Crowe Captains Any Ship He Wishes
Nov. 14 -- When you make a $135 million film, you need to fill theaters, and Master and Commander has no female characters, no space-age gadgetry, and only two big battle scenes. But this high-seas adventure has one big asset that towers over everything — Russell Crowe.
Hollywood has been trying to make big-screen versions of Patrick O'Brian's wildly popular seafaring novels. But Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World languished in studio development hell for years.
Waterborne movies like Titanic are expensive to make. And wash-ups like the disastrous Waterworld have turned producers into landlubbers. But Crowe, 39, in his first film since A Beautiful Mind, quickly turned the tide.
A woman appears on screen in just one fleeting scene in this 140-minute film. But Hollywood is confident Crowe has the good looks and Oscar-winning credibility to attract women and older viewers. And while the script is aimed at a more sophisticated audience than the average caffeine-driven action flick, younger audiences are likely to sign on for the voyage as the Gladiator star battles on the high seas.
Crowe, however, thinks the film is less of a risk than producers believe, especially behind the strength of director Peter Weir, the filmmaker who gave us The Truman Show, Dead Poets Society, The Mosquito Coast and Witness.
"If you look at the breakdown of the percentage of people who actually read O'Brian's books, there's a surprisingly large percentage of women," Crowe says.
"For me, I look at it like this: Is Peter Weir going to make a fantastic movie, something that will be held up to, you know, the greatest of cinematic adventures? And I thought that it would be. I mean I never concern myself with the commerciality of the movies."
Still, with his Oscar-nominated turn in A Beautiful Mind and a string of high-grossing movies following L.A. Confidential, Crowe is on an undeniable hot streak. He won the best actor Oscar for 2000's Gladiator, and may have only lost out for A Beautiful Mind the next year because of his Hollywood bad-boy reputation.
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