How much of the shoot actually took place on the water, and what kinds of hardships did that cause?
Petersen: We filmed for weeks on the real ocean, on the waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific. The main problem is always seasickness I had it on Das Boot, and I had it here again. I’m from Hamburg in the north of Germany, and I grew up around water, so it was fine in the end. But we were always physically fighting the water. For example, when we were shooting on the East Coast [in September of 1999], Hurricane Floyd hit there, and we were kind of an endangered species. We actually had quite a bit of luck, because this big, big hurricane could have hit Gloucester [Massachusetts], but it didn’t. We caught the tail end of it, and we had beautiful, great big waves.
You know what? It doesn’t sound like much, but an 8-foot wave is big! It’s a lot! So we got great shots, but at a very high price, because half the crew was seasick. I think Mark Wahlberg threw up 35 times. It was just unbelievable!
There are other problems, too, like colors that change all the time. The weather changes often; if you look from one angle over to the other direction, it’s a completely different situation.
Did you ever have Industrial Light & Magic come in and do sky replacements to help match location shots?
Petersen: We did that all the time.
Of course, you gain the most control over weather on a soundstage. Was it always your intent to shoot part of the film indoors?
Petersen: You know, we had all kinds of thoughts. [We considered] shooting at a variety of places: the water tank in Malta, the facility in Mexico where Titanic was done, and even at the Universal Studios lake. Finally, after struggling and brainstorming for a long time over how to do this movie, we said, ’The best, most efficient thing would be if we built an indoor tank at Warner Bros.’ And the studio did it! They dug a 95- by-95-foot square, 22-foot-deep tank into the floor of their biggest stage, the legendary Stage 16. It’s the largest inside-a-soundstage tank in the world, but we needed it to be as big as it is because our Andrea Gail was 68 feet long.
How did you create the illusion that the Andrea Gail was on the high seas?
Petersen: The entire boat was set on a gigantic gimbal in the water. You can imagine what a weight that was! The movement of the boat could be programmed and recorded in a computer, so we could repeat those movements endlessly. That was a great tool. We also had these big, specially built tanks that dumped tons of water over the boat, plus six or eight water cannons [that] were used to shoot water over the boat. The boat was being rocked on the gimbal in combination with wind machines, rain machines and wave machines what a spectacle that was!
Where was the camera?
Petersen: I learned on Das Boot that it’s very important to never connect the cameras to the boat itself. The cameras have to be independent of the boat to really get the feeling of the movement in the water. We therefore had two, three or four huge crane arms with cameras extending from the edge of the tank, which gave us a third axis of movement. Having the cameras totally away from the boat enhanced the movement of the boat and helped a lot later on to [create the illusion] that the boat was moving through the waves.
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