Bombing the box-office

Be prepared. Be very prepared. The annual summer blockbuster season (not exactly Moviehouse’s favourite time of year) is nearly upon us, and it is about to kick off with the most lavish production of the entire year. Billed as Saving Private Ryan meets Titanic, Pearl Harbour will be bombarding cinemas everywhere from June 1st, and very big things are expected of it (i.e. very big box-office takings). This is hardly surprising, given a budget which surpassed the $150 million mark, rivalling even the cost of 1997’s aforementioned sinking-ship epic.

However, Pearl Harbour can be assumed to be in safe hands on the revenue front, given the reliable track record of its ever-bombastic director Michael Bay. His previous three credits (Bad Boys, The Rock and Armageddon), whatever one’s view of their artistic worth, have between them taken more than a billion dollars worldwide. Bay, for his part, seems to just be happy to get the chance to blow things up, as befits a protege of the Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer partnership. As a little moppet, his hobbies included recreating volcanic explosions, and it is unlikely he will ever grow out of it now that he’s 38 and doing it for a living.

“What can I say? I think whatever a screenwriter can imagine or put down on the page, then I can put up on screen. I like making big movies.”

Happily, Pearl Harbour affords Bay the opportunity for his biggest bombing sequence to date. With almost touching enthusiasm, Bay beams: “When the explosion happened, it was the biggest explosion I have ever seen in my life. Our special effects co-ordinator John Frazier, who has been around the special effects world for 40 years – he was one of the guys who worked on Apocalypse Now – said that this is by far the biggest explosion ever done for a film.”

He’s keen to stress, though, that there’s more to Pearl Harbour than his usual popcorn-and-loud-bangs output.

“This is a much more serious movie. I’m the first to admit that some of my movies, like Bad Boys, have had terrible scripts but great charisma beween the actors. The Rock was a fun ride, Armageddon was a fantasy. But as a director, I want to grow each time I make a movie, and Pearl Harbour is about a key part of history – a moment which has become part of a forgotten history lesson for most Americans. I decided it was such an important story to tell.”

As the title implies, Pearl Harbour is based on the Japanese bombing of a Hawaiian US naval base in 1941 – an event which shook America out of its isolationist stance in World War II. Like Titanic, the plot has a youthful romance at its core: Rafe McCauley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett) are two daredevil young pilots in the US Air Corps. Rafe has fallen for naval nurse Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale) but the war, and in particular the Battle of Britain, separates them. Believing that Rafe has been killed, Evelyn turns to Danny for comfort, only to fall in love (ahh!!!) When Rafe returns unexpectedly, all three are devastated, but the attack on Pearl Harbour supersedes their emotional predicament.

According to Bay, it’s this love triangle which forms “the heart of the movie. And because of the backdrop to the story – the events of war, the huge sense of danger and loss – it’s really an epic love story, which was very appealing to me. Not many fims have that quality.’ He is unconcerned about the inevitable flood of Titanic comparisons.

“The epic quality is going to invite those comparisons. That and the fact that we’ve got some ships in it too! I thought Titanic was a terrific film, but to compare our film to theirs invites expectations that are just too high.”

In preparation, Michael Bay spoke to as many survivors of the Pearl Harbour attack as he could, eventually tracking down over 100 of them and recording as many of their recollections as possible, some of which have ended up in the finished film. Bay is particularly proud of one such recorded incident now brought to the big screen: it involves a Japanese gunner who flew so low that he could motion to American children playing in a schoolyard to take cover.

“You’d think that was a total movie moment,” he says, “but it was a real experience. No film can be 100% historically accurate, so you have to combine things. Otherwise, the movie would take two days.”

Was he at all worried about taking responsibility for such a prestigious project with such massive expectations attached?

“Well, I had been thinking about this film for so long that I could see it in my head. I was worried that I might not be able to get it on film. So I decided that even if I didn’t make a dime on the movie, it would be fine. I’d be happy to do it for free. Just the other day, I showed the trailer to one of the survivors of Pearl Harbour, and he had tears in his eyes at the end. He said, ‘my heart’s not very good and I don’t think I’m going to make it, but I really want to see this film’. That’s a great responsibility. But you know, I would be so happy if the film served as a tribute to these guys.”

Pearl Harbour opens nationwide on June 1st