Inside the high-risk Hollywood quest to bring Sebastian Junger's true-life thriller to the screen

By Hal Espen

Claudette Barius/Warner Bros.

The Andrea Gail's Hollywood crew in the grip of the monster

Given the A-list talent involved, readers of the book (and of Outside, where a feature adapted from an early draft of The Perfect Storm ran in 1994) have reason to hope that the movie will offer more than Hollywood pyrotechnics. Petersen (Das Boot, In the Line of Fire) knows how to direct brisk action thrillers combining intelligence and a bracing touch of perverse humor. His cinematographer is John Seale, an Australian whose most recent films were The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley. The screenplay is by William D. Wittliff (among his credits are The Black Stallion and the 1989 TV miniseries Lonesome Dove) and Bo Goldman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Shoot the Moon). Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, who were terrific together in last year's Three Kings, head up a brilliant cast of actors including John C. Reilly, Diane Lane, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Cherry Jones. And the advance word is that Industrial Light and Magic's digital effects impart the hurricane's full lethal brutality with an unprecedented realism.

Something more heartfelt than the mere desire to craft a box-office hit seems to have driven everyone involved in the making of The Perfect Storm. In part this commitment was a response to the power of Junger's book, but there was also an awareness that the disaster that befell the Andrea Gail was not a distant historical tragedy. Real men died, devastating real families and loved ones in a community already devastated by the collapse of North Atlantic fisheries. The adventure being re-created is a true one, and as Clooney puts it, "We didn't want to do it an injustice."