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.’”
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.
title: “Waterworld” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-16” author: “Sandra Thompson”
Using ancient ecological, archeological and historical data, the scientists found that people made a dent in marine-animal populations long before modern times. The remains of trash piles show that Native Americans began harvesting green sea turtles from the Caribbean 2,000 years ago. Then, in the 1700s, European colonists hastened sea turtles’ demise, so that today only 10 percent of the original population of about 16 million sea turtles remains. That in turn has hurt sea grasses in the Florida Bay: without sea turtles to crop the plants, seagrass beds are overcrowded and the plants are dying from disease. “We’ve always presumed that these diseases were a result of the crap we’re dumping in the ocean or the changes in water quality,” says biologist Jim Estes of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Overfishing also hurt blue crabs in the Chesapeake: oyster beds that used to shelter baby crabs were dredged away. And sea otters in the North Pacific seem to have been decimated by killer whales, which were left without their traditional food of fin and sperm whales after the great whale hunts of the past century.
All may not be lost, however. Protecting marine reserves from fishing could help restore the stocks, as long as tough rules protect water quality. We’ve been trawling the oceans for centuries. But we may be the last generation to do so if we don’t protect what’s left.
