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Ghost Ship in our magazines

THE MOVIE: Ghost Ship

THE STARS:
Julianna Margulies • Gabriel Byrne • Isaiah Washington
DIRECTOR: Steve Beck

THE CONCEPT:
A salvage crew is employed to investigate a mysterious vessel, the remains of the fabled Antonia Graza, lost at sea for more than 40 years. But the crewmembers find the ship is far from deserted; it’s now the home to something more deadly and horrific than anything they’ve ever encountered.

U.S. RELEASE: October 25, 2002 • Rated: R

THE COMMENTS:

STEVE BECK:
“The opening sequence in the film is one of the best uses of shock that I’ve seen. If you look at the opening scene frame for frame, you’ll find that there is only about four seconds of actually ‘blood work.’ The less you show the more powerful it is. So we were real careful about the set-up of it. We were going for that super shock at the front of the movie to [get the audience] right out of the gate!”

GABRIEL BYRNE (Captain Sean Murphy):
“Greer is a gentleman who’s searching for his place in the sun. He’s at that point where he wants to strike out on his own, but while he’s there on the boat he knows he has to toe the line. He gets caught up with a very mysterious character on the ship, which takes him in a different direction than the rest of the crew.”

JULIANNA MARGULIES (Epps):
“I thought the water scenes wouldn’t be difficult for me and they ended up being a lot more than I’d bargained for. It was really hard. I had to really get into shape to play Epps and I trained throughout the filming on top of the 14-hour workdays. There was a lot of underwater work that involved scuba diving – luckily I was already a fully qualified scuba diver. At one point, when we were out filming in the water, they had to put the shark nets out because apparently several sharks had been seen in the area.”

ISAIAH WASHINGTON (Greer):
“Doing the CGI scenes was so hard. I will never take for granted those people who have worked on Star Wars like Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor, who have had to perform with nothing but an X and a green screen. You feel like a complete idiot to be in a room surrounded by green screen and have a voice shout at you, ‘Okay chandelier; okay table to your left.’ Steve would shout to me, ‘Widen your eyes, be more afraid.’ I said, ‘I can’t be more scared,’ because in the year 2002 we’ve seen it all on the five o’clock news. I think if Gabriel and Julianna and all of us really began to play scared for the movie, it wouldn’t have worked. The process was not to be scared but to be disoriented, not knowing what was going on. That was important to us, that was stronger.”

STEVE BECK:
“I hate to be scared, but it’s a lot of fun entertaining people in this way. This is a gigantic Hallowe'en party!

Written by Judy Sloane. Back to top

Visit the official Ghost Ship site
Images above © Warner Bros
Feature © 2002 Visual Imagination Limited.
Not for reproduction.

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