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Yeah, exactly.

What makes "Breakdown" so intense is that you don't know whether Russell will be tough enough to rescue his wife from her kidnappers.

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

The way that I filmed the movie, you become that guy within 10 minutes of watching it. You're having that experience. That's why, three years after it's been in the theaters, I run into people who don't realize I directed it, and when they talk about it they still have an emotional response that's very fresh in their minds. When you can shoot a film from a particular character's point of view, it can be a powerful way of telling a story, especially if it connects, the way this one did, to people's own paranoia and subconscious fears. It touched a nerve.

I think the fear of being lost far from home is a universal fear. I'm sure when we were cavemen, the idea of being stranded far from the cave was terrifying. Then you add in all the urban legends that have sprung into our consciousness, over the last 50 years, of crazy people in broken-down shacks off the highway, who skin people alive who happen to knock on their door.

Both "The Game" [written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris] and "Breakdown" are about characters who learn that man can't live in an insulated environment -- unruly life will always break into it.

In fact, "U-571" is in some ways the same movie because, really, when you're in a submarine, your greatest fear is of the ocean coming into your world. But "U-571" is also about a time when a generation of young men faced the question of whether they would rise up together and risk their lives to defeat an incredible threat or whether they were just going to wimp out. I think what interests me in all these movies is the question of what it takes to get one to rise above one's normal everyday life and do something dangerous and extraordinary.

What's intriguing about "U-571" is that the man you put at the center of it, the relatively untried officer played by Matthew McConaughey, is not a John Wayne character -- he's somebody who'd like to be John Wayne.

I was trying to get somebody the audience would identify with.

Which is why it's interesting -- he's the perfect choice to address today's audience, which hasn't had a tough history and doesn't know if it's capable of what our fathers and grandfathers did.

You know what group "U-571" tests best with? It tests best with women over 30. I mean, it tests great across the board -- we get amazing exit surveys -- but we actually do better with women than we do with men. I was talking about this with a female journalist. She said, "Well, I believe it's because women are always being told they're not good enough. Here's a character who's being told he's not good enough, and he has to be good enough, and women can identify with that." But I think everybody can identify with the scene where Bill Paxton tells him he's not suited for command. Everybody has been told at one point in their lives that they're not good enough.

You put an additional stress on the character when you cast McConaughey, an actor who, perhaps unfairly, became a reference point for premature stardom, who was known for being treated as a star just because he was on the cover of Vanity Fair, before he was ready for it.

That's a good analogy.

What were the biggest challenges of doing an epic like "U-571"?

Actually, one of my biggest challenges was overcoming being stuck in a submarine, where there's no chance to cut away to the restaurant at night, or the farm. You don't have all these devices that help make movies "movies," that allow you to cut away to a radically different location.

And, in production, "U-571" was a movie of extremes. Half was shot on a soundstage, which is a comfortable way of making a movie. It's controlled: You're not fighting the sunlight or the sound of someone running a leaf blower next door, and you have a nice dressing room right there. And the other half was shot out in water, dealing with huge elements.

You really feel the moment when the sub just misses scraping the bottom of the enemy destroyer. You don't have those weightless effects that come with movies that rely too heavily on computer-graphics imagery.

I wish CGI were further along than it is, but it isn't. To me, it does look fake. We do have some CGI, but most of the stuff in our movie is real: It's either done full size or with quarter-scale miniatures -- and we're talking miniatures that are from 50 to 80 feet long, so it's still a massive engineering job to get them to move in the water.

We built a 600-ton full-size submarine, a self-propelled, diesel-powered submarine, as well as a couple of full-size submarine replicas. The fun thing about making a movie this size was going out to sea on this submarine. It was so convincing that when a U.S. aircraft carrier pulled into port next to us one day on the island of Malta, they had to send over a boarding party because we weren't showing up on any of their enemy registries. They were amazed that we did this for a movie.

But for me, the biggest difference between this movie and "Breakdown" was the size of the cast. "Breakdown" was a one-man movie: Kurt Russell was there every day and all the others, with a few exceptions, were basically day players. "U-571" is an ensemble movie. Each of the 15 characters has a persona and a purpose for being there, and you, the storyteller, are constantly juggling them.

Some critics complain that the movie lacks characterization. Actually, there were a couple of scenes which did have more character moments, and they came across as completely indulgent, irrelevant and inappropriate. You watched them and you thought, "Hey, buddy, people's lives are depending on you. Why are you crying into your beer glass? You've got a job to do." The fact is that there's a war and a mission and a specific time clock these men are fighting. Any mistakes they make can mean life or death at any given moment. The point of the film is the overall gestalt of people going and doing something so that we can enjoy the liberties that we enjoy today.

I found your movie a lot more entertaining than "Das Boot."

Look, "Das Boot" is a great movie. The only thing about "Das Boot" -- the fundamental untruth of that movie -- is that it tried to portray its submariners as guys who were just trying to mind their own business, as patriotic sailors, when suddenly Hitler came to power and they were reluctantly stuck fighting for the Nazi flag. In fact, that was anything but the case. These guys were all volunteers who got into the war well after Hitler came to power and were ardent Nazis. There was a heavy propaganda program in Germany that gave going into submarines special prestige and imbued these guys with the sense that they were really fighting for the Führer and the fatherland.

These guys were gung-ho and pro-Nazi, and to portray otherwise is basically a complete revision of history. Clearly, near the end of the war, morale was ebbing. But I've spoken to some of our guys who captured these guys at sea, and I asked them what they were like. And they said, "They were real Nazis; they were just like out of the movies. They were blond and blue-eyed and arrogant and thought that their capture was a temporary setback, and that Hitler would come along and blow us back into the ocean."

Next page | War after "Saving Private Ryan"