Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

November 15 , 2003

Upgrade that column: A few words with Keith Gordon, an extended conversation with Peter Weir; a couple of new departments, "Swag the dog" and "Adventures in the 606"; and an elaboration on a misunderstood joke in my review of The Matrix Revolutions.

The Music of Sound

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World has a potential readymade audience in the acolytes of Patrick O'Brian's twenty seafaring novels that chart the friendship, follies and victories of Captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) and doctor Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany). (David Mamet considers the late O'Brian one of the greatest novelists of the past thirty years.) Are they moviegoers? Are they part of that slumbering beast, the literate adult audience? Others will savor Russell Crowe at his most masculine yet most contemplative. Crowe plays Aubrey as a man of calculation and bluster, of manly confidence yet concerned for the safety of his crew and his ship.

But for me, whether in haunting earlier works like Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave, Fearless, or popular successes like Dead Poets Society, Witness or The Truman Show, the 59-year-old writer-director's work is always an event. (A DVD double-feature of his earliest work, The Plumber and The Cars That Ate Paris [Home Vision] was just released, including succinct interviews with Weir about his origins, taped while he was editing Master and Commander.)

Master and Commander is set in 1805. Most of Weir's confidently disorienting movie takes place onboard ship, teeming with sailors, men and boys alike, weaponry, ambition. When the crew alights in Galapagos, we share Weir's wonderment and the dazzle the characters experience: this is the strangeness that met explorers each turn of the way, a place as brilliantly colored and strikingly strange as the surface of another planet.

"O'Brian's writing," Weir says, "Mmmm. So full of wonderful images." But much of Weir's influence, both while working and in his movies, comes from music and sound. "There were paintings to be looked at. But for me, there were all sorts of other things. Music plays a primary role, at least at much as the visual, in settling into [a story]. For whatever reasons music seems to be suggestive of even more images for me. On occasions, I had tapes and CDs made up of music to listen to in the car, and different tracks will send me to different parts of the story. I think the music is important in the way that it inhibits the intellect and allows this more unconscious thought to come to mind."

There's a lot of nineteenth century sailor-speak in Master and Commander. "Well, that was a concern in early screenings with the studio," Weir says, calmly, "that there were too many [terms of art] that were incomprehensible to the majority of people. I thought they were part of the atmosphere of reading the books. It is true, you do trip over them. But it lends an authenticity. My final point to any concerned executives was that if we were doing a medical story, we wouldn't say, instead of 'Pass that scalpel,' 'Pass that knife.' It just doesn't go that way! Within a medical story, the names for the instruments are part of that atmosphere. I think it helps you understand that you are entering a very foreign world. For O'Brian, he was not going to condescend to you. You had to join that ship like the landlubber you were."

The movie's opening reels make mesmerizing use of sound, easing an audience into this strange world. easing us in. "Exactly the plan. Generally speaking, [old movies set on the sea had] a very big score. When the sails went up, the music went up, when the sea was wild, y'know, the orchestra came in with a complementary feeling. But I wanted you to get to know the sounds. My experience of traveling [on a ship is] is that there was always sound, there everything was moving and rubbing and creaking and grinding or falling. I wanted the audience to have those sounds in their ears."

Another memorable sound is Crowe's grumbly voice, which dialect coaches suggested should essentially be his own Australian accent. Crowe's kind of a throwback, offering lessons in swagger. "If overt masculinity is a throwback, possibly yes to that. There are very few [actors who suited the role] and considering the casting, there was Russell and, y'know, there was Russell. I think he's strongly male. And in a period picture, it can be demonstrated in a way that masculinity was in that period. I think it's very attractive to people."

The history of filmmaking is littered with the hulks of misbegotten movies set at sea. What precautions did you take? "Firstly, I had read the books about making movies at sea. I'd shot a few days at sea in the course of my filmmaking, and I knew, for a start, you get a very short day. Maybe no more than six hours shooting. Then you have to cope with obvious things like seasickness and the weather conditions. Maneuvering the boat into position. It's tempting to a filmmaker, it's like making a film about climbing a mountain. It would seem, things would happen if you go to the mountain and start climbing. But I did read those books, particularly the making of Moby Dick, John Huston's picture, [the making of] Jaws, and I thought the way to make this, basically, was not to go to sea! We had the technology to do that now."

So how much of Master and Commander was shot in the tank? "The plan was to go to [Fox's] Baja tank [built for the shooting of Titanic]. In a 100-day shoot, we spent ninety days in that tank and on nearby sets. So ten days at sea, and I had a second unit working fairly constantly getting wide shots with our second-unit vessel. But essentially, we shot it on stage. Then applied low tech and high tech solution to problems. Low tech, every filmmaker who's every done a scene with a period railway, where you've got a train to leave, but can't afford [it], or it won't move, you track the camera past the train, people wave and it appears the train is moving. So we did that many times with that static vessel. Yes, she was on a gimbal in the deep, forty-foot section of the Baja tank. That's the section where Jim Cameron tipped the Titanic up, so that he needed that depth to imply she was sinking. So if you'd seen the tank drained, you would have seen this goblet-shaped apparatus. Again, a decision made by [my] physical-effects guy, was not to use very highly computerized systems and electronic systems, but to use hydraulics: more dependable and so it was hydraulic-driven. She could rock and tilt and that was it. So then I knew I had miniatures. I added those."

CGI wasn't an attractive option? "We were going to do [mostly] CGI but when I walked out of Lord of the Rings, I realized there was something else they were doing here. So I rang up Peter Jackson and then got onto Richard Taylor of WETA Workshop, and I said, 'How are you getting the dimension you're getting in your CGI?' And he said, 'It's a combination of miniatures and CGI.'"

Weir is one of the few directors who disdain contributing extras to DVDs. On the Criterion release of Picnic At Hanging Rock, Weir reportedly insisted that not only would there be no commentary, the packaging should not indicate its lack. "I think I belong to, I don't know if it's an old school, but the type of director who really has one interest only with the DVD," Weir says. "And that is that it's an accurate record of the film itself. That the color balance is right, that the picture looks like it did on the big screen. I don't do commentaries, I find that, um..." A measured pause. "Awkward. Y'know, put it this way. When I was a kid, it was fashionable to have a magician at the birthday parties. I think it was the third birthday party that was ruined when the man explained how he did it and all the magic was gone. That's the way I am with DVDs. I'm very uncooperative during the shooting. I don't want to think about it. However, it's become much appreciated by audiences, so with this one, with my editor, cut about twenty-three to twenty-five minutes of deleted material into its own little movie. Because we were on the one location, it was very easy to do. I think that'll be something that's enjoyable, with no narration. It just works by itself."

Others disagree, saying that commentaries and such enhance the perceived value of the DVD release. "Anything that makes money will be done," he says dryly. "Technically, all my films, I've supervised the making of the DVDs, of the earlier films, pre-that technology. But as for bonuses, there's not much on them. I mean, on this one, instead of an interview, I've done a kind of talk to the camera about the creative process of putting this together and had a lot of props around me that I had when I was writing the script. I like to have things from the period, y'know, swords and books and stuff that touch [the time]."

What was the most challenging of challenges? "To feel that the ship was sailing, and not only that, but that we were passing through various different oceans, from the to the Atlantic to the Pacific. And that concerned me for a long time. In meetings like this, and there were many of them in pre-production, I would say to the special effects, both visual and practical, there' s a real trap here. That is, we'll spend all our efforts on the battles and the storm and forget about the in-between part. But I said, we must be aware, we've got to make this ship sail in between these major events. And blue water sailing at that. And I'm not going to depend on a second-unit vessel. That'll be the bonus, whatever I get from them. So I would force a meeting. I'd say, 'Let's take scene 72. Here's Jack, he's just come down the mast from positioning the ship behind [his] and orders more sail to be put up and heads down to talk to the young midshipman on the bow. What will that look like? How will we get the water flowing past that ship, because we'll be in a tank?' I think that was my big [responsibility]."

Three studios, Fox, Universal and Miramax, as well as Samuel Goldwyn are credited as co-producers. How did that work? Is it simply a matter of how to assemble a risky venture that costs $135-150 million? "I don't know entirely," Weir says. "I know there was a decision made that because of the cost of the picture, that they needed a partner. But then the arrangement that was made with Miramax and Universal were to do with things that I'm not privy to in relation to Russell Crowe. He had certain other commitments. So there was a bit of juggling and movement of his commitments that then gave those parties a chance to become involved."

So there's a raft of material that could be cobbled into a sequel. "I can't imagine a sequel myself but then that's because I know what's involved in making one of these things! But I think it would have to be phenomenally successful for them to consider it. It's so expensive. But yeah, I tacked into the middle of series. You know, I was offered Master and Commander straight, the first book page-by-page, and turned it down. Twice. Because I didn't think it would lend to itself to adaptation in the way that I would be interested. I thought it would be to a degree rather humorous, tongue-in-cheek. There's a lot on land, there's an affair with the Admiral's wife that Jack's having, there's Algerian pirates, all sorts of things. Stephen's off spying on shore. In other words, it's a tremendous mosaic of detail of various events."

But Weir remained attracted to the material. "I said to the studio, when turning it down the second time, 'Look, I love the series. But I would prefer one of the books toward the middle of the series, where it's a long voyage.' And they rightly said, 'What about the friendship? In book One, you see them meet.' And I said, 'Well, why not go on a mission and learn they're friends during the course of that mission?' But I felt since this was being reawakened, this genre, as they say, therefore you couldn't be first to do it. [Many others had come before you.] You had to do something fresh. So I thought a very limited palette was the solution.

Like most assured and gifted directors, Weir thrives on limitations. "Group of people on a ship, one landfall. At the same time, I thought that would remind the audience in some way of how space movies have appropriated the experience of these people who opened up exploration from the fifteenth century right through to the tail end of exploration in this period. That you would realized they set out into the unknown, the sea would become space. The vessel would be like a spacecraft. The chances of getting back, maybe 50-50. It was a dangerous thing to do, and an adventure.

Still, bits are drawn from the entire series. "Yes. It's largely based on 'Far Side of the World,' with some incident from 'Master and Commander.'' The studio held onto the title Master and Commander. I was against the idea, but they found it tested well and you could say it: "Russell Crowe - Master and Commander." It was kind of catchy and that was their decision. There's a lot of original elements in the plot, though."

The movie is filled with characters who are young boys at sea, and it seems at times throwing them into a production like this would be almost as daunting as throwing a young boy into a life at sea. Weir worked that idea. "With an untrained actor, the idea is, I think, to create an atmosphere that is conducive to them acting. So in this case, to make it so real and with them in their very well-researched uniforms, every detail from every stitch to every button was checked thoroughly at the Greenwich Museum archives by our wardrobe team. So when they arrived on the set, and you walked in, I really floated a wall. So that you would come in with your head down and occasionally bump it and y'know, we would have the effect of candles. Sometimes we'd have candles burning. So in my own way, it would be easier for them." Weir pauses. "Then it requires some talent."

It's startling to see these boys we'd think of still being with their families comprising so much of the crew. "Sometimes [they were] orphans," Weir explains. "Sometimes a 'son-of-a-gun.' They were born under a gun in a port, a quick coupling, and the woman presented the child [to the father] at a certain age and said, 'This is yours, you know.' And then there were the officers. They were really young trainee officers the midshipmen. They came from families that wanted to place a child in the service. Or some kind of arrangement was made. But the majority of them wanted to go to sea."

The violence in Master and Commander doesn't spare the children. "I wanted these kids to see how kids were in another era. But the violence as part of their lives and they accepted it including the horror of the operations. I thought that was part of the truth of this story, and it had to be implied, if not shown. Let's say I was fulfilling the letter of the law--and I mean by the MPAA-implied law--that if you don't see it, then you can hardly, in a way, censor it. But it comes from my own personal journey as a filmmaker. In other words, I think during the period of the Hays Code, filmmakers, the best of them, became extremely inventive in implying sex, for example. Or passion. And to a degree, violence. And I thought that was the most effective. I think I had my own mental Hays Code, because of this single fact. If you can make the audience complete the scene in their own mind, from their own imagination, the effect will destroy the potential of being didactic and join them more truly into the experience."

It's a lousy question to ask a working director, but I had to wonder if he has a definition of a "Peter Weir Film," a signature? "I can't really answer it. I mean, I don't think too much about it other than in a moment like this with a question. I see my job, really, as one of serving the story and therefore what's paramount and important is that story. Inevitably, your fingerprint's left on it somewhere. But I've never been interested in having a style. In other words, the movies are not about me. They're about the subject."

Weir's always trusted the audience, where most other filmmakers tend to explain. "That's also a result of these wretched tests, with audiences and cards and filling it out and constantly you're presented with... I do those tests and I get what I get out of them but you have to avoid those who get very nervous and say, 'We found that seventy-one women and forty-three men found such-and-such a scene confusing.' And I say, 'Yes, but then later they realize what it was all about. That's storytelling.' "Yes, but don't you think that if we just made it a little more obvious, because that confusion is a bad thing.' And I say, 'Well, I don't think so.' Having had children, I remember the impatient child, turning the pages of the children's book, and they would say, "Will the bear get out that tree?"' And you say, "Just wait, just wait. 'The bear wondered what to do..."' 'But is the bear going to get down out of the tree?' Turn the page, 'and then he decided to jump.' That's what I grew up with, storytelling, and tension and all of the things we love."

Dark doings

"Repainting the Sistine Chapel": That's the insult one journalist flung at Keith Gordon at Sundance 2003 for having the audacity to shoot the late Dennis Potter's film script that revisited his 1986 The Singing Detective, considered one of television's greatest milestones.

A strange, inventive blend of many film genres, the fever dream of Potter and Gordon's The Singing Detective burns brightest with the intensity of Robert Downey, Jr.'s performance as hack crime writer, psoriasis-sufferer and tortured soul Dan Dark, hallucinating his life's many misdeeds in musical form while confined to a hospital bed. Like Gordon's earlier Waking the Dead, a romance with magical, near-perfect performances by Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connelly that soar, The Singing Detective would be a delight for its performances alone, especially the magnetic Downey, but also Katie Holmes, Robin Wright Penn and in a batty small role, Mel Gibson (whose Icon Productions financed the film).

Talking to Gordon in recent weeks, I wonder how he's taking the accusations of blasphemy. The script, he says, is "extremely close" to the late writer's draft. "Potter is one of my favorite dramatists of the last half of the twentieth century, and the only reason I wanted to do this was that doing Singing Detective as a feature film was his idea, his rethinking, his changes." Potter's script often features characters who reveal inner wants by lip-synching old songs. "The song choices were all his except for 'It's Only Make Believe' by Conway Twitty, which replaced Potter's choice of 'Blueberry Hill', which we simply couldn't afford."

Potter shifted the story from England to Chicago, and Gordon had to transpose the tale to Los Angeles "since Robert was on probation at the time, and he couldn't leave California. But I thought that change was minimal, since L.A. was a great town for 1950s noir B-movies like The Killing and In a Lonely Place. I also thought the whole 'screenplay' theme made even more sense in L.A. I called Potter's longtime agent, and she felt he would have been fine with it. It also let me put the hoods" - a duo of comic incompetents - "in the desert instead of a cornfield, which I liked better for the Waiting for Godot feel."

There are also what seem to be allusions to current events. "Even the topical references that most people assume we added, to George Bush, Baghdad, and so on, actually go back to Potter's original script, and the first George Bush." He pauses. "Here we are again..."

It's difficult to imagine a world where it wouldn't be compared to the miniseries. "The biggest fear was exactly that, knowing that a lot of people who loved the original would never be able to see this as its own piece. But I didn't expect the anger we hit. I got angry letters from people I'd never met when they first heard we were making the film. One critic at Sundance, who had yet to see the film, started his interview with 'Where do you get the balls to repaint the Sistine Chapel?'. And he wasn't smiling.

"Even now, I feel a lot of the critical response has missed the point, and not seen what Potter was trying to do," he continues. "Instead, the assumption seems to be that wherever this retelling, or rethinking, in Potter's own words, departs from the original, in style, tone, or content it was some unintentional mistake on my part, or Potter's part."

Michael Gambon is magnificent in the original, a burned-out hulk of a man in his fifties. "Quite a few critics have said Robert is too young, without examining how the context of the character has changed. In setting it in the world of 1950s rock-'n'-roll there is a more youthful energy to the man. There's a reason he's named 'Dan Dark', not 'Philip Marlow'. This version is proto-rock-and-roll and Mickey Spillane, not crooner 1940s songs and Hollywood A-list noir. Potter saw America as a society more about youth than England, and the characters are affected accordingly. To have cast an actor in his mid-50s, and have him doing these songs would have, a) looked silly, in the wrong way, and b), missed the social satire Potter was exploring in this script , America's split in the 1950s between the [illusion that] everything is great', the sexy, young energy of rock-and-roll, and the dark, xenophobic, McCarthy, sexually-repressive reality."

"I could cite many more of these," the earnest 41-year-old continues, "like those who complain that the noir sections look 'cheap', without thinking about what expressionist, low-budget 1050s B-movies really looked like. Or those who complain that the piece is more choppy and confusing. It is, since Potter, in seeing it compressed into film length thought it should be more visceral, more inside the character's head. He wanted the audience to be piecing it all together right with the character, instead of watching from outside, as had been more the feel of the series. It's not that I mind if people prefer the earlier choices, although I feel many never give the new choices a chance, but I do mind the assumption that they aren't purposeful, but are just arbitrary 'mistakes.'"

I'd met Downey for the first time at an October Chicago International Film Festival function, and his attention to the conversation was remarkable. I ask Gordon to describe the look on Downey's face when he takes direction. "When I'd give Robert direction, he would tend to look right at me. Often, for the first few seconds, he'd look a little afraid, like 'I don't know what you're saying'. Or 'I don't know if I can do that'. But usually, before I finished speaking, I'd sort of watch his face settle, and he'd give me a tiny hint of a smile, or a tiny, nod, and say something like 'got it'. And he always did."

Diagramming The Joke Dept.

I made an aside in writing about The Matrix Revolutions where I attempted to mock the thematic grandiloquence of the writer-directors' trilogy. Several readers took my crack as a jab at their religion, which it wasn't meant to be, but I can see how I could have made my point more clearly and less glibly. A second try: What possible curveball could be thrown at the end of the Matrix trilogy? What sort of savior could "The One" turn out to be? Spoilers ahead: Practically the only way to avoid a Christ-like transfiguration mingled with some Jungian foofaraw with a hint of some vague sort of handing on of the struggle to a spiritually blessed little Indian girl--would be to offer a left-field veer into another system of belief, such as suddenly revealing that the trilogy was only a pink-elephant dream of Vishnu's or that the late L. Ron Hubbard is God.

Swag the dog

Columbia sent out VHS copies of their newest trailer for Something's Got To Give, and I hope the Nancy Meyers' movie lives up to the jokes and complications. I disliked almost all of her work with her ex-husband, Charles Shyer, but fingers crossed on her first solo venture. It arrived in an oddly heavy box, which turned out to be, well, a box of rocks. To promote the beach-set comedy, the studio sent out a canning jar filled with flat white stones. "Good for skipping," a friend ventured after I wrested it from its wads of bubble wrap.

An oblong postcard arrived in the mail for the Regent Beverly Wilshire's "Pretty Woman Suite Getaway," which made my coffee go down wrong. With "package rates start[ing] at $550 [for a] suite and connecting room," the hotel where Disney set their fairytale of a prostitute who winds up with your average, everyday, kind, rich, handsome john is set, says they're "celebrat[ing] girlfriends, pampering and world-renowned shopping." "Do you... need a 'no boys allowed' weekend? ... Your Pretty Woman Suite Getaway will include: a slumber party suite with complimentary adjoining room, champagne and strawberries upon arrival, chick-flicks, makeovers, spa goodies and gifts... Call the girls, pick a night, and kiss the boys goodbye!" No mention of a list of local outcall numbers; check with the concierge.

Adventures in the 606

I've kept notes for years about the creatures who appear again and again at promotional screenings for movies I've attended in Chicago and other cities. There's a bizarre dowager-and-son tag team who've been haunting screenings in the 606 for ages, present at almost any event that offers free passes in advertisements or through radio promotions. Man, I'd love to make a documentary about them. But they're appalled at the idea that there's anything unusual about their life.

Here's the first of a few glimpses of such creatures, late October, Fox and the Chicago Yacht Club's charity sponsor a preview of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Russell Crowe's doing a Q&A afterwards, moderated by Richard Roeper. Second person in line for the microphone is an enormous, homeless-looking man in tight-to-bursting clothing and greasy shoulder-length gray locks. The petite woman ahead of him recoils as he leans close. The unkempt individual finally has his chance, intoning into the mike, "Misssster Crowe... Could you share an an-nec-dote about... the storm?" Ass duly kissed, Crowe mocks the man with a comic British accent: "An anecdote about the stormmmm." Ten minutes of my life flash before my eyes as a lovingly rehearsed story about Peter Weir's commitment and the sensation of jet exhaust in one's face in an enormous sea tank in Baja unfurls. "He likes himself," my date deadpans. The man-mountain remains rooted, hanging on to the microphone for dear life until Crowe had torn all the pages from the Storm Anecdote playbook.

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