December 2

Excerpt from Australian Broadcast Corp interview

December 2, 2003

Q. In what ways is Captain Jack different kind of guy from Maximus?

A. Oh completely different. Possibly they are similar in what they inspire in their men, you know? Um ... But I think uh you're talking about leaders with you know a completely different set of, a completely different brief shall we say in terms of what they're supposed to achieve. You know, uh, I'm not sure how Maximus would go on a boat for a start! (giggles) yeah ....

Q. How did Russell go on a boat?

A. Russell was very wired about going on boats let me tell ya. I've grown up in two different harbor cities so it's not as if I've been unused to getting on all different shapes and sizes of vessels. But I've always thought through my life that I wasn't a very good sailor. I began to wonder ... I saw it as a problem to start with but then I began to wonder if it was just another physical thing you could face down and get past. That's what I discovered. The difference between a seasick sailor and another kind of sailor is ... time. And by the time it came to we'd finished production and all that, getting on a yacht and sailing from Sydney into Coff's Harbor, uh we'd finished production and all that I didn't think it would be a very good situation for the Captain to be continuously throwing up in front of the men. The way that I finally got to that point was the time spent on board the boat. But it's the same with anything like that. It's the miles in the saddle and the time you spend focusing on it which will help you achieve what you want to achieve.

Q. Speaking of playing the violin which you do in the film. I read a review from a newspaper in Dallas that praised your playing in the film. Are you going to come clean about that? It wasn't you actually playing on the soundtrack?

A. Of course not, we don't want to scare all the children. But that's going to happen in terms of whatever you're doing in the film. However you can't pretend to play a complicated piece by Boccherini or Mozart you have to know where you are. And for me, that level of work is about the violinist who sits in the audience and goes ... "he's actually playing it." The thing is I was taught by Richard and a few other people .... Zoe Black was one of them, Robert Green in America um, so I had plenty of teachers and I spent as much time as I needed to be comfortable with the instrument for the bowing to be accurate, for the fingering to be accurate you're learning every single note of four complete pieces for there to be a minute and thirty seconds in the film eventually There's a lot of work that goes into a small amount of screen time. And then Richard plays then to my fingering, so Richard Tognetti replaces the sound of what we're doing. But you've got to understand that on the set even when you're on playing it live you're miming to the soundtrack then anyway.

Q. The Richard you refer to, the Richard Tognetti is from the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Do you want to say a little bit about what he's actually brought into the project?

A. I met Richard in 1995 in New York when the Australian chamber orchestra was playing in Carnegie Hall. I was a long, long way away from home and had been away for quite some time and uh so were they. You know? So I very cheekily hang the Australian consulate and said, "Do you obviously want me to attend?" A box full of seats and I took Salma Hayek and a few other people. I was just thought that they were magnificent I was really amazed by his energy on stage and was really amazing to me that a violinist could be so on fire. You know? So we became friends that night possibly out of the mutual aberration of Salma Hayek and the enjoyment we got out of teasing her hairdresser about his fear of heights while we're standing on top of the Ritz hotel. Somewhere in that we found common ground? So when it came up that somebody was asking me to be a violinist I said well I need to see if I can enlist Richard's help if I can. I was told that I'd There might be other things that he could contribute. Richard is a wonderful fella so Peter and him hit it off straight away. But also, more importantly, is that the time period, is Richard Tognetti's sandbox. Once of the things to Peter was I want this guy to teach me violin but also you should meet him. One particular I think is the Boccherini's Madrid ~ was a magnificent way to finish the film ~ has a great spirit, it has a great sense of humor, a beautiful piece of music. Quite difficult to play ... when you're not a violinist.

Q. Paul Bettany - sensational performance here. And you worked with him in A Beautiful Mind where he played your room mate. Was that helpful in actually developing the kind of on screen rapport the two of you needed to have in Master and Commander?

A. I'm sure it was, but I'm sure we could have achieved the same thing without as well. You know? That was my uh, the way I view Paul. So when his name came up, there wasn't too many people who were enthusiastic about it because in American film at the moment putting together that kind of pairing together again so quickly having had such success as we'd had with A Beautiful Mind is uh, not how people view the business. But right from the moment we first met, from when we first shook hands we began doing a kind of comedy that is all relied on trust. You know? Trusting that the person you're doing the comedy with will hold up their end of the bargain. Similar to a sort of a Peter Cook / Dudley Moore thing. And we got into it naturally and made everybody in the room, and we'd only just met, they were like literally falling out of their chairs with laughter. Um, and see that's an indication that we've grown up in a very similar way, we've both grown up with parents in the business so to speak, we've both grown up with the theatrical tradition, you know, points in both of our lives that the only way we could make a living was busking in the streets so we share a lot of common ground in the way we've gotten to the place we're at. But bottom line was, he was the right man for the job.