by Benjamin Svetkey - Entertainment Weekly - April 21, 2000
They stared down death in the North Atlantic, ducked Nazi depth charges, and dodged enemy torpedos. They helped turn the tide of the war. Made the seas safe for democracy.
Still, there's no excuse for talking during a movie.
And the small corps of retired U.S. submarine officers sitting in this Washington, D.C., screening room--where they're getting a special sneak peek of U-571, Universal's new World War II drama about the capture of Germany's infamous Enigma code-making machine--are chattering full speed ahead. "Very authentic," barks one old sea dog when Bill Paxton pops up on a submarine deck sporting what looks like the Gorton's fisherman's hat. "That's what they wore." A few rows back, two ancient mariners are debating Matthew McConaughey's torpedoing tactics--"How many meters did he say?" one of them bellows into the other's hearing aid--so noisily you half expect the actor to break character and shush them.
They're even more talkative after the screening. "They got the details exactly right," gushes retired admiral William D. Smith, who once served aboard an American sub not unlike the one in U-571. "The feeling of claustrophobia. The relationship between the captain and his crew. The way the water poured in when he lowered the periscope. I've never seen a more realistic depiction of a submarine battle.
"Of course," he adds, "the story is total fiction. That's not what really happened. But I don't think too many people will care...."
NOT TOO MANY--ONLY ABOUT 50 MILLION of them in England, where U-571 started making waves the day it began filming.
Turns out that for all the painstakingly authentic detail in U-571 (a full-scale replica of a Nazi U-boat was even built for the estimated $60 million production), the filmmakers have always maintained that the plot is pure fiction. ("It's a yarn," as McConaughey puts it.) Still, the movie's historical detours have left some people feeling a bit lost at sea. The hitch: The sailors who apparently inspired the film, who really raided a scuttled German sub in 1941 and swiped an Enigma machine (a pivotal event in the war that allowed the Allies to eavesdrop on Hitler's secret military plans), spoke with veddy different accents than McConaughey's good ol' boy drawl. They were Brits, not Yanks.
"It's an action movie," says the drawler himself, defending his portrayal of U-571's all-American Andrew Tyler, the heroic lieutenant who shoots his way into a German sub to snatch the encryption gizmo (it looks like a typewriter with attitude) and ends up sea-jacking the entire U-boat. (Incidentally, the real English sailors found the U-boat abandoned; the Nazis prematurely jumped ship thinking they were about to be sunk.) "Did it happen just like this? No. And we're not saying it did. But any time you're cutting something down to two hours of celluloid, you have to take some theatrical licenses."
Paxton, who plays McConaughey's equally fictional American skipper, offers a similar take. "We aren't trying to be Saving Private Ryan," he says.
Still, to the English, it sounded like historical heresy. U.S. FILM DISTORTS HISTORY TO STEAL WAR HERO'S GLORY blasted one British headline when the movie was shooting in Europe last year. At one point, after the film was attacked in the British Parliament, President Clinton had to step in with some I-feel-your-pain diplomacy. "I understand your desire to see the role of the Royal Navy...acknowledged," he wrote to a member of the House of Commons. "As you know, Universal Studios has stated that the film is not intended to be an accurate portrayal of historical events."
"It was all a big mistake," explains Jonathan Mostow, the 38-year-old director who labored for almost a decade to bring U-571 to the screen. "It was one of those bad communications things."
Mostow is relaxing in his backyard, completely nude, playing bonos with McConaughey. (No, not really; he's actually sitting in his office on the Universal lot, fully clothed, but why should movie directors be the only ones who get to take "theatrical licenses"?) "We held a press conference at the start of filming and the English papers ran these stories that we were stealing credit for what they did during the war," he continues. "It wasn't true, but people in England understandably got very upset."
From the start, Mostow says, all he wanted to do was make an old-fashioned World War II thriller, "in the tradition of The Guns of Navarone," he explains. His decision to frame the film around the Enigma was, it turns out, almost an afterthought. It was the story of the subs, not the encryptor, that really raised his periscope.
Back in 1992, when Mostow was directing cable-TV movies (pictures like FLight of Black Angel, a sort of economy-class Top Gun), he stumbled upon an antique submarine in San Francisco that had been turned into a floating tourist attraction--and suddenly he was bitten by the sub bug. Back in L.A., he pored over library books on World War II naval history. "I had a long list of stuff that I wanted to put in a movie," he says. "But I didn't have a movie. I didn't have a plot."
So when Mostow ran across the Enigma story in one of his books, a klieg light blinked on over his head. "It's the secret everyone is after, the perfect MacGuffin," he says. "It's what's inside the Maltese Falcon." Still, it didn't give him a big-budget action movie. The true story of how the Royal Navy captured its first Enigma machine was dramatic, sure, but Mostow knew it lacked certain basic Hollywood elements (not enough gunplay, for one thing--or American accents).
Fortunately for Mostow--and the Allies--it turned out there were plenty of other, lesser-known Enigma tales. One of them even involved Americans: In 1944, a U.S. Navy task force actually did sea-jack an entire U-boat, Enigma and all, towing it back home (although by then so many Enigmas had been stolen from the Nazis you could practically pick one up with Green Stamps). When Mostow cut-and-passted these true stories together, he finally had a story he thought could float.
Or maybe not. "At the time, Waterworld had come out," he recalls. "And here I was, writing this totally uncommercial movie, set on water. No studio was going to be interested." His bank account dwindling, he decided to bang out another, more commercial script. "I wrote it in three weeks,"" he says. "My goal was to sell it for something like $10,000. I figured that would solve my problems."
Oh, it solved his problems, all right. The script, which Mostow also ended up directing, turned out to be Breakdown, 1997's taut $36 million Kurt Russell thriller. Suddenly, studios were very interested in Mostow's totally uncommercial submarine movie. A deal was struck with Universal's then chairman, Casey Silver. Michael Douglas expressed interest in playing the captain (the film's main character at the time). It looked like smooth sailing ahead.
Except that Douglas dropped out, Silver got fired, and preproduction delays dragged on for months (that life-size U-boat replica took a year to complete). Still, Mostow kept plugging the leaks. He convinced Universal's incoming chief, Stacey Snider, to re-greenlight the film and he retooled the script to fit different actors. "I'm the Obi-Wan of the movie," says Paxton, who plays a downsized version of the captain. "Matthew is the hero."
"I was looking for an action film," McConaughey says. "The last really good one I read was Assassins. I tried and tried to get that Antonio Banderas part, but..."
To star in U-571, however, McConaughey had Mostow at hello. "When you're doing a big-budget movie, you get a list of names," says the director. "[Studios] aren't comfortable without a certain-size actor. Matthew is a guy everybody remembers being in these big movies--he's worked with Spielberg and Zemekis--even if his heat has cooled down a little within the Hollywood beltway."
The five-month shoot in Malta and Italy was filled with the usual on-location inconveniences--"Saltwater rain pouring over you all night long, burning your eyes," says Jon Bon Jovi, who also endured a crew cut to play one of the sailors--but for the most part the actors had a blast. In fact, they barely noticed the drubbing there production was taking in Britain. "We were busy shooting the movie and the studio was sort of falling apart," Mostow says. But when he saw a BBC interview with one of the sailors who boarded the real Nazi sub in 1941--"They asked these pointed questions, like, 'Isn't it horrible that the Americans are taking credit for what you did?'"--he decided it was time for action.
"I called the guy, this 80-year=old English sailor, and invited him to visit us in Malta, " Mostow says. "He met with everybody. He walked on the ship sets, visited the prop room. And when he walked away he was like, 'Wow!'" Mostow also put renowned Enigma hisorian David Kahn (The codebreakers), on his payroll as a technical adviser. And he dedicated the movie to all the sailors who helped capture real Enigma machines.
"Look," he says, "if I had found one real story that would have made a great two-hour movie, I would have done it. But the fact is, sometimes fiction is the best way to reveal the truth."
Back in that Washington, D.C., screening room, the old sub skippers couldn't agree more. "Hollywood does this sort of thing all the time," one of them says. "they make it a little more dramatic than it really was. Change the facts a bit. But the details in this one are very realistic. Like the way he's getting ready to fire that torpedo at the U-boat...."
Fascinating, Captain, but could you keep it down? Some of us are trying to match a movie here.
