u-571

What Saving Private Ryan did for the Normandy Landings, the white-knuckle suspense movie U-571 aims to do for the Battle of the Atlantic. The $90-million World War II epic from Universal Pictures tells of a daring mission by a US submarine crew to steal a top secret German coding device named Enigma from a stranded Nazi U-boat in 1942 and thus turn the tide of the war. Based on a real-life episode that occurred at the height of the Second World War, the all-action spectacular was filmed during early 1999 at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios, where full-size, authentically detailed submarine interiors were built; and on location in Malta, where the mid-Atlantic battles were recreated in all their explosive glory. U-571 re-teams veteran producer Dino De Laurentiis with Jonathan Mostow, the writer and director of the successful 1997 suspense thriller Breakdown starring Kurt Russell, which was featured in Preview 26. What is more, says the producer of such classics as La strada, Barbarella and Serpico, plans for his latest production - his 600th! - date back to well before the release of his prior collaboration with Mostow. “During the shooting of Breakdown, Jonathan came to me and said, ‘I don’t know if you’re interested, but I would like to make a World War II movie next. And I have a script set on a submarine’. So I read it and it had an amazing story at its centre. It wasn’t a case of, Well, Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line are being made: Let’s join the trend. No, the fact that it had a war setting was immaterial, because the characters were wonderful, the tale was emotionally involving and it contained one stunning action sequence after another. I couldn’t wait to do it.” Mostow, it turns out, had actually written the U-571 script two years before Breakdown but shelved it because he felt the subject didn’t fit the times. “Who was going to make a suspense thriller set in World War II?” he asks. “Yet I kept coming back to the script, researching it further, as it revolved around such fascinating subject matter. I mean, how did these young sailors have the courage to go on such creaky, leaking vessels left over from the twenties? I would have been scared to death. It took me a long time to get my head around that concept. “I suppose I could have updated the story and added the technology of Crimson Tide or The Hunt for Red October, but that would have taken away the sheer heroism at the story’s core, because submarines today are unthreatening and more like giant office buildings. “Once I had satisfactorily argued my story’s audience relevance and humanised the tension, my long-time writing collaborator Sam Montgomery spent nine months polishing initial drafts,” continues the director. “Then David Ayer, a former US Navy sonar man, came aboard the project to add a final reality level.