Behind the Scenes: The Hunt for Red October (McTiernan, 1990) with Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin

Somebody will take it off. Somebody will take it off. The Americans are shooting at us again. You son of a bitch! A young man who worked for me in development in 1984, I sent him down to the book fair to see the new books that were coming out. He came back with this book from the Naval Institute Press and it was the Hanford Red October. So I took it home and I had it on my night table. I contacted the press. The press referred me to an agent here who was representing this new writer, Tom Clancy, and I began to negotiate an option for the rights to the book. The book, I believe, came out in Europe before it came out in the States, and I happened to be working in England, and I read it and loved it and wanted to make a movie out of it. But I was like a week too late to put an option, and I snuff out, got there first. I optioned the rights and the right to see any subsequent books and use any subsequent characters that were used in the original book. That was the thing that I remember most was the saturation of Clancy's books in the culture at that time. I mean, you'd be in the first class cabin of a plane and eight out of ten people on the plane were reading a Tom Clancy novel. There was something I smelled about the novel that I thought was underneath what Clancy put together, and that was that it was treasury. John McTiernan was directing Predator, so I went over to, I believe it was Fox, with Ned Tannen, who was then running production at Universal. We looked at some footage, we came back and hired him. I was working at Paramount, and I had just finished Presidio and Beverly Hills Cop II, and Ned Tannen said to me, why don't you do The Hunt for Red October? I didn't know what The Hunt for Red October was, so I read the book, and after I read the book, I saw there were a lot of problems in terms of turning it into a movie. It's very intimidating when you look at that book just in terms of the scope of it and the size of it, to reduce it to one simple human story. Tom could describe a pencil for three pages. It would have been a government-issued pencil. It would have been impossible to put all the information in the book in the screenplay. And I just had an intuition about what Clancy had done. When John McTiernan first came aboard, he had a vision of the script which was much closer to the book. And I went in there and said, Larry, I like your screenplay very much, I don't want to use any of it. And we sat and talked through it, and Larry had a large enough heart that he just let go of the story that he told. And we just started on a different one. I'd gotten quite friendly with Kevin Costner, and I went to Kevin about playing Jack Ryan, but Kevin was up to his neck and very enthusiastic about doing this buffalo movie. And I said, you'd rather do a buffalo movie than a submarine movie. We then decided we would go looking for an actor who was up and coming and build a movie star with this role because it was a star-building role. The next thing you know, I got a phone call to go to Paramount to meet with McTiernan and with Mace. So we flew him out, we read him, McTiernan loved him, and we decided we'd take a chance on the young Alec Baldwin. It was kind of incredible because that's the first really big part in the film I ever played. Alec could memorize pages upon pages of dry dialogue. When they asked him to stand up in that boardroom, all those admirals and generals who were trying to figure out whether the Red October was up to no good or whether they were defecting from the Russian Navy. All that Alec says, he memorized it overnight. And I said, this guy is a super brain. I remember when I was talking to John and we shot the scene where I go into the water to get picked up and brought onto the submarine. I said to John, you know, you need a shot of me hanging from this helicopter. I think I said to him, wouldn't it be cool if you had a shot of me where the camera was in the door of the helicopter looking down at me hanging there. And we disengaged the pen and you see me fall away from the camera into the water. And I just said it to him, you know, theoretically. And John said, yeah, that would be a good shot. Let's try to do that. And he said, would you do that? I said, yeah, I'd love to. Alec is really, really a committed actor. And there is nothing that Alec won't do in order to make something believable and in order to make it good. When we did the film, you know, like any film you want to go and see for yourself and you want to see what people's attitude about what they do is really like. If you want to make your characters believable, you go and find those people, you spend time with them, you hang out with them. I went to Washington and they set me up with a couple of guys who were CIA information specialists. I have no idea how I was cast in the role, except great fortune, you know, good luck. James Earl Jones, of course, didn't read for us, but he was a very key player for us because the minute James Earl decided to come on this film, every major actor in California said that they'd love to play in it. Greer was always what you call a modest size character, a bit part. I don't know why Admiral Greer is black and not, you know, Hispanic or Asian or, I have no idea. Maybe it was a little new in the movies to have an admiral who's black, to have a man pictured as an authority figure where everyone else respects him and takes his instructions and his race is simply not an issue. He happens to be black, but nobody pays any attention to him. What this movie had, this movie just had so many great movie actors, you know, people that could really, really, you know, squeeze every moment out of it in front of the camera. Very, very early on, there was talk of casting Klaus Maria Brandauer in that part. And two or three days after I realized that Klaus couldn't do it, Sean Connery's agent called me and said, Sean is looking for a film. What about that Hunt for Red October? So I said, great. And we faxed the screenplay to him in Marbella. I was ready to take a golfing holiday and go home to Scotland. And suddenly they caught me in London and sent me the facts of what they had. And so I got, once I got caught up in it, it was very difficult not to agree to do it. He called about three days later and I had never spoken to him at all. And I got on the phone and he said, Mr. Neufeld, this is Sean Connery. I said, oh, how are you, sir? He said, fine. He said, I don't think I can do your movie. I said, why not? He said, well, it doesn't make any sense in the political situation here. He says, you know, we have detente with Russia, perestroika, and this is all about defecting to the United States. I said, no, but it's said in the past, Mr. Connery. She said, no, it's not. I said, yes, it is. Just look at the, look at the first printed matter that goes up on the screen before the movie starts. And he said, I don't have that. They sent the script to me, but they had not put the, because it was faxed. There was no forward on it. And the forward explained that it happened before. So we faxed him the first page and about an hour later, uh, he called, he said, oh, now, now you're talking. Now, now this makes sense. I remember when they said, Sean's going to be in the movie. I thought, oh, wow. I'm dead. No one's even going to notice me in this movie. I'm going to be invisible in this movie. Alex. Wow. Wow. Sean all of them. I was dropped. I was really pleased when Sean came on board because aside from being a great actor, he carries with him a tremendous amount of antecedent goodwill. People want to like Sean. I heard a lot of things about Sean. He was tough and rough and all that kind of stuff. And for me, he was nothing but, um, really nice and funny and irreverent and very generous. Scott Glenn was one of the actors that was suggested. And the minute his name came up, we knew he had the kind of strength, uh, and of course chops, as they say, to play the role of, uh, Matthew. So, and he was hired and they called me up and they said, do you want to take a ride on a, uh, on a fast attack sub for real? And I said, yeah, sure. Tom Fargo, who was the captain of the salt Lake city, which was the nuclear submarine that we visited and dove to 600 feet off the coast of San Diego and spent the night on to do research for the film to be on a real nuclear, uh, six 88 attack class submarine. Um, Tom Fargo was the captain of that ship. The skipper of the boat was who wound up being a great guy. And we became friends. He said, Scott, I hope you don't mind, but he said, I've given a orders to all the guys on board to treat you as a equal rank with me. So every time for the next, uh, you know, a few days that we're out, uh, when someone comes up and reports to me, they're going to turn right around and they're going to report to you. And then I'm going to tell you what we're going to do about it. He said there may be once or twice when I'm going to ask you to just go to your quarters when we'll be doing dealing with stuff that's, that's, that's top secret that's classified. But now how he knew to do that. I mean, it was like giving me an acting lesson, Scott Glenn. I would love to take all sorts of credit for his performance, but actually it belongs to the captain of the Salt Lake city. What I discovered when I came on board, uh, the salt Lake was that in important matters, Tom Fargo certainly was, uh, you know, uh, a strong, tough commander, but he had a degree of relaxation and looseness with his men that I never would have expected. And he was just incredibly, uh, confident and really just this incredibly, he was like this guy you'd follow into hell. You know what I mean? He was this really tough guy, you know, and he never raised his voice. He would say things almost by way of suggestion. And of course they would be done just like that. And, um, so for the hunt for it October, I thought, well, hell, I, you know, why bother even working? I'm just going to copy him. I'm just going to, you know, I'm just going to make Mancuso Tom Fargo. And so that's all I did in that movie, you know, whatever good happened in that performance, basically, you know, I owe to now Admiral Fargo. So thank you, sir. Many years ago, before I put away the toys of childhood, I used to be an actor. And one of the ways that I write, I have always done this is I play all the parts. I get up, walk around the room and shout as Jack Ryan or walk over as Ramius, whatever. And while we were doing it, John kept looking at me and he said, you know, I, I want you, you should play the cop. Then come after the movie was cast and everything, I saw a call sheet and, uh, I still hadn't talked to John about it. And I looked at all the call sheet and there was my name after the cop. Now I had not acted in 16 years. I, uh, ran out to the, to a, to, to an acting teacher and said, help me. Then, since I was the writer, I tried to write myself into every other scene that I could find. We had to look at real submarines first and, and look what the, see what they look like. And the first thing I noticed is that basically you hit your head wherever you go on a submarine. We did build and that was really absolutely amazing. The whole deck and the con tower of the Russian submarine was built in Long Beach. They wouldn't let us take it outside the breakwater, which since I built it to stage the whole submerging scene and the men getting off the ship and all of that made it kind of difficult. We didn't have any weight, any surf at all, or any supposedly a storm in the North Atlantic. I got this bunch of boats and I had them driving circles around us in order to make a wake. And we had other boats with big fog making machines. The promise was that we had as a crew member and as a camera operator, we had to be on the deck as it was going down again. You know, when, when, when the ship goes down, when they see the American cruise ship approach it, those pumps are not really high tech piece of equipment. And, and we thought it was going to go relatively slowly. So we had the whole camera crew, several cameras and equipment on the deck. And all of a sudden that whole thing went and everything was in the water. The cameras disappeared to the bottom of the ocean. I mean, obviously we couldn't shoot in a, in a real submarine for any length of time, although we did use an old diesel sub for the interior of the Russian submarine in the movie. It is claustrophobic in an actual submarine, but there's only so much that you can do with a camera. The only thing that I really wanted to know to do, and I was, and I was convinced it was very important, is when you're inside submarines and you cut from one submarine to the other submarine, they all look so similar that I had to find a way that the audience would instantly know you're in the Dallas, now we're in the Red October, because quite often you're in the back of people's heads. So you don't know yet who the characters are. So I made a very distinctive choice, and that was John and Terry Morris, the production designer, to create a light scheme that is very recognizable. The Dallas is red, the Red October is blue, and the search submarine is green. And it's done subtly, not, not like really bright, but it is, you know right away where you are. It helps the audience to kind of give a feeling of choreography. And because if you cut from one closet on one boat, you have otherwise no idea. So I had, I felt the biggest job as a, as a, as for me was, as a cinematographer, to really help the audience. Because they would be so confused so quickly if you wouldn't tell that story and make that very, very clear. The camera is always exactly where it needs to be to tell that story. Yanni and I would work at these great elaborate camera moves, and I, and we were content to do them over the course of four or five takes. I'd see where, what was working and what wasn't working, and I'd fix the actors to help the move. And he'd see it from the other direction, and he'd fix the camera move or the lighting to make it work better. And I told him, listen, we have to also build things in the set. I mean, like, you tend to think, well, the Americans have to have the most modern submarine. I think you should, the Russians should have, this is the newest one, that should be the slickest looking, the most high-tech looking, and the American is just pretty neutral. The Russian Red October submarine is an entirely different boat from Scott Glenn's Dallas. And I just said, suppose the Navy for their next submarine brought in a bunch of aeronautical designers and said, leave every gauge where it is, leave every control, every handle, every screen, leave everything exactly where it is, but just do it with your materials instead of our materials. Do it with aircraft materials in an aircraft style. And that's how we did the interior of the, of the Dallas. We built the interior of a Los Angeles class attack submarine, the studio did, and it was accurate to the smallest detail. And it's amazing. The gauges worked and it was on a gimbal and it was up in the air and it was just this interior shell, but the gauges inside worked and they were hooked to a computer. So as the sub started to descend, the gauges would descend. The entire interior that we used to shoot was set on a gimbal, which was constructed on the Paramount lot, an enormous, enormously strong gimbal. It was anchored to the concrete floor. It is gimbaled to do 45 degrees forwards, backwards, sideways, which in itself is seasickening. Usually when I'm making a movie, I like to get to the set way early, way before anybody else and figure out how everything works and feel comfortable with it and just be there all day long. And that's just my way of working. With Hunt for Red October, I basically didn't get up into that gimbal until I knew they were about ready to shoot. And then I would get into it and we would start to work there. But it was, it wasn't like super comfortable for me. It must've been rough for Jan because of the kind of lighting restrictions and the fact that when they turned it on, I mean, it was bouncing all over the place. Quite often the camera was like on top of a Titan crane and long extended arm with hot pads on the end. So it was like the base of the camera quite often was 45 feet away, if not more. So it was, the communication was really, really tough. And very few people could be inside the set because the set was always moving and people had to be tied off to guardrails and helmets and all that stuff. I got involved with Hunt for Red October after they completed production on the movie. They were having another facility actually work on the post-production special effects in Paramount. And the director decided they wanted an alternative. So they contacted ILM and so ILM put me on to the project at that point. John wanted us to make it look like we were really underwater, but obviously they had to take certain cinematic license so that we could actually see the subs at those distances. So we wanted a lot of feeling of depth and scale because the Hunt for Red October is supposed to be over 600 feet long in scale. So that was our aim with that. So we tried to find out what he visually wanted to achieve. There was this really fantastic shot where they ran the camera over the large model and they used a series of mirrors because they couldn't get the camera close enough. It was just too big and bulky. Well, because John wanted a lot of the shots to be extremely close to the submarine, we didn't want to shoot them far away to make them look like they were miniature. So we wanted to really scrape the sides of them. So there were a few shots where we actually had mirrors involved and we would basically build like a triangular mirror system put right up next to the lens. And then the lens would photograph through that mirror onto the model itself. So the mirror was literally scraping the model itself. We had to develop a special rig to hang the Red October so that it would stay well out of view of the camera for the distance shots. Tad Chanowski redeveloped a rig that he had invented for batteries not included. And what it was, was a hanging frame from which were suspended 12 wires. And the 12 wires were connected to the Red October at four points. So each point had three wires attached to it, which triangulated the possible motion at each one of those points. So as a result, we had a rig that was electronically operated and could make the Red October pitch and yaw in a really smooth fashion, which was very believable. Because the production schedule was so tight, we had two motion control crews working on the project. Well, motion control, as it's become, is a computer controlled camera that runs generally at a very slow speed. One of the things that we knew we had to do, since we had to photograph this in smoke, is we didn't want to spend a lot of time doing blue screen or matting and trying to combine that depth. So what we decided to do was shoot it in smoke, suspend these by very thin wires. And Joel Fulmer basically designed a rig that we could motion control that would suspend the submarines, and they connected onto an entire motion control crane system. It's one thing to do a submarine just tracking through the water, which in our case was heavy smoke. But things got very complicated when the Red October has to traverse a rocky terrain, subterranean area. One of the frustrating things was with this particular project, we were just on the verge of making computer graphics work for a lot of things. And of course, John McTiernan and a lot of people in Hollywood had been hearing things, and so they wanted the whole thing done, computer graphics and compositing. We said, well, we're not at that point where we can actually do all of that. But we did want to make sure that we did all the ripple effects and the distortions and get those added in as computer graphics. The computer effects were kind of primitive, but they were the best that was available at the time. When you're creating a composite of multiple live elements or CGI and live elements, the hardest thing is always trying to get them to look like they were photographed at the same time. If you look carefully at the movie, every scene ends with a provocative question. And can you believe to this day I still remember the line I say? He knows his Russian lines. That kind of mind doesn't let go of stuff. But wishes it did let go of stuff. This was like the big event in my life, because I did this movie. And after this movie, I got offered other movies. The script and the way it's filmed and the way it's directed is quite unique, and it feels very modern. It's not one shot that feels old in this whole movie. We've done 13 movies. That was the best time I have ever spent with a director. Submarine movies generally deal with brave men in confined circumstances under enormous pressure. That makes for what can be great movie drama.