Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life (5 page)

Rae is horrified when she awakens and sees that the schooner is no longer in sight. “Would you just tell me one thing?” she asks. “I just need to know if that boat is sinking.”

“No,” Hughie answers, looking at his watch. “Past tense would do, but, yeah, it is. Why don’t you believe me?”

“Yeah, I believe you. ‘Course I do. That’s why we’ve got to go back. To get John.”

“There’s no going back.”

Rae locates the schooner on the radar screen, but the radio contact with John is only one way (he can hear her, but she can’t hear him). He uses clicks to talk to her. One of the auditory delights of the movie occurs when she talks to him on the radio, her whispers of “Are you there?” cutting straight to the bone.

In an attempt to get control of the situation, Rae allows Hughie to make love to her. Whether the sex is a seduction on her part or a form of rape is left up to the viewer to determine. Nicole is nude during this scene, her by-then famous posterior exposed for maximum benefit.

Once Hughie lets down his guard, Rae drugs him and then tries to load a shotgun, only they end up fighting over it. He tries to choke her, but passes out from the drugs. While he is unconscious, Rae ties him up and nails down the hatch to the cabin. She tries to start the engine, but it won’t start. She hoists the sails and turns the boat around. There is more drama as Hughie gets free and goes after her once again. She wounds him with a spear gun and sets him adrift in a rubber raft. Of course, this being a thriller, there is more action to come.

Nicole’s physical acting in this movie is superb. It was really the first time she had been asked to display anger, panic, and resolve with her body—and she rose to the task, even in those scenes, so uncharacteristic of Nicole, in which she had to go toe-to-toe with Hughie in physical combat.

“She was absolutely focused on that picture, which is remarkable for a twenty-year-old,” says assistant director Stuart Freeman. “She handled everything like a trooper [and] under pretty hard conditions. I did a picture with Vanessa Redgraves in Alaska many years ago and Nicole reminds me so much of Vanessa in the tenacity to get the performance. She’s so focused on getting a performance that she is unaware of being cold or being roughed up because she is so focused on the performance. That was in 1987—now the world knows how focused she is.”

That is high praise coming from an assistant director as experienced as Freeman. Born in Great Britain, where he began his film career, he moved to Australia in 1981; by 2002 he had worked on over sixty feature films in twenty-nine countries and had completed more than two hundred hours of television.

Although Freeman had lived in Australia six years before production began on
Dead Calm
—and he was familiar with Nicole’s work—he had never met her. That occurred in the producer’s office in Sydney while they were in pre-production. They did not meet again until everyone arrived on location in Queensland, a resort area in northeastern Australia just inside the Great Barrier Reef.

The actors and film crew stayed on Hamilton Island for the duration of the twelve-week shoot, living in chalets and block apartments usually rented to tourists. The island is one of the most popular in the area and features a high-rise hotel and a jet airstrip with direct access to Australia’s major cities.

They knew from the start that it would be a difficult shoot—most of the action takes place aboard a schooner and working with boats is sometimes as worrisome as working with animals—but there was no way during pre-production for them to prepare for their worst enemy, bad weather.

“We shot it when the trade winds were full on,” says Freeman. “When we did the storm sequence, we actually sidled out and caught the edge of a storm, which was happening daily. That was the remarkable thing about it—the storm sequences were virtually for real.”

Working at sea is one of the hardest things to do on film, he explains. “It doesn’t matter what happens; if you miss the mark, you can’t just put the brakes on—you have to turn around 360 degrees to come back again and you are subject to the wind, the waves, the elements. The most difficult thing [for the actors] was being able to concentrate on the performance when everything else was against them, the way the weather was treating us.”

When the weather was bad, they simply filmed on a set they built on the island. They constructed it from scratch around a seventy-by-forty-foot tank that was filled with water. Buoyed by empty oil drums, the sets floated on the water, thus providing a sense of realism. When the actors walked, the make-believe boat rocked and rolled, generating a realistic movement comparable to what they would have experienced aboard the ship.

The first acting challenge Nicole faced was as a car accident victim. Lying in the emergency room of a hospital, tubes connected to her body and her face battered and bruised, she convincingly portrayed a mother who had just lost her only child.

“When a good actor focuses, they become that character,” observes Freeman. “Nicole mentally put herself into that position. Obviously, Phil Noyce would have set the scene, the tempo, but it doesn’t matter what the director does because in the long run it has to be the ability of the actor to pull it off. It comes down to ability. She showed that amazing ability at such a tender age. In terms of the style of acting in such an oppressive, if you like, psychological aspect of the movie, it was astounding that she had the ability. I’ve often wondered if she knew she had the ability.”

Another tough scene to make realistic was the sex scene between Nicole and Zane, which was filmed on a set designed to look like the interior of the ship. Nicole’s character initiated the seduction, perhaps with the intention of making him trust her, but shortly after it began (she removed her shirt and he ripped away her shorts), she left him to go up on deck, only to return to complete the act. The scene was tough on Nicole, not because of the nudity—she had appeared nude in movies before—but because of the emotions involved, the fact that she would be having sex with a man she despised.

“All the crew that had to be there were there,” says Freeman. “Everyone respected [her feelings] and that was another thing that she handled superbly. Those that have to be there to do their job, do their job, and part of her job was to do that scene. So it was a matter of doing it and doing it professionally. Again, for her tender years, she was so mature.”

Although Nicole was somewhat shy in her personal relations with the other actors and crew, when it came to the work product, she was surprisingly assertive. “I remember there were many times when there were discussions about a particular scene that she and Phil would have a very, very deep and meaningful conversation while we were doing lighting or getting the positions right,” says Freeman. “Sometimes they would go off and just discuss the performance.”

The subject matter of the film was not the only difficult consideration. Simply dealing with the sea and its many moods was time consuming. Typically, the crew and actors put in fifteen-hour days. Already located a good twenty miles from the mainland, they had to travel an hour by boat from Hamilton Island to reach the lea of another island, where most of the filming took place.

“We had a boat for makeup, support boats, divers, people in the water, camera boats—and our catering was brought out by boat,” says Freeman. “We had a massive boat for our base and we had other boats to take us out—it was absolutely colossal.”

On weekends, everyone let down their hair and partied on Hamilton Island. No one ever thought about leaving the island to go to the mainland. “There were fun times, singing and partying, but nothing extraordinary,” recalls Freeman. The only person who did not seem to relax was Nicole’s co-star Billy Zane. “He was very intense in those days,” says Freeman. “The part he was playing, he put his heart and soul into it, and it was hard for him to get out of it.”

Nicole had a different take on Zane’s apparent isolation. “Phil Noyce manipulated us in certain ways, so that Sam [Neill] and I got on very, very well, and Billy, well, we didn’t get on,” she told
Rolling Stone.
"But Billy and I were playing characters that were in conflict constantly. And I think there was an unspoken agreement between us that we weren’t going to get on. I don’t think you can be buddy-buddy with someone you’re meant to be struggling with, and feeling so much animosity towards.”

To keep in character, Nicole made it a point to be in bed by 10 p.m. each night. For Zane, who remained in character twenty-four hours a day, Nicole’s standoffishness was a challenge and he constantly exhorted Nicole to come out and play past her bedtime. It annoyed her because, as she later admitted, she secretly wanted to be the wild one.

Freeman’s strongest memories about the film revolve around Nicole’s relationship with his daughters—Rachel and Joanna, who were four and five years of age at the time of filming. He recalls that Nicole would complete terrifying scenes in which she was fighting for her life, then she would sit down to watch the dailies and invite Rachel and Joanna to sit on her lap. It was an amazing sight to Freeman, who was not used to seeing actresses change emotional gears so quickly. It touched him to see his daughters cling to her and have their affections reciprocated.

“I have nothing but respect for that girl,” says Freeman. “She’s a very favorite lady of mine because of the things she had to do [in the film] and the conditions she had to do them in. When we saw the dailies and she sat the girls on her knees, you wouldn’t know that she’d been putting on that ordeal the way she was smiling and playing with my girls. She’s an amazing woman . . . Nicole Kidman is one of my happiest memories. I have nothing but respect for her.”

Co-star Neill was left with much the same impression, concluding that she could do just about anything she set her mind to. She has that mysterious attribute that cannot be explained, he decided: You either have it, or you don't.

When
Dead Calm
was released in the United States in early April 1989, Nicole was almost overwhelmed by the attention she received. Warner Brothers flew her to Los Angeles and treated her like royalty. “I have limousines all the time at my disposal,” she told the Australian edition of
Rolling Stone.
“They have two suites for you. Which one would you prefer? ‘Well, I don’t care!’ I said. ‘Whatever you think.’” At every turn, she was asked if she needed anything. If she looked the slightest bit tired, they offered to call in a masseuse. They watched her constantly, ready to respond in an instant to any change in her mood, however slight. “It’s very hard to cope with it without feeling so guilty. You end up walking around going, ‘My God I don’t deserve all this.’ And feeling like you’re bluffing it.”

When director Phillip Noyce went to Hollywood to observe audience response to the film at Mann’s Chinese Theater, what he saw and heard surprised him. “One woman was yelling, ‘I can’t stand this! I can’t stand this!’” he told Steven Rea of the
Philadelphia Inquirer.
“And the audience was shouting back, ‘Well, leave then!’ And she was saying, ‘I can’t leave!’ And I honestly thought she was going to have a heart attack .  .  . audiences right across America are building up an enormous agitation during this movie—they scream and they shout at the screen, and people stand up and yell out.”

Reviews were mixed and displayed some of the same emotions described by Noyce. Wrote Christine Arnold Dolen for the
Miami Herald
: “Somehow you just sense, when a movie begins with an adorable toddler rocketing through the windshield of a car, that you’re not about to experience a few hours of wholesome family entertainment .  .  .The best that can be said about
Dead Calm
is that director Phillip Noyce maintains nearly constant tension and finds a surprising number of ways to evoke menace in confined spaces. As for me, if I want tension, I’ll just drive I-95.”

Roger Ebert had a different take on the film. “[It] generates genuine tension, because the story is so simple and the performances are so straightforward,” he wrote for the
Chicago Sun-Times.
” This is not a gimmick film (unless you count the husbands’ method of escaping from the sinking ship), and Kidman and Zane do generate real, palpable hatred in their scenes together.”

~ ~ ~

After filming on
Dead Calm
was wrapped, everyone was optimistic about the work they had done, but the movie business being what it is, they were afraid to be overly optimistic.

“Every picture that’s made is made by professional people who hope they have made a good product,” says assistant director Stuart Freeman. “I don’t think that anyone thought that it would be the success that it was, but there were a lot of people hoping that it would be a success.”