Master and Commander: How Russell Crowe’s maritime actioner became a cult classic

Peter Weir’s 2003 seafaring yarn Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is not at all the testosterone-driven maritime action movie audiences might have been expecting.

Yes, elements of the plot are deeply jingoistic. Grown men become tearful whenever the sacred name of Admiral Nelson is mentioned. On the eve of battle, officers make tub-thumping, Agincourt-style speeches. But alongside battle scenes and shots of sailors clambering up vertiginously high rigging are moments of great emotion. The blockbuster, adapted from Patrick O’Brian’s novels and showing at the Venice Film Festival next month in tribute to its Australian director, touches on everything from evolutionary biology to bullying, mental illness to suicide, superstition to classical music.

The film also features one of Russell Crowe’s finest and most underrated performances. He plays British navy captain “Lucky” Jack Aubrey, who is in charge of HMS Surprise. Jack has a touch of Ahab-like fanaticism about him. Obsessed with the mysterious French ship Acheron that appears ghost-like out of the mist at the start of the film, he vows he will follow it to the gates of hell if necessary. The captain, though, possesses a softer side too. Crowe later summed him up as “a sailor with calluses on his hands, who has grown up in the navy and knows every part of his ship … and those same callused, thickened hands then pick up this delicate feminine instrument, the violin, and he will play from his heart the things he can never say”.

The Aussie star captures his very English character’s mix of boorishness, repression, courage and sensitivity. He’ll abandon a drowning sailor to death or have a man flogged – but remains endlessly loyal to his close friend, the physician and scientist Maturin (Paul Bettany).

The idea for the movie came from Tom Rothman, who is today the CEO and Chairman of Sony Pictures’ Motion Picture Group, but in the early Nineties was a young film executive. He remembers spending a rainy day in his father-in-law’s study, reading the first O’Brian book in the Aubrey-Maturin series, Master and Commander. The moment he finished it, Rothman – who had worked earlier in his career with US indie filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee – set about trying to adapt it for the big screen. It’d take him 12 years. “I worked for Sam Goldwyn at the time and we optioned the books but I had to become chairman of 20th Century Fox before I had enough clout to get it made,” he tells me.

Weir twice turned down Rothman’s offer to direct the film, but the exec eventually talked him round by handing him a sword (“the symbol of command in the British navy”) specially made up by the props department. He told him: “Peter, you need to take command of the Surprise.”

The Australian filmmaker quickly saw through the bluster and chauvinism in O’Brian’s books. “It’s about how men (and boys) behaved in that time and circumstance, how they understood concepts like ‘duty’ and ‘courage’,” he told GQ last year. “Perhaps that has some relevance today. Times change, and with them fashion, but some things remain imperishable. The film touches on those imperishables.”

Once he was on board Master and Commander, the director was relentless in his quest for authenticity. He wanted actors with “18th-century faces”. Casting directors Fiona Weir and Mary Selway saw thousands of hopefuls and scoured English schools for youngsters to play the midshipmen. Teenager Max Pirkis eventually landed the pivotal role of Midshipman Lord Blakeney, the young sailor who, in one gruesome early scene, has his right arm amputated. He grew so used to using his left arm that more than 20 years later, he tells me he can only cycle one-handed with his left arm although he is right-handed.

“[Production] was a constant state of one arm-ness, writing with one arm, eating with one arm, going to the loo with one arm,” he jokes. Pirkis speaks fondly of the time when the actors really did go to sea on a real-life tall ship, the Rose, which had been converted to look like a 19th-century frigate. “You’d be waiting for a helicopter to come in for a wide shot. There was nothing modern to see.”

Pirkis was part of a small team that travelled to the Galapagos Islands for a fortnight’s shooting at the end of production. “The sequences where we are running up and down volcanoes or in lava fields or are in the midst of the iguanas or the birds, all of that is on the islands,” he remembers. “It is extraordinary. The animals are so tame you can literally pick them up if you wanted. Little baby seals crawling up to you, birds everywhere, and absolutely teeming with life.”

Much of Master and Commander was shot at Baja Studios on the Pacific Coast of Mexico using the same huge water tank where James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) was filmed a few years before. Cast members were sent off to nautical boot camp for two weeks before shooting began, to learn how to tie knots, clamber up the rigging and unfurl sails. They stayed in teams that reflected their ranks in the film. “It was probably the hardest bit of the shoot because we had to absorb so much information,” says James D’Arcy, who played First Lieutenant Thomas Pullings.

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To foster camaraderie, Crowe organised rugby and baseball games on Sundays, took the actors on day trips to SeaWorld and paid for them to spend a weekend at a luxury San Diego hotel. When there were grievances, he represented their interests. “We didn’t have phones and so we didn’t have any way of contacting anyone,” D’Arcy says. “In the production office, there was one phone where you could contact England. The way it worked was that I, as the first lieutenant, went to Russell on behalf of the crew and said, look, this is what people are feeling. We don’t have hire cars and we don’t have phones and so people are feeling isolated as a result. He then went to production on our behalf and solved that problem.”

D’Arcy remembers Weir as “a very deep-thinking intellectual who is also a visualist – in my experience, a completely unique combination. In any conversation you had with him, it was immediately obvious he knew far more about that subject than you did, even if it was your chosen specialist subject on Mastermind, and yet he discussed it with you without making you feel embarrassed.”

Pirkis, meanwhile, describes the director as “possibly one of the most gentle human beings I’ve ever come across. He has such a calm, quiet and considered manner, really thoughtful and patient, and he really listened. I never once saw him raise his voice, lose his temper, or look like he was in a fluster. He was a man completely in control of his art form and at one with his material.”

Battle scenes were shot with multiple camera crews. Pirkis talks of the “cacophony, the intensity, the heat and the smoke, shrapnel flying all over the place. The noise even of unloaded weaponry going off is pretty extraordinary, super-immersive and awe-inspiring.”

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When Master and Commander was first conceived, there was talk of a franchise. After all, O’Brian completed 20 novels featuring Aubrey and Maturin. But so far there’s been no sequel. Following its release in 2003, the film secured 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. It went home with two, for Best Cinematography and Best Sound Editing. Some fans likened it admiringly to a seafaring version of Star Trek. O’Brian devotees generally gave it their blessing. It did decent but not spectacular box office (it grossed £165m worldwide on a budget of £117m). “It didn’t generate that kind of monstrous, rapid income that provokes a sequel,” Weir later acknowledged.

The film’s misfortune may have been that it arrived a few months after the global success of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, another – albeit more family-friendly – tale of adventure on the high seas. Master and Commander, though, has weathered far better than its rivals. It retains a cult fanbase, and sparked viral reappraisal last year following the publication of a GQ article headlined: “Why are so many guys obsessed with Master and Commander?”. Crowe himself remains a fan. In 2021, the actor would challenge a Twitter user who claimed the film is great for putting you to sleep. “That’s the problem with kids these days,” Crowe replied. “No focus. Peter Weir’s film is brilliant. An exacting, detail-oriented, epic tale of fidelity to empire & service, regardless of the cost.”

Disney currently has the rights to the O’Brian books. Given the success of their other recent historical adaptations – such as TV’s Shōgun – it would be no surprise if the studio someday soon puts the HMS Surprise back in commission.

‘Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World’ is having a special screening at the Venice Film Festival, which runs between 28 August and 7 September