros.-owned replica of the local fishing vessel that sailed into a storm with a crew of six in October, 1991--and never came back. Six years later, journalist Sebastian Junger's tale of the tragedy became the runaway bestseller "The Perfect Storm." The movie, starring George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and Diane Lane, sails into theaters on June 30..
Clooney plays ship captain Billy Tyne, a down-on-his-luck fisherman who leads a crew of six (including Bobby Shatford, played by Wahlberg) into the Atlantic for a month of dangerous "long-line" sword fishing. Their timing couldn't have been worse: miles from land, they get caught in a once-in-a-century storm. While shore-bound family and friends (including Christina Cotter, Shatford's girlfriend, played by Lane) gather at a Gloucester bar to commune, watch the news and worry, the crew tries to save the ship as the Coast Guard struggles to reach them in time.
The film marks the second pairing of Clooney and Wahlberg, who teamed up last year in "Three Kings." "He's got pictures of me [having sex with] a farm animal, so I gotta keep hiring him," jokes Clooney, who's also producing Wahlberg's current film project, "Metal God." "Mark does stuff [on film] that cannot be taught," Clooney says. "There's this thing about him, you look at his face and root for him... You want him to somehow succeed. Every time you see him you say, 'I want that kid to do okay.'"
Read More on News
Wahlberg, who grew up in Boston, once visited Gloucester on a grade-school field trip. Later, during his years as a teenage juvenile delinquent, he jokes, "I'd have come up and robbed the place, but the train doesn't come all the way up here." Those local roots made him an informal advisor on all things New England. To research his part, Wahlberg moved to town before filming began and lived above The Crow's Nest, the local fisherman's bar at the center of the story, in the room once occupied by his character. During shooting, he helped the cast refine their Boston accents.
Many of the movie's actors say they became close to the real-life families of the dead fishermen. The night before the interviews, Lane had been out with Cotter, whom she plays. As of Monday, June 19, Lane and several of the cast hadn't yet seen the edited film, but Cotter and the rest of Gloucester will get its first peek next week, when the cast and crew return for a local premiere. Most of the locals have already relived the trauma of the lost fishermen so often, the film version isn't likely to reopen wounds, the actors say. "They've been through this with [the book] already," Clooney says. "This town has lost 10,000 people [to fishing disasters] since the 1600s--it's been on a constant mend for a long time." Says author Junger, who says he's pleased with the film adaptation of his story: "I can't imagine a movie is going to produce stronger feelings than the real [events]."
Director Wolfgang Petersen ("Das Boot", "Air Force One") took on the project after Steven Spielberg passed on it and managed to bring the $115 million picture in under budget--a real feat after seafaring budget-busters "Waterworld" and "Titanic." His trick? "Minimize the time on the real water, the ocean, as much as you can," he says. "The best control you have is if you do [as much as you can] inside a big sound stage." To do that, his team converted a Warner Bros. sound stage into the world's largest indoor studio tank, with water 22-feet deep. Tech-meisters at Industrial Light & Magic added fake waves to the background of the indoor filming; outside shooting was done off the coast of Southern California and Massachusetts.
Even with safety divers stationed all around, the cast says the work was hard and dangerous. "I almost drowned two or three times," says Wahlberg, who suffered ear-drum damage during filming. The cast especially hated the "dump tank," which dropped huge walls of water into the tank to create monster waves. "We became like Pavlovian dogs.... 'Oh no, not the dump tank,'" jokes actor John C. Reilly, who delivers a solid supporting performance as crewman Dale "Murph" Murphy. As reporters started turning green last week in the gentlest of ripples, actress Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio dispensed advice: "Just stare at a fixed spot on the horizon," she says. The actress plays Linda Greenlaw, captain of the Hannah Boden, another sword boat on the fringes of the storm.
The film opens the same weekend as another of the summer's big fish, "The Patriot." There's irony there: The latter, a Revolutionary war movie, stars Mel Gibson, who almost played the Clooney part in "Storm," but backed out due to a scheduling conflict. "It would have been better for both of us if we hadn't been [scheduled to open] on the same weekend," says director Petersen. He'll spend the next few weeks hoping moviegoers find Mother Nature a more formidable enemy than the British Army.
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines