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Showing posts with label sea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sea. Show all posts

Sunday, 7 April 2019

FILM 1972: DEAD CALM


FILM 1972: DEAD CALM

TRIVIA: Before filming began, Nicole Kidman took lessons from the owner of the Storm Vogel on how to operate the ship. During the storm sequences near the end of the film, she is actually piloting the yacht.

For the scene where Hughie rips off Rae's shorts, Billy Zane really did rip off Nicole Kidman's shorts through his own sheer strength without any alterations made to the shorts to make them easier to rip.

Sam Neill met his wife, Noriko Watanabe, in the making of this film.


Sunday, 9 December 2018

FILM 1893: K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER



FILM 1893: K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER

TRIVIA: Upon reading the film's script, the surviving crew members were so incensed that they sent an open letter to Harrison Ford, Producer/Director Kathryn Bigelow, and Producers Christine Whitaker and Steven-Charles Jaffe, expressing their dismay. Among the less-than-credible details they objected to were profane language, the animosity between the two highest-ranking commanding officers, insubordination among the crew, drunk crew members, the attempted mutiny, the guns (which are kept under seal in a secret location) and the handcuffs (which were only used by and available to cops).

The director and producers of K-19 were the first Western civilians ever allowed inside the Russian naval base at the Kola Peninsula.

The movie set of the sub was identical in size to the actual K-19 sub, thanks to the K-19 blueprints that were available to the producers. Since the sub's corridors were very narrow, the filming camera rolled along a rail system implemented on the ceiling. The rails were painted so they would blend with the sub's interiors.

The blue glow inside the nuclear reactor is known as the Cherenkov effect. In order to simulate it, the crew poured seven hundred two-liter bottles of Canada Dry tonic water and illuminated the reactor with ultraviolet light. The tonic water contains quinine, which emits a bluish glow in the presence of ultraviolet light.

According to Jacob Pitts, during one scene, the Director of Photography was having trouble getting Harrison Ford's eye line. When he asked Ford where he was looking, Ford replied that he was looking into his soul. When the DP asked him where his soul was, he replied, "Under a pile of money."

The meter used in the scene where the ships doctor is checking the radiation dosimeters by inserting them into a dosimeter reader is not actually a reader at all. It is a modified Hewlett Packard (now Agilent) HP3555A/B Transmission Level/Noise test set used by telephone and communications technicians. This actual meter was not developed by HP until several years after the K19 incident. The method for reading dosimeters at the time was to look through them (like you would a telescope) and read the progression of an indicator on a ruler like scale.

Natalya Vintilova has the only female speaking role in the whole movie.


Sunday, 21 October 2018

FILM 1852: THE MEG



FILM 1852: THE MEG

TRIVIA: In real life, Jason Statham is an expert swimmer. In the 1990 Commonwealth Games, he represented England in diving. Footage of him competing can be found online. Most of the shots of him in the water are real. A stunt double was used for more hazardous shots.

In the book, the megalodons are pure white, almost luminescent, from living in an environment with virtually no light. This coloring proved too difficult to render in CGI while still looking realistic, so the megalodons were colored like great white sharks.

Eli Roth was attached as director before being replaced by Jon Turteltaub. Roth left due to creative differences with the studio, namely that he wanted the film to maintain both its R-rating and a $150 million budget. It was also rumored that Roth, on top of writing and directing, also wanted to play the lead role of Jonas, but the studio believed he did not have the star power.

The film is based on the book "MEG: A Novel of Deep Terror," the first book that author Steve Alten ever published.

The Meg (2018) was filmed in New Zealand.

The name of the boat at the end of the film is "Charlotte." This is also the name of the ship that the character Benjamin Franklin Gates searches for in National Treasure (2004), which was also directed by Jon Turteltaub.

Featured on Episode #196 on the podcast "How Did This Get Made?".


Wednesday, 19 October 2016



BOOK 157: MOBY DICK: HERMAN MELVILLE

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is a novel by American writer Herman Melville, published in 1851 during the period of the American Renaissance. Sailor Ishmael tells the story of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaler the Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, the white whale which on the previous whaling voyage destroyed his ship and severed his leg at the knee. The novel was a commercial failure and out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891, but during the 20th century, its reputation as a Great American Novel was established. William Faulkner confessed he wished he had written it himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world", and "the greatest book of the sea ever written".
"Call me Ishmael" is among world literature's most famous opening sentences.

Dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne, "in token of my admiration for his genius", the work was first published as The Whale in London in October 1851, and under its definitive title in New York in November. Hundreds of differences, mostly slight and some important, are seen between the two editions. The London publisher censored or changed sensitive passages and Melville made revisions, as well, including the last-minute change in the title for the New York edition. The whale, however, appears in both editions as "Moby Dick", with no hyphen. About 3,200 copies were sold during the author's life.

The novel has been adapted or represented in art, film, books, cartoons, television, and more than a dozen versions in comic-book format. The first adaptation was the 1926 silent movie The Sea Beast, starring John Barrymore, in which Ahab kills the whale and returns to marry his fiancée. The most famous adaptation was the John Huston 1956 film produced from a screenplay by author Ray Bradbury. The long list of adaptations, as Bryant and Springer put it, demonstrates that "the iconic image of an angry embittered American slaying a mythic beast seemed to capture the popular imagination", showing how "different readers in different periods of popular culture have rewritten Moby-Dick" to make it a "true cultural icon".



Sunday, 9 October 2016



FILM 1576: THE SHALLOWS

TRIVIA: The movie was shot in part off the Gold Coast of Australia. Other filming commenced in a giant swimming pool.

Jaume Collet-Serra teamed up with the art department for the design of the shark, "I came to the conclusion that the shark had to be female", says the director, "Females are slightly bigger and have great scars from mating, visually they're scarier as they are more protective."

The screenplay for this film was featured in the 2014 Blacklist, a list of the "most liked" unmade scripts of the year.

Nancy's nickname for the seagull is Steven Seagull, which is, of course, a pun on actor Steven Seagal.

For the seagull character of Steven Seagull, the usage of both cgi and using a puppet was considered based on the belief that it would be inordinately hard to train such a bird to act, this "horrified" both producer's Matti Leshem and Lynn Harris who wanted to use an actual seagull while scouting for location in Australia, Blake Lively was able to feed a group of seagulls at which point it was realized that using such a bird would be possible.