25/4/2014 Behind the Scenes of "Captain Phillips'" Best Scene, and Its Worst | Criticwire

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Behind the Scenes of "Captain Phillips'" BestScene, and Its Worst

At Letterboxd, Jason Overbeck, who worked on "Captain Phillips" as an apprentice editor, has a brief but fascinating

account of how two of the movie's scenes came together. (Credit to Vadim Rizov for drawing my attention to

Overbeck's post.)

Although he doesn't explicitly frame it as such, the two scenes Overbeck focuses on are the movie's best and its

worst: the career-high moment in which Tom Hanks' skipper takes stock of the traumatic ordeal he just barely

survived, and the opening conversation between Phillips and his wife, played by Catherine Keener. Although Overbeck

wasn't present for the final edit, he did have an opportunity to view the raw footage of both scenes, giving us an

unusual degree of insight into what the film's editor, Christopher Rouse, had to work with.

Let's start with the bad, the painfully on-the-nose conversation between Hanks and Keener in which they baldly lay out

the themes of the film like a nervous public speaker opening with the outline of the talk he's about to give. According

to Overbeck, part of the problem was that director Paul Greengrass wanted the actors to improvise the dialogue,

which threw Hanks off his game, his unease compounded by the fact that he was still getting a handle on Phillips'

thick Boston accent:

Hanks was uncomfortable working so loosely and was still working out his accent and Greengrass had his own

agenda about what the scene should be. In the end, it is a very pieced together scene with a lot of ADR and

even still, it doesn't really work. I know there were some early arguments for starting the film with Hanks

boarding the Maersk Alabama, which I think was a non-starter because that would have meant cutting Keener

completely out of the film and never establishing normalcy for Phillips outside of his career. I bet everyone

involves wishes they had a little more money to reshoot that scene, I think it's the biggest flaw in the film.

That "loose" approach, however, paid enormous dividends in the movie's final scene, where Hanks was acting

opposite a trained medic with no previous acting experience.

I'm gobsmacked by Hanks' take on post traumatic shock every time I see it, I remember watching the dailies

and the first take, the medic kept messing up her take but Hanks guided her through it, reassuring her that she

Tom Hanks in "Captain Phillips"

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25/4/2014 Behind the Scenes of "Captain Phillips'" Best Scene, and Its Worst | Criticwire

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knew what she was doing and she would get over

her nerves, I think he told her he was nervous too.

Then the very next take was of the level of quality

seen in the film (I'm not sure if that was the take

used or if it was another one) and I remember

tearing up just watching the dailies, with her cold,

believable professionalism the perfect foil to the

well studied performance he was giving and both of

their commitment to what they are doing is just

phenomenal and this is the fruit yielded by the way

Greengrass works, allowing non-professional and

professional to exist together with guidance but

also an open forum to try things.

Of all the crafts involved in the making of a film, editing, sometimes called "the invisible art," is the hardest to judge, in

large part because without substantial research there's no way to tell what the editor was working with in the first

place. But here, at least, we get a brief peek into the editing suite, with most enlightening results.

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