Boat people

Getting wet with Wolfgang Petersen and Sebastian Junger

Wolfgang Petersen has a thing for impending doom in confined spaces. The German-born director has tormented his characters in a submarine (Das Boot), an elevator (In the Line of Fire), Air Force One (Air Force One), and now the tiny hold of the swordfishing boat the Andrea Gail in The Perfect Storm.

"Yes," he says in Teutonic accent that recalls the megaphone-wielding, dictatorial directors of Hollywood's Golden Age, "it's an old Greek-drama trick of the one space and time. You can't go out, especially when confronted with a crisis. Is it maybe a submarine with depth charges, or is it a plane with terrorists on board, or is it, like in our case, a boat facing the storm of the century? To watch the characters and how they interact in a situation like that, or in a doomed situation, that makes it very dramatic."

Aristotle's unities of time and place aside, what about his notion of "the imitation of an action"? How constrained or inspired did the director feel about re-creating an actual event, especially since many of the survivors are still living?

"You have an enormous responsibility, of course. Das Boot was a real story as well; it was the story of a war correspondent, one who was on that submarine and wrote a book about it, and the film was a tribute to German submarine sailors. This is a tribute to an American blue-collar world -- Gloucester fishermen. We have a responsibility to stick to the reality and tell their story and not to make huge compromises with a nice love story and clichés so that it might work better for a summer audience. I think it's a pretty risky thing to do and pretty bold, and I'm very proud that we did it."

Like Petersen, Sebastian Junger, who wrote the bestselling book on which the movie is based, has a thing for extremity -- the plight of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. "I felt that it's a little bit of a class issue here. That there are a lot of jobs in this country, a lot of industries that really cost a lot of lives. I mean, people die regularly working. Men particularly. And I felt that no one acknowledged it. The people who get all the glamor are people who are risking their lives at a performance, like mountain climbers, race-car drivers, guys like that. They're extraordinary athletes, I mean, I'm not criticizing them at all. I just felt that society should include in their admiration people who often have no education, who make very little money, and who are also doing something that is necessary to society. Society would be fine if no one climbs Everest again. It's not that I wanted to make heroes out of the working classes, but I just felt that it was time to focus people a little bit on things like logging -- tremendously dangerous. And everything's made of wood, practically. We remember our war dead, you know. We don't remember our working dead."

Was he worried that the film might violate the honor of these working dead, or exploit them for entertainment and financial gain?

"As long as it doesn't violate some basic principle I believe in, I'm fine with it. You know, if a UFO had come down and saved them, that violates a basic principle of mine. Any time you publicize a tragedy, you're either exploiting it or you're informing the public about something that they're blissfully unaware of. I would say it's a mix of the two. This honors the hard work and the tragic deaths of six anonymous guys. Now, people know that men die offshore fishing; they didn't before."

-- P.K.

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