LOOKING FOR THE LIGHT
TWO DECADES ON FROM SAVING PRIVATE RYAN AND BAND OF BROTHERS, TOM HANKS RETURNS TO WORLD WAR II WITH SUBMARINE DRAMA GREYHOUND. WRITING EXCLUSIVELY FOR EMPIRE, HE EXPLAINS WHY WAR STORIES CAN GIVE US HOPE
ALAN FURST, THE fabulous novelist of World War II occupations and spies, sets his books in the war years before the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad because up until then, the German army seemed invincible and Nazi Germany was sure to rule one side of the world. The Japanese Empire, with its sudden attack of Pearl Harbor, other bases and civilian populations across the Pacific, had conquered the territory it called The Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. Furst’s characters, then, have but three choices on how to conduct their lives — as heroes, as villains or as cowards.
Now, that is a harsh sentence to pass onto the kids and old folks who were alive then, but it does capture the personal dramas that I find so relentlessly fascinating, human and worthy of telling in movies. The War (yeah, in capital letters) had no end date in sight, the Bad guys were winning, and matters as broad as who lived and who died, and as common as how much bread and bacon would be on store shelves, were daily worries for most of the people on the planet.
Until the Covid-19 virus affected us all, living in a state of stasis — of constant civil strife — might have been hard to fathom. If you were alive in 1939 and could read a map, the next six years of your life were to be ruled by the great unknown. You had no idea who was going to survive, if your city was to be forever blacked out at night, if invaders were going to appear from just over the horizon or if liberation would ever save you.
I KEEP RETURNING to stories about World War II because they ask a very basic question: what would I have done? I don’t mean, “Would I have signed up to serve?” as I have enough hubris to assure that, like everyone else, I would have. Rather, I wonder what would have become of me once I became a soldier, seaman or airman? Would I have been an engineer? A cook? A quartermaster? A machinist-mate, like my father was in the South Pacific? A paratrooper who jumped into Normandy on D-day like the fellow who ran the drycleaning service of the hotel I once worked for? Would I have been a real-life version of the characters I have played, or would I have served by filling out forms at a desk?
And how would I have behaved in that physiological state of stasis — in the paradox of equilibrium and strife?
STASIS: A PERIOD OF INACTIVITY… OR CIVIL STRIFE.
When I came across C.S. Forester’s The Good Shepherd, I found a setting for that very state — a destroyer escort protecting a convoy of ships in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in early 1942. The character of Ernie Krause is middle-aged, a career naval officer who graduated from the US Naval Academy 20 years prior, but has just now been given command of his first ship. Adapting the book into the screenplay, Greyhound was an exercise in distilling a million details into a straight line from the moment Commander Krause awakes one morning until he returns to his bed days later, having survived just one extended battle of the North Atlantic; it is his first crossing. He, his crew and the other ships under his protection experience the dread of the war, the terror of fiery deaths in the cold sea, the miscues of unreliable equipment, the life-altering reliance on each other, and the pleasures of stolen bites of a decent meal and the bracing power of a cup of hot coffee.
As Forester did with the book, my adapted screenplay did not go to other settings of London or Berlin. The enemy in the Nazi wolfpack are not seen except when the U-boats surface or in Eye-of-god shots from below. One of the challenges of writing the screenplay was dramatising all the information that Forester, the novelist, was able to put into prose. For example, few civilians know that the U-boats could travel as fast as their prey only when they were on the surface. Submerged for the attack, submarines were slowed to a fraction of that speed, powered by electric engines with batteries that needed recharging on the surface.
Sonar could not operate when the ship was at high speeds. If Krause needed the familiar ‘beep beep beep PING beep’ that is a part of all ship/sub movies, Greyhound, the ship, has to slow its engines for the sonar to work at all.
And get this word into your head — pillenwerfer. Ever hear of it? I hadn’t either. German for “pill-thrower”, a pillenwerfer was a decoy device that a sub would release underwater, creating the same kind of sound signature that sonar would often confuse with a U-boat.
This stuff drove director Aaron Schneider and me a bit nuts. We shot the film on a stage at the Celtic Studios in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in the spring of 2018, also using the USS Kidd, a vintage Fletcher-class destroyer that sits on the Mississippi River as part of a vibrant historical area in downtown Baton Rouge. The cast was trained by Captain Dale Dye (USMC Ret.) who I’ve worked with since the Vietnam sequences in Forrest Gump, then again on every World War II project since (he also played the supervisor who fired me as Larry Crowne). Despite the gimballed set on stage and the actual bulkheads of the Kidd, we still found frustrating limitations when it came to dramatising the smaller details, the standard procedures and historical records that add ingredients to the stew. For example, the quality of the radar in early 1942 was notoriously spotty, and often
simply did not work. And, do you know what a ‘talker’ is? That’s the crew member on the bridge that repeats exactly what he hears over his headphones — from all over the ship — relaying information and orders to and from the commander. For an actor, it’s a blast to perform. For a director, it’s a lot of footage to shoot. For a screenwriter, it’s a ton of verbiage that devours pages. Krause does not have the luxury of the cinematic narrative of the movie — some of the film’s grander storytelling shots of U-boats on the prowl and the position of the ships in the convoy. He has only the information that is relayed to him and his view of the grey sea.
But these details, all these small bits of behaviour, become the material of drama — the small ‘b’ beats that make up the big ‘B’ beats of the inherent conflict of Greyhound. Where are those enemy subs? According to what the sonar operator just said to the talker, and what the talker just repeated to the commander, the U-boat hoping to kill them all is somewhere over there, maybe. And, Krause has just heard over the TBS (‘Talk Between Ships’) that the other escorts under his command are chasing a target of their own — a Nazi U-boat — somewhere over there.
A FILM IS made three separate times, each a creative marathon. Writing the screenplay is a maddening if glorious dream, as anything can be conjured up on paper. In the early drafts of Greyhound I was able to go deep, ignoring budget and physics — for example, initially the Wardroom [the commissioned officers’ mess] tilted so far over while the ship was manoeuvring when under attack that plates got smashed and urns of hot coffee went flying. And Krause, in his mind’s eye, imagined exactly where the enemy U-boats were, thanks to his visions of Nazi swastikas that crawled across the waves of the rough sea like giant spiders from hell. But limited time, the lack of a second gimbal, a stretched budget and story priorities put the kibosh on all that.
In the second incarnation of the movie’s creation — the weeks of shooting — time and budget and, hell, the focus of the film, made changes inevitable, even crucial. The script tells us what needs to be shot, but the filmmaking itself distils moment after moment, scene after scene, beat after beat, until behaviour and procedure is captured inside the lens. Scenes in the Combat Information Centre, separate from the ship’s bridge, became fleshed out and weightier as orders from Krause are dealt with and his questions are answered.
In the long third and final act of making Greyhound — the 18 months of editing, mixing, scoring and shooting of SPFX footage — the film never stopped telling us what it was — and what it was not. The faces of the crew became more expressive than lines of dialogue. A captured pause told more than a shot. The white glare of a distress rocket in the black of night became a chilling, oft-repeated moment of dread. The sad reality of segregation in the Navy made the serving of meals a bitter comment on that historical fact. The African-american messmates served ham steaks and peaches to the ship’s officers in some scenes, but were called to ‘General Quarters’ where they supplied ammunition to the ships guns while under attack.
The challenges we faced making the movie all came from the original Forrester [novel]. He wrote of the duties of the four-hour watches, the pondering of what could happen in the next moment, of that stasis, and the stresses Krause faces in the middle of the night, in the middle of the ocean, in the early days of the Battle Of The Atlantic. On board the ship are messengers and clerks, cooks and mechanics, sailors in charge of getting the laundry done, each man with an assigned battle station when ‘General Quarters’ are sounded. Had we had all the time and money in the world, I would have included scenes in the ship’s laundry — as
I bet, were I in the Navy in 1942, that would have been my assignment.
I DON’T DOUBT that the news of another World War II drama with my name on it will result in cries of, “What? Again? Why?”
I read history for more than entertainment to pass the time on a summer beach (or while I took ‘Shelter-in-place’). I am an actor tasked by Shakespeare — who wrote the greatest historical narratives in literature — to hold the mirror up to human nature. Well-written history, be it the Bard’s Henry IV Parts One and Two or Eugene Sledge’s With The Old Breed: At Peleliu And Okinawa, is as authentic to the record of history as it is to the verities of human nature. These things happened to human beings who were just like us, placing soul-crushing stresses on folks who hoped to keep their families secure, pursue happiness, enjoy the results of their labour, and simply grow old and grow up. That is the stuff of timeless drama, free of any fog of nostalgia nor limited by genre.
In Michael Chabon’s most wonderful book, The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay, a woman writes this love letter in the earliest days of The War: “I don’t know what is going to happen to you, to the country or the world. For all I know these words themselves are lying at the bottom of the sea.”
Stories from World War II are about the heartbreak and worries of I don’t know. In our production company Playtone’s mini-series and much of the non-fiction-based films I’ve done, the stasis of I don’t know is the personal challenge that can be met with common purpose, with some characters being demonstrably right and others being devastatingly wrong. Even in the best of times, in eras of peace and normalcy, heroes, villains and cowards all work their instincts. In stories of The War, as, I hope, in Greyhound, we see our current selves reflected on screen — of the choices each of us are forced to make in times of purpose and in periods of stasis.
It is the human condition to suffer Fate. How we live through that suffering is when we define our humanity, no?
GREYHOUND IS SCHEDULED TO BE IN CINEMAS IN AUTUMN/ WINTER 2020