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Ron Howard is obsessed with detail -- whether he's tackling fire (Backdraft), space (Apollo 13) or Formula One racing (Rush). Now the Academy Award-winning director has ventured to the ocean for In the Heart of the Sea.
It's a tale of adventure and unpleasantness: in 1820, the crew of the Essex sailed into the South Pacific to hunt whales, only to find themselves at the mercy of a 26-metre monster -- the inspiration for Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.
WIRED spoke to Howard about heading into the belly of the beast.
WIRED: In the Heart of the Sea is dark, but striking. The sequence in which the ship's crew are showered with whale blood is both disgusting and oddly beautiful.
**Ron Howard:**Well, part of the film is an awakening story, seen through Tom Holland's character [cabin boy Thomas Nickerson]. So it was important to keep touching base with his experience, what it felt like to be exposed to the awe of nature - the power, the danger and the beauty of it. And also I didn't want to shy away from the modern perspective that this is about the energy industry. This was how you got the oil. Commerce was driving a really brutal, destructive industry.
Did you have prior interest in seafaring?
Only for its inherent drama. The works of Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad. And that opportunity to see characters tested in this most primal and visceral - and therefore dramatic -- way. I don't like the water much personally.
Nathaniel Philbrick, who wrote the book from which this film is adapted, said he looked to modern scientific studies to figure out what the Essex crew experienced. Did you delve into those areas too?
For the action moments, we took our inspiration from the journals of the Essex, from passages of Moby-Dick and from etchings and scrimshaw accounts of whale counter- attacks on whalers. We built pre-viz at [VFX company] Double Negative, then we shared them with marine biologists, who helped us refine the whale behaviour, so that it was entirely plausible. That was very important to me.
Did you have experts on location with you?
We had a guy named Steve Callaghan, who is a modern survivor: he was 76 days on the Atlantic Ocean, and wrote a book about it called Adrift. Over the last couple of decades he's studied survival at sea, he's written books, he's interviewed survivors. He was of tremendous value, not only because he could talk to us about starvation and survival, the emotional rollercoaster of that, but he also stayed on the movie and helped us as a sailor. He was out there on our whale boats. Then we had tall-ship sailors who came to work with us as our technical advisors. In terms of authenticity, I tried to set the same standards for this that I did for Apollo 13.
Did you join the cast at seamanship boot camp?
This movie came together quickly, it was very demanding, so I didn't have time to hang around and play -- which I had done on Apollo 13; I'd gone to space school with the guys. I hadn't done much work on the water since the 80s, on Splash and Cocoon. There I developed the point of view that you could do a lot of work in the water if you went for a naturalistic approach and you didn't try to stage and align too many objects. If you could get a handheld camera on deck, you could accomplish a great deal. But if you started getting camera boats and helicopters, everything would get bogged down and start to feel artificial.
How did you approach the CGI?
I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that not only does CGI allow us to create the whale in the most behaviourally correct, dynamic, revealing and surprising way, it also allows a director to actually be more ambitious about going on location and shooting in difficult places. Before, if you were shooting in the ocean and the light was right and the performance was great and the composition was what you wanted -- but a barge appeared in the background -- you were dead. The shot was ruined. Now those are easy fixes. It used to be so limiting that it pushed people to do more in tanks and on backlots. It was just so crushing.
[pullquote]In terms of authenticity, I set the same standards for this as I did for Apollo 13"[pullquote]
You also shot some sequences in a water tank in Leavesden (a Warner Bros complex in Hertfordshire).
Three tanks: an outdoor, an indoor, plus underwater.
What was it like for the actors to shoot in tanks after getting the real deal on location?
We actually did it the other way round. Anything physically dangerous, requiring wires or stunts, destruction, fire, we shot in a tank. Then we went to sea and shot all the aftermath. The cast preferred the ocean. They could get off [the tank] and go to get some tea, but because we were doing all the difficult stuff it was really miserable -- icy water dumped on them and being on hydraulics, getting tossed around.
The scene in which Nickerson goes into the dead whale's head to collect the oil: is that historically accurate?
Oh yes. That was one way in which it was done.
Tom Holland has said it felt like being in a real dead whale.
[Laughs] He gagged a couple of times, ha! That came to him very organically.
Did you go in there?
No -- this is the beauty of being a director! I was standing at the monitor, chortling as Tom slithered down into the oil.
In The Heart of the Sea is out in cinemas on December 25
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
