Hi, my name is George Dzundza. I play the Chief of the Boat on the film called Crimson Tide.

And I'll be taking you through the submarine into various places and things that you have not ordinarily seen before. You're going to be able to see things that will shock you, that might make you smile, and others that will just make you understand the difficult nature of what it is like to be underwater for long, long periods of time.

I'll see you in a little bit. We shoot six. Uh, no, we shot five and you got three, four, and five on A.

And three and four was your pitch. Three, four, three, four, and five.

The most expeditious way of covering stuff like this is by using several cameras. Yes. So, we've got cameras on the floor. Tap in the video. Put the housing on. Let's go.

We've got four cameras back here. It's time-consuming setting each setup. So, it's better if you cover it with several cameras. Yeah. Give me like a 180 there. I'll do a second 180 here.

Yeah. 'Cause Gene's looking forward all the time. Straight on. Straight on to Gene. So, you're on... Hey. Um, no. Do give me a flat. Give me two-dimensional. Yeah. Give me... No, on Gene, flat on, full face, frontal.

And then I'm coming around here on Denzel.

Yeah. You're on the 180 here, man. Yeah. Yes, it's covered. And what's really interesting about this picture is that the three most powerful men in the world are the President of this country, the head of Russia, and a commander of a nuclear submarine.

The destruction in one missile is more than we've ever used combined in all the wars since the beginning of time, including the bombs that were dropped on Japan. So these are lethal, lethal.

killing machines, and one man controls it all. We have a properly formatted emergency action message from National Command Authority for strategic missile launch. Captain, your course, sir.

Get the authenticator. Denzel Washington plays a character who comes on as the number two in command on the boat, and the number one in command is Gene Hackman. And they're basically from two schools.

One's the new guy. He's experienced, but he went to Harvard. Hackman, of course, is from the old school. They respect each other enormously and they've heard of each other, and in fact, Hackman picked him off a list.

As you no doubt heard, my XO has appendicitis. I need a good man to fill his spot.

Your name was at the top of the list. Oh, that's good to know, sir.

It was a short list. An interesting kind of project to work on, in that we were trying to make drama out of moments when you're speaking on an intercom. Gentlemen, this is the captain.

Russian rebels have threatened to launch against our country and are fueling right now. They will have launch capability in 60 minutes. This is a state of high crisis; we're about to fire.

And as we're about to fire, we get a second message that gets interrupted because our sub gets attacked. Radio, receiving emergency action message. Recommend, Alert One. Recommend, Alert One.

The second message might have called off the first, but now we don't know what to do. Sir, this is an EAM pertaining to a nuclear missile.

No, Mr. Hunter, that's a message fragment. And we don't know whether we're supposed to push the button or not. Well, Gene Hackman's character, Ramsay, wants to push the button and my character doesn't.

Then the sparks fly. Look at this. Now, if you notice, this is an actor getting ready to prepare. It's a very serious moment.

This is his close-up. He's getting ready. Now, you look at the intensity with which he focuses. Go in deeper. Go into the soul. You can see the soul of the artist here at this moment.

And he goes in. This is that tearful moment in this scene. You'll notice this in the movie later on. That tearful moment, the bow of the head. And you'll understand its significance later on.

The head of the... Look at this. Rude. He's rude. Running with cameras to line them up.

Oh, we're waiting for, waiting for another poll. Watching it go away. Good work. Carry on.

Cut or I'll find some. Another target package. Captain, you're relieved of your position. Cobb, get Mr. Hunter out of control. I do not concur, sir. I do not get Lieutenant Zimmer in here right now. Believe me, under Navy regulations, operating procedures, arrest this man. Get him out of control right now. No, you can't take me out. No, I don't. Oh, God.

Covering the release. Yeah, I know what it is. I knew yesterday. I sure knew yesterday. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. You're relieved of your position. Get Lieutenant Zimmerman in here now. Captain, sir, I do not concur and I do not recognize your authority to relieve me under Navy regulations.

Arrest this man. Get him out. Captain, under operating procedures governing the release of nuclear weapons, we cannot launch our missiles unless both you and I agree.

What are you waiting for? A formality, sir. This is not a formality. Is it expressly why your command must be repeated?

I must give my assent and I do not give it, sir. And furthermore, if you continue upon this course, arrest the XO on a charge of mutiny.

You have to arrest the XO on a charge of violation of authority and command 0815 and relieve you of command.

The USS Alabama rebel, controlled missiles being fueled. Launch codes compromised. Dissident threatened launch at continental United States.

Set DEFCON 2 immediately, launch 10 Trident missiles. They're fueling their missiles. We don't have time to mess around until you've had time to think this over. I don't have to think it over. We're relieving you of command. I am assuming command.

You're not assuming anything. Cobb, escort the captain to the stateroom. Captain Cobb, the captain is under arrest. Lock him in the stateroom. Now, Cobb, I sir. Casting a movie is a little bit like painting pictures, and that's my background.

And you begin in a corner and you put a color down and you think you have a vision of what the end product's going to be, but as you put each stroke down or each color down, one affects the other.

Some people play their personalities. Well, both Denzel and Gene are capable of playing anybody and yet they're still Denzel and Gene. You get everything with them and there's nothing they can't do and it shows. Okay. Okay. So maybe then where a lot of the character came for me was in the doing, you know, finding out what it is that I do because there were entire scenes that were based upon what we're supposed to be doing in the sub and you couldn't fake it.

You know, they had the real stuff there. 100 yards, 55 knots.

Arm torpedoes two and four. Now torpedoes two and four. Now torpedoes are off, sir. Brace for impact.

Zero bubbles. Any course 231. Good, good, good. Rig ship for impact. Rig ship for impact. It got tough sometimes. You know, all these fire control and strategic and this and that and missile blah blah blah.

Sonar, give me exact range and uh making 1,000 yards. It was It was cool, but I like that kind of stuff.

Launch countermeasures, countermeasures away, sir. Rig ship for impact. Rig ship for impact. What's important about the character is the fact that um he was brought up in a Navy that tended not to over-psychoanalyze both the personnel that he works with and the situations that he was given.

His position about the new Navy is that there are gray areas that he doesn't believe in.

He doesn't believe that there can be gray areas in the military. You think it was a mistake, Mr. Hunter? Sir, using the bomb on Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Well, if I thought that, sir, I wouldn't be here.

Interesting way you put that. How'd I put it, sir?

Very carefully. This makes for an interesting character to play. Somebody who is, um, very direct about what they do and opinionated; a very strong military man. I think his dog gave me the final seal of approval.

Gracie—about that dog. Takes him everywhere. Navy looks the other way 'cause he's Ramsey. You know, started to look for individuals, personalities, you know, more than just great actors.

I imagine in the end to get great actors and different individuals, different personalities, so they were memorable. It's a combination of Tony's great eye and our ability to spot really talented actors, and that kind of melds together.

And when you see the young kids on this sub, I think the entire world will be impressed. When we were doing our research and studying on what it takes to be a guy who goes underwater for three months, I got a certain sense of these men.

It's much more family-like than I think any other branch of the service, which also allows for the schism when it does happen in the film to be very, very shattering.

Steve, hold it. Now, they're fueling their missiles.

Scotch. Uh, Johnny, back. Come here, man. Come here. That lamp sitting up there. We dressed that a while ago.

See that orange lamp? Get rid of it. Yeah. Okay. And also beyond that, I want to put some more cables. Run a bunch of thin cables like that through there.

See that? That corrugated one is back. Yeah. Give me a bunch of other ones through here. John. Yeah. What exactly happened here? I know her book professionally. Well, you see, uh, I was cueing some background and one of the guys walked right in front of Gene on this line and blocked his line.

So, Tony just lashed out and punched me right in the face right here.

Said, "Don't ever do that again." Yeah, it's pretty nasty. You think all the support you're getting? This crew is very supportive. They've all put band-aids on their faces in my support, and I really appreciate it.

I know they stand behind me, and hopefully I won't mess up and miscue the background again. Background action.

go out of control. Hit the kill switch. Couldn't get to it. Too hot. I really enjoyed the scene that leads up to this big confrontation that Gene and I have.

Captain, National Military Command Center knows what sector we're in. They have satellites looking down on us to see if our birds are locked. And if they're not, then they give our orders to somebody else. That's why we maintain more than one sub.

It's what they call redundancy. I know about redundancy, Mr. Hunter. It was a wonderful build from being reasonable to being totally out of control. Cob, arrest this man and get him out of here.

Under operating procedures governing the release of nuclear weapons, we cannot launch our missiles unless both you and I agree. When you're having an argument or something, if you're good at what you do, you always have some feeling about the other person.

And that works for you. That works, you know, for the audience. I say I order you under arrest on the charge of mutiny.

When the division happens within the ship where you have two sides that are debating whether or not to launch a nuclear attack or not, it's a matter of seconds when people choose sides. He's in command now. If they order him to launch, we'll launch. I won't blow them all to hell.

But I'd rather go down myself and get this one wrong. And the official thing to do would be to fire the missiles. If you get a first order says launch and the second order says don't launch, but it doesn't have the authentication code at the bottom.

If it's not complete, you ignore the second order because it could be a dummy and you launch. The character played by Denzel takes that one step further and decides for himself that that's not correct.

When you're faced with death, you want to go with what you know. What we know is that the Navy says orders in hand and our captain is the man who should be in charge.

So, we get him out. I think that I would make the same choices he made, given those circumstances.

I think I would do what my character does in the film. Give me the missile key, Mr. Hunter. I think people would probably respect him whether or not he's right or wrong. What he does, you know, that's something else.

But you respect him for doing what he believes is right. He does it by the book. That's what makes good drama. You know, what if, what would you do, signals now? Give me Put a two on the stand inside.

Give me Sean here. Okay, good. Let's have a look, guys. Sean. Yeah.

Can we send them down a little bit? Yeah. Let's slide. Yeah. Here we go. It's a two and two singles, man. Yeah. So, uh, Michael, slide downstream a bit. Can you? Good. Put a little bit of shadow so I can bring another light.

Yeah, that's okay. And when George go down, Navy's problems with the story was the mutiny, you know, and they say this would never happen on a nuclear sub today, you know, it would never happen in the submarine force. If it would never happen, why do they train their guys in, you know, what would happen in the event of a mutiny, you know, so obviously it's something that isn't very far from their minds.

When I would run my scenarios past the captains that I was interviewing, I could see their faces go white because what we were talking about having happened at the sub was scary.

And you talk about it to a Hollywood executive and he goes, "Oh, great.

That's great." But you talk about a sub captain and he thinks about the men on board and the boys that he's sailing out to sea with and it is frightening.

It so happened in Top Gun because it was a PG-13 picture. Nobody was cussing and uh you know there wasn't on-screen sex, whatever.

So they said, "Well, this picture is quote unquote appropriate for us." They make arbitrary decisions that aren't arbitrary for them.

We understand it. All's fair in love and war. But it's just crazy. Well, we're going to make this movie with or without Navy cooperation. I'm going to have a chase boat with two cameras on that and the chase boat's going to chase the sub to a T.

I got a helicopter. At least initially, we knew what a sub looked like. We had pictures of a sub. We had pictures of the interiors and we made actual scale replicas of everything that they actually have inside that con and inside the submarine.

They thought that the image of the Navy may be tarnished, but on the contrary, I think that it's a real plus for the Navy because it means that the system that the Navy established actually does work.

Movies are full of obstacles, and that was just one big general one that made everybody be a little more inventive. The kind of the climax of the film for us was the implosion of the Akula, and it had to get hit from one of the Alabama torpedoes.

But unlike other films we've seen, we've never seen a submarine actually explode and then implode as it really would on screen. I think it took basically three types of technology.

It took motion control dry-for-wet technology, which means we take the miniatures that we've built and put them on a stage and shoot them with computers controlling the cameras and the models, and with the use of smoke in the room and lighting effects, we give the illusion that we're underwater.

The Akula model was actually photographed underwater, wet-for-wet, which is where we actually place the miniatures in the water and shoot them underwater.

The whole thing takes place on screen in about 6 seconds, but in real life, it takes place in a quarter of a second.

Now, when I had you and Gene up there and you were feeling those violent moves, that's what we were on. Oh, what the gimbal is, is it's a hydraulic mechanism that we engineered and designed solely for the purpose of simulating what the submarine movement would be like.

God, sonar, incoming torpedoes bearing 086. They must have got one off before they got hit, sir.

Right full rudder, launch starboard countermeasure, away, dive, make your depth 1200 feet, 20 down now.

Take a deep dive on those blanks. Let's go, let's go. Hang on everybody.

Well, the gimbal was difficult because we were walking at this severe angle and trying to do a scene at the same time. So, it was tough, but it added a certain realistic feeling to the picture that I think is indispensable.

Well, you know, the sets have been unbelievable. And just the way that Tony's shooting it, I think is really fantastic. And the angles and a lot of motion.

Four firemen get into the kitchen and then they get cut off from safety by this explosion, which is this freezer door. There is some danger involved, but it's mainly it's not the danger aspect.

It's just there's a lot of elements that you've got to coordinate to put together. So it's time-consuming just getting each set up. Yeah, but it's an interesting sequence because a fire in a submarine is obviously your worst nightmare.

Background switch. Couldn't get to it. Too hot.

My challenge each day is, no matter how small it is, to try and do something fresh or different from what I've done before. Whether it's in something I get from a performance or from a look or from an angle or it's just something, and at the end of a good day, I feel as if I've achieved something that I haven't done before.

You want to work with people you like, and that's one of the reasons we've revisited the world of Tony for the fourth time, because Tony's an absolute pleasure.

He's just a great guy. When you go onto a set that Tony Scott's running, he is great in the field commanding men. He's like a world-class general. But he's cool, man.

You know, he's got a crew that he's worked with a lot, and he really makes it real easy for the cast, real easy for me, real simple. He's very accommodating, you know, obviously very talented.

So, I was glad, you know, I mean, part of the decision of me making the decision to do the film was that Tony was directing it because this is the kind of stuff that he can make sing and fly.

Behind the Scenes: Crimson Tide (Scott, 1995) with Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington

Scripts