CAPTAIN PHILLIPS
India release: 18-Oct-13
Genre: Action thriller
Language: English
Director: Paul Greengrass (The Bourne movies)
Cast: Tom Hanks, Barkhad Abdi, Catherine Keener
Duration: 134 mins (2 hours 14 mins)
Rating: U/A
Captain Phillips is a multi-layered examination of the 2009 hijacking of the U.S. container ship
Maersk Alabama by a crew of Somali pirates. It is — through director Paul Greengrass’s
distinctive lens — simultaneously a pulse-pounding thriller, and a complex portrait of the
myriad effects of globalization. The film focuses on the relationship between the Alabama’s
commanding officer, Captain Richard Phillips (two time Academy Award®-winner Tom Hanks), and the Somali pirate captain, Muse (Barkhad Abdi), who takes him hostage. Phillips and Muse
are set on an unstoppable collision course when Muse and his crew target Phillips’ unarmed
ship; in the ensuing standoff, 145 miles off the Somali coast, both men will find themselves at
the mercy of forces beyond their control.
Columbia Pictures presents Captain Phillips, a Scott Rudin / Michael De Luca / Trigger Street production. The film stars Tom Hanks, Barkhad Abdi, Barkhad Abdirahman, Faysal Ahmed, Mahat M. Ali, Michael Chernus, Corey Johnson, Max Martini, Chris Mulkey, Yul Vazquez, and David Warshofsky. Directed by Paul Greengrass, the film is produced by Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti, and Michael De Luca. The screenplay is by Billy Ray, based upon the book A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs, and Dangerous Days at Sea by Richard Phillips with Stephan Talty. The executive producers are Gregory Goodman, Eli Bush, and Kevin Spacey. Also collaborating with Greengrass are director of photography Barry Ackroyd, BSC, editor Christopher Rouse, A.C.E., production designer Paul Kirby, costume designer Mark Bridges, and composer Henry Jackman.
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In Captain Phillips, director Paul Greengrass charts the emotionally charged story of Somali
pirates taking an American sea captain hostage, while simultaneously exposing the underlying
economic divide that sets the event in motion. The story begins in Vermont, where Captain
Phillips leaves his family to sail cargo (partially food aid) halfway around the world — and at
the same time in Somalia, where a former coastal fisherman, Muse, aims to overtake one of
the high-value ships that passes through his coast every day. At the heart of the confrontation
between Phillips and the desperate Somali pirates who take him hostage, Greengrass reveals
the rift between those who are part of the lucrative ebb and flow of international trade, and those
who are caught outside of it.
“We’ve had a lot of very good films in the last decade that have looked at issues of national
security and terrorism, but I wanted this film to look at a broader conflict in our world — the
conflict between the haves and the have-nots,” says Greengrass. “The confrontation between
Phillips, who is part of the stream of the global economy, and the pirates, who are not, felt fresh
and new and forward-looking to me. The stand-off between Phillips and Muse is a thrilling
high seas siege, but one that speaks to the larger forces shaping the world today.” Greengrass
continues, “I’ve always felt that a story should be told in a way that is compelling and thrilling,
but also thought-provoking.” As a former documentarian, Greengrass has long been drawn to stories that dig beneath the surface of contemporary events — from Bloody Sunday, about a British Army massacre in Northern Ireland, to United 93, about the 9/11 hijacking thwarted by passengers, to Green Zone, about the Iraq War. At the same time Greengrass has also emerged as the game-changing director behind high-octane thrillers of refreshing realism — The Bourne Ultimatum and The Bourne Supremacy.
These two strengths — Greengrass’s investigative instinct and his mastery of the thriller form —
merge in Captain Phillips. At the core of Greengrass’s approach to Phillips was his decision
not to tell the same story of a hostage-rescue triumph that had been seen in news headlines.
“When Paul joined the project, it was clear that he was committed to portraying the events
around the Alabama’s hijacking in a much more nuanced way than what had been reported,”
says Michael De Luca, who produced the movie with Scott Rudin and Dana Brunetti, and —
with Brunetti — aided Columbia Pictures in acquiring the rights to Phillips’ story. “Paul made it
clear from the outset that he wanted to tell the story as authentically as possible,” he adds. As
Greengrass explains: “I want veracity. I want to convey the reality and immediacy of the event, as
it happened. And that means immersing ourselves in research during the pre-production stage.
I’ve always felt that, from conception to shooting to post-production, you have to earn the right
to the audience’s attention and you can’t ever take it for granted.”
Greengrass wanted the film to reflect a complete picture of the world the pirates came from.
“Phillips’ book was written from his point of view, naturally; from the beginning, Paul wanted to
ABOUT THE FILM
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tell a story that went beyond that,” recalls screenwriter Billy Ray. Co-producer Michael Bronner,
Greengrass’s long-time collaborator, dove deep into researching the history of Somali piracy and
the economic imperatives that drive it. The depletion of fish in Somali waters due to industrial
overfishing was one factor that spurred the growth of the pirate economy on Somalia’s coasts,
which had formerly relied on a healthy domestic fish trade. Bronner explains, “Somalia, which
has been decimated by civil war since the collapse of its military dictatorship in 1991, was hit
around the same time by an influx of illegal fishing, after the EU tightened regulations, driving
fleets into new hunting grounds. Somali piracy essentially began as a reaction to foreign over-
fishing; former fishermen would hijack ships and hold them ransom as a source of income. When
it became clear that this was a profitable activity, it attracted the warlords, under whose power
piracy evolved into an organized, transnational enterprise. Somali piracy is organized crime
that’s truly global in structure, backed by financiers not only in Africa, but in Europe and North
America as well. The boys on the boats sent to attack cargo ships — Muse and his crew — are
only the end of a long and complex chain of players who control this very lucrative ‘business.’
The bosses of pirate conglomerates are able to live richly and ostentatiously, in a country where
the poverty is so extreme that young men devoid of other prospects literally risk everything to
get a taste of that kind of life.”
Bronner supplemented his research into Somali piracy with research into the international shipping industry; he conducted extensive interviews with Maersk executives and the real crewmembers aboard the Alabama during the crisis to gain an understanding of the seaman’s way of life, and the international laws and economics that govern container ships. The Maersk Alabama was unarmed when it was attacked by pirates (as all merchant vessels at that time were, in accordance with international regulations). Shipping officials revealed to Bronner that they had — even in the days and weeks leading up to the Alabama’s hijacking — been discussing ways to mitigate the risks to Maersk vessels navigating dangerous waters. Ultimately, the attack on the Alabama precipitated changes in the industry, with Maersk and other lines boarding armed guards (many former Navy SEALs) onto their vessels for the most hazardous stretches of their routes.
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75 of Captain Phillips was shot over 60 days on the open water. “Shooting this film
out on the ocean, on a working ship, was tremendously important to me,” says
Greengrass. “I started the film with the conviction that we had to re-enact the
event in conditions as close as possible to those in which it occurred. Everybody said, ‘You’re
insane — shooting at sea is one of the things you don’t do as a director.’ But it gives the film a
veracity that cannot be quantified.” The decision to shoot on the open sea, using the same kinds of vessels on which the real-life
drama had unfolded, meant a production fraught with logistical, physical, and psychological
challenges unlike any Greengrass and his crew had encountered before. “Striving for veracity
involves taking risks yourself in making the film — as a director, as a cast, and as a crew,”
Greengrass explains. “As a piece of filmmaking, this was the most arduous experience I’ve ever
had. Being on the ocean all day, every day, shooting in confined spaces or on the open water, in
the swell, being knocked around, was torturous. But we did it and we kept our days. In the best
of ways, the cast and crew on the film came to feel very much like we were the crew of a ship, all
working together,” Greengrass says. “At the same time, each individual job done was incredible.
The acting was incredible, the lighting was incredible, the design was incredible, the editing was
incredible. And it all builds to a final moment in which I believe Tom Hanks gives a performance
of stunning humanity. My abiding memory of the film will always be Tom at that final moment. It
is simply so human.”
The first challenge the production faced was sourcing the numerous ships that the story called
for — a working container ship, two US Navy destroyers, and an aircraft carrier. Finding vessels
that were as close as possible to the ships used in the actual incident — a Greengrass mandate
— posed a huge problem, despite the eagerness of Maersk Line and the United States Navy to
collaborate with the production. “These ships are made to work — and a working ship is either
hauling goods 24/7 or, in the case of the Navy, on standby for military action, and you can’t
just take them offline,” producer Dana Brunetti says. When Maersk Line identified a relatively
underused container ship in the Mediterranean, the production picked up and moved half a world
away to Malta in order to take advantage of its availability. “Fortunately, this ship, the Maersk
Alexander, was a direct match to the ship that was hijacked, the Alabama — that was a very
lucky break for us,” says Brunetti.
In addition, the production was able to arrange for the Alexander’s crew of 22 merchant mariners
to continue operating the ship during the two and a half months of filming. The captain of the
Alexander became a vital resource for Greengrass and Hanks, illuminating both the mechanics
and the human issues surrounding the day-to-day operations of the ship. “Being on the real ship
and having access to the real crew was essential to the process,” says Greengrass. “You could
ask them questions — what would they do, what would they say, where would they go, with
what piece of equipment, in X, Y, or Z scenario.”
SHOOTING AT SEA
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Greengrass’s commitment to verisimilitude created challenges for the cast and crew. The
weather was often uncooperative, which turned what would have been a merely difficult shoot
at sea into a nearly impossible one. Of shooting on the Alexander, De Luca recalls, “There are
massive swells that come over the side of the ship. The sea changes minute by minute from
calm to incredibly choppy and back, so you never know what you are going to get; how do you
plan to shoot scenes and match shots with a landscape like that?” Each morning the production
crew had to be nimble enough to decide on a moment’s notice if they could shoot a scene on the
water, or if they’d have to stay in port and shoot a scene inside the ship.
Maneuvering the five hundred foot container ship placed extreme constraints on the production,
Daniel Franey Malone, the film’s marine coordinator, notes: “It’s not like using a recreational
vessel. This ship can only go to certain places, and we needed a harbor pilot and a tugboat to
move it around every day. And, of course, the ship is made for containers, so it was extremely
difficult to put a film crew on there,” Malone says. “It’s incredibly claustrophobic. It has narrow
passageways and very narrow stairs. We’re used to having a lot more space. We really had to
scale things down and the teams had to be very conservative in what they brought on board. The
constant back-and-forth from the bottom floor to the bridge — believe me, it was no small feat
making it all the way up and down those stairs with equipment.”
On top of the claustrophobia and the other constraints of working on the ship, the production had
to take on the challenges of coordinating and shooting multiple vessels on open water. “A crew
is some hundreds of people and equipment — actors, and costume, and makeup, and cameras,
and set,” says Greengrass. “To put that on the water is a monumental logistical endeavor. You’ve
got dozens and dozens of boats, and then you have to have safety boats. The production was like
a flotilla, and I felt like the admiral of a fleet.”
One of the most dramatic scenes in the film is the taking of the Alabama, which was done without
the use of CG effects. “One of the most difficult feats of the entire shoot was the technical safety
aspect of bringing a skiff with four actors alongside a moving cargo ship with a tremendous
undertow,” says Greengrass. “Getting close enough so that they could put the ladder up and
execute the boarding maneuver — that was a very time consuming process. Safety was of
paramount importance. But the film gives you the sensation that you really are there, and they
are right alongside that ship and going up, because they are.”
In preparing to film the sequence, the four men playing the Somali pirates — Barkhad Abdi,
Barkhad Abdirahman, Faysal Ahmed, and Mahat M. Ali — began a rigorous training regimen.
“Paul told us that he wasn’t looking for just actors — he wanted us to become pirates,” Abdi
says. “So with weeks of intense practice and rigorous training, we became pirates. I didn’t know
how to swim. I had to learn how to climb. Being scared wasn’t an option. When I was on the
ladder, 100 feet above the water, I just thought, I have to get to the top.”
Abdi, Abdirahman, Ahmed, and Ali also had to learn how to handle the pirate skiffs as if they had
grown up on them. “We spent weeks taking the guys out so they could drive those skiffs, which
was a challenge; they are not easy boats,” says Greengrass. “Then we moved to the open ocean
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to teach them how to stand up while the boats were moving — and you can imagine how those
boats throw you around in that swell. The challenge was to do all of this safely. And then we had
to work out how to shoot it.”
That task fell to the director of photography, Barry Ackroyd, BSC. “For the scenes on the skiffs
with the Somalis,” he explains, “we built a small scaffold rig where we could bungee the camera,
because when those skiffs hit a wave, they really hit it — and we had to find a way not to lose
the camera overboard.”
The most intensely challenging sequence of the film by far, however, was the climactic scene
as the Navy orchestrates Phillips’ rescue. Greengrass calls it “the most complex and difficult
sequence” of his career: “There were multiple Navy ships hurtling around, multiple helicopters —
immense safety concerns. How do you choreograph, set, and convey on film action that involves
a small carrier, several destroyers, and multiple helicopters bombarding a small lifeboat in
darkness — all at high speed — on water? Any director will tell you that you get one helicopter
in the air and your stress level rises. And the clock was ticking for us to get these shots, because
we could only have the Navy hardware for a limited amount of time.”
The U.S. Navy was as eager as Maersk to be involved in the film. But, just as with Maersk’s
merchant carriers, finding the Navy ships required a long and delicate negotiation. Notes
Brunetti: “The Navy wanted to be involved from the get-go because this film reflects them as
sober-minded professionals — I think they feel it’s a very accurate representation of the way
they operate. But, like Maersk, their commissioned ships all have to be on duty. The Navy ships
have to be on standby to react to situations that arise around the world, and that was a higher
priority than supporting a movie. They absolutely did not want us to make the movie without
them, on our own, without their support; our depiction of them would have been less robust. The
question was whether we could work around their very understandable limitations in a way that
would allow them to get us what we needed.”
A solution was reached, again, thanks to the production team’s flexibility and adaptability. “A
high ranking admiral met with us in Los Angeles and made a promise to me: if we brought
the movie to Norfolk, Virginia, he would get me — in his words — everything I needed,” says
Executive Producer Gregory Goodman, who handled many of the challenging logistics of the
shoot. “We hadn’t considered going to Norfolk because it is not a film production center. . . .
Everything needed to shoot would have to be brought in from outside the area, and because
of the distance, you can’t rely on nearby vendors for support. But after looking at our limited
options, it was clear: we were going to Norfolk. I called them up and said, ‘I’m going to hold you
to your promise!’ And they lived up to it. And I will say that once we were set up in Norfolk — a
massive undertaking — it was a great place to shoot.”
To portray the USS Bainbridge, the filmmakers were granted access to the USS Truxtun, a
510-foot-long Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer commissioned in 2009. “The Truxtun
had just been rehabilitated and needed to go on a two-month shakedown cruise, and part of
that consists of doing minor maneuvers,” says Brunetti. “We were attached to that mission.”
Throughout the shoot, the destroyer remained an active, mission-ready ship loaded to respond
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to emergency calls. The two additional ships that assisted the Bainbridge during the real-life
rescue mission — the USS Boxer, an amphibious assault ship that is part of the Navy’s anti-
piracy task force, and the USS Halyburton — were portrayed, respectively, by the USS Wasp, a
multipurpose amphibious assault ship, and the actual Halyburton, both of which were stationed
at Naval Station Norfolk.
Moving these Navy vessels was complicated, dangerous, and difficult — and Navy destroyers
are an even less hospitable home for a film crew than a cargo ship is. Brunetti explains: “The
Navy ships have to operate seven miles out of port, and it’s very difficult to get the ships in and
out of port — it takes hours. So instead, our crew piled into small boats — fifteen to twenty
people in each of seven or eight boats — and embarked from a dock in Norfolk to meet the Navy
ships, waiting for us miles out at sea. Then each of us had to transfer over to the ship, an arduous
process of stepping one by one over the side and climbing a ladder, in ocean swells, with all of
our gear for the day. We made the trip back and forth daily, each night transferring to our small
boats and heading back to Norfolk in the dark.”
Greengrass says the Navy “threw themselves enthusiastically into the film. From the Halyburton’s
captain and his number-two down, they put the ship and their resources at our disposal. They
could see what we were trying to do, so we’d always have somebody in the crew saying, ‘You
need to know this’ or ‘In X situation we would do Y’ — those thousand decisions that make a
film feel like it’s working and that keep it true to reality. Those environments are real: the CIC,
the interior sections — they were all on the real destroyer.”
Getting the Navy onboard was just the first step in filming the rescue sequence. “In that scene, there were a lot of moving parts — two destroyers, an aircraft carrier, and a helicopter shining a light on the lifeboat,” adds producer Dana Brunetti. “We had to get the ships in position, we had to get our cameras in position, the helicopter had to hit the lifeboat at the right moment, and the actors in the lifeboat had to deal with the fact that the ships were creating an intentional wake to rock the boat. They were in there for hours while we did to them what the Navy did to the actual hijackers.”
Goodman expands on the logistical challenges involved in that climactic scene: “The lifeboat
moves very slowly — about two or three knots. That actually happens to be just below the safe
operating speed for Navy ships. They are liable to stall if they’re going that slow. So we had a
cat-and-mouse game in terms of timing the ships and their relationship to the lifeboats. That
was very tricky — it was a math problem.” What the filmmakers didn’t know at the time was
that this was a case of art imitating life. The USS Bainbridge had experienced the same problem
during the real-life rescue of Captain Phillips; the destroyer kept outrunning the lifeboat.
The climax of the film — set at sea, in total darkness — also presented tremendous challenges for
cinematographer Ackroyd. Pulling off the shooting of these sequences required an extraordinary
amount of advance planning, coordination, timing, professionalism — and a little luck. “We
shot them day-for-night, dusk-for-night, and night-for-night,” Ackroyd says. “Each scene is a
combination of all three techniques, all rolled into one.” He adds, “We had one camera inside
the lifeboat, I was in a RHIB [rubber-hulled inflatable boat] with another, a third camera was on
the destroyer, and a fourth camera was in a second helicopter, positioned to shoot the picture
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helicopter. The Navy destroyer is coming up on the lifeboat and doing a handbrake turn in front
of the lifeboat, and we have to get that shot simultaneously from my RHIB, from the destroyer,
from the air, as well as from inside the lifeboat, looking out from a two-foot-by-three-foot port.
All of that was done dusk-for-night — and dusk is twenty minutes. You have twenty minutes
to capture a maximum amount of material. And you can’t stop, or dusk will change, and all of a
sudden you are shooting night-for-night. We haven’t CG’d those shots — all of those happened
live. People would always ask, ‘How are we going to do it?’ Well, we’re going to shoot it. That’s
what I live for.”
Though the production was daunting and technically difficult, everyone got through it, because
the entire crew shared an esprit de corps inspired by Paul Greengrass and Tom Hanks. Producer
De Luca notes, “Tom was very game. He never paused no matter what we asked of him. For
example, being in the lifeboat on the open water all day, for days on end, was exhausting and took
tremendous stamina for everyone involved; and Tom never complained, despite the inevitable
and constant sea-sickness that set in for him and the other cast aboard that very unwieldy
vessel. I think that attitude and spirit from him carried through to everybody and carried us
through the production.”
“This was pure filmmaking — I’m very, very lucky to have done this. I’ll always carry the memory
with me,” says Goodman. “Everybody was focused on the same goal.” Ackroyd agrees: “As a
cinematographer, when you see a script and it says ‘Night — total darkness — at sea,’ you have
to think twice about doing that project — unless it’s Paul Greengrass who is asking you to do it.
When you sign up to do a Paul Greengrass film, it’s because you realize that the struggle will be
worthwhile, the story will be powerful, and the effort will be recognized — by which I mean that
the audience will take from it something that they don’t get from every other film. And I hope that
will be the case with Captain Phillips.”
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The audience will not find conventional heroes in Captain Phillips — only human beings in
all their societal, cultural, and personal complexities. Greengrass saw Richard Phillips not
as the engine of the story but rather as a man who, while quietly devoted to his work, gets
suddenly swept up into a violent, global event. “Phillips reminds me of men I knew when I was
young, growing up with a father in the merchant marine: the working men who haul the goods
we use around the world, who are the lifeblood of the world economy. They are the truckers
of the sea. It’s a very physical, blue-collar kind of world. To me, Richard Phillips is that kind of
man — a kind of Everyman who finds himself in this unwanted confrontation,” says the director.
“He’s really an ordinary person, but the way he responds to what happens to him and what this
ordeal he goes through has to say about the world we live in is extraordinary.”
From the very beginning, the filmmakers envisioned Tom Hanks as the veteran merchant mariner
Richard Phillips. Hanks has excelled in diverse roles depicting seemingly ordinary men facing
extreme crises: from Andrew Beckett, the lawyer suffering from AIDS and fighting a wrongful
termination suit in Philadelphia; to astronaut Jim Lovell, struggling to return to Earth after a
moon mission goes awry in Apollo 13; to John Miller, the World War II captain searching for a
missing soldier in Saving Private Ryan; and to Chuck Noland, the FedEx executive trapped alone
on a desert island in Cast Away. Hanks builds characters from the inside out, endowing ordinary
people with a quiet but extraordinary bravery. His portrayal of Richard Phillips is no exception.
Greengrass says of his first time working with the two-time Oscar®-winner: “Tom and I went on a journey together. In the beginning, he kept saying, ‘For me, it’s really just about a guy in peril on the sea’ — and Tom honed his performance down to something that stark and true. He spent hour after hour in that lifeboat — everyone was moved by how much he put into this. It was not just a matter of his talent, but of his willingness to explore every inch of this man’s humanity — the accuracy of what Tom did and the detail of it was magnificent. I was also incredibly impressed by his physical stamina. We were out on the ocean for hour after hour, and Tom never complained. He was always the first one to turn around and say, ‘I’m ready. Let’s do it again.’” Hanks prepared for the role by getting to know Richard Phillips, visiting with the captain at his home in Vermont, where he lives with his wife, Andrea, a nurse. Hanks found Phillips to be an affable, self-effacing man who never saw himself as anything more than a seaman simply doing his job. Incredibly, Phillips returned to his work at Maersk not long after his near fatal ordeal with Somali pirates. “That in particular I found amazing,” said Hanks. “That a man who suffered such a wrenching, terrifying ordeal, could bring himself to go right back to sea. I knew understanding Phillips’ strength — that particular kind of personal fortitude and connection to the sea, despite what happened — would be essential to understanding the sort of man Richard is. The reality is that not everybody has what it takes to be a ship captain — and not everyone could have withstood being taken hostage.”
CAST & CHARACTERS
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Arriving on set for his first collaboration with Greengrass, Hanks was surprised by what he found:
“Paul tried to explain to me what his style was like before we started shooting — handheld
cameras, no dolly track, no marks to hit — and asked me if I was comfortable with that. Of
course I said I was, but I honestly expected — regardless of what Paul said to prepare me —
that when it came to shooting, I would see that dolly track come out and we’d get specific about
hitting our marks and hitting our light. Never happened. We didn’t even stage the scenes —
we found them. We’d gather in the morning, discuss the scene for an hour and a half, two
hours, maybe even longer, and then shoot it in its entirety all the way through — an eight-
minute scene, a twelve-minute scene, whatever it was — instead of breaking it up into shots.
It’s an extraordinary way to make a movie — a method that is 180 degrees from that of other
filmmakers. It plays to Paul’s strengths and I don’t think he’s interested in making movies any
other way. And the result, I think, speaks for itself.”
Greengrass, in turn, says that Hanks was fully on board for the process and the result was a masterful, truthful performance. “I remember one very difficult scene. We were on the Truxtun and we were getting ready to film the scene, post-rescue. We asked Richard where that interview really happened, and he said it took place in the sick bay. Well, we’d been planning to do it in the Captain’s quarters, but as soon as he said it, the sick bay made much more sense. So Tom and I worked out how we’d do it, and I picked a crewmember from the Truxtun to play the scene with him. As a result, a woman who was not expecting when she woke up that morning to have a speaking role in a movie, or to be acting opposite a two-time Academy Award®-winner, did this climactic scene with Tom that brought the entire crew to tears! It’s just a stunning moment in the film.”
Greengrass’s orchestration of the fraught initial encounter between the pirates and the Maersk crew provides another example of the methods Greengrass used to help the actors reach an added level of realism: Greengrass made the decision to keep the actors playing the seamen from having any contact with the Somali-American actors who would play the men taking over the ship. They never met until the moment they shot the scene of the pirates entering the bridge. “It was a smart thing Paul did, that we never met each other,” explains Hanks. “We didn’t have readings or dinners, so they were these shadowy guys to us, and when they storm the bridge, the verisimilitude was just incalculable. The hair stood up on the backs of our necks.” Says Greengrass of the scene: “Since they had never met, shooting it that way was a ‘once-only’ moment — we had to get it in that first take. And we did. It was incredible. Tom and Barkhad did that long scene with such depth and humanity that when it was over, everyone on the set applauded.” In seeking four foils for Hanks, casting director Francine Maisler conducted an intensive search for
actors who could bring both authenticity and emotion to their roles. Maisler began by narrowing
the choices to actors of Somali descent. “From the beginning, it was very, very important to
Paul to cast Somalis in the roles of Muse and his crew,” Maisler says. “And that was a massive
casting dilemma. But Paul has a tremendous gift for teaching young, untried actors to perform,
often alongside formidable experienced actors — it’s part of what makes his films so visceral. I
knew the only way to build the organic connection to Somalia that was so important to the film
was to find men who were Somali or Somali-American. And I knew that meant finding young
men who may have had relatively little experience on set, but who were open to taking a leap on
this film, and who were able to hold their own, opposite Tom,” says Maisler.
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Having researched all the places in the world where Somalis have emigrated in large numbers,
Maisler centered her casting search on the U.S.’s largest Somali-American community, in
Minneapolis, Minnesota. There she distributed flyers announcing an open casting call at the
Brian Coyle Community Center, drawing more than 1,000 candidates for the role of Muse and his
three crewmates.
As she worked with Minnesota Casting Director Debbie DeLisi to narrow the candidates from
hundreds to just a handful, Maisler began to group them into foursomes to see how they would
work with one another. One of those initial foursomes consisted of Barkhad Abdi as Muse,
Barkhad Abdirahman as Bilal, Faysal Ahmed as Najee, and Mahat M. Ali as Elmi. Realizing that
these four men all knew one another, it was natural for Maisler to assign them as a group. “Once
we grouped them, they began to rehearse on their own time, with Barkhad Abdi leading the
group’s rehearsal sessions,” Maisler says. “Later, we swapped other actors in and out of the
foursome as an experiment, but we kept reuniting that original foursome, and ultimately, Paul
cast them in the movie. He was impressed, as we all were, by their talent and chemistry and
commitment to the film.”
The final hurdle was a meeting with Greengrass and Maisler in Los Angeles. After the meeting,
they went for a walk on the beach: the four actors, Greengrass, and Maisler. Maisler recalls, “It
wasn’t quite clear if they realized that they had been cast, so Paul told them, ‘You guys know —
you have the parts.’ ‘No, nobody told us.’ ‘Well, you have it.’ They were so ecstatic that they ran,
fully clothed, into the ocean, celebrating. It was one of the most pure moments of joy I’ve ever
seen.” Says Ahmed: “We just had to jump into the sea to make sure it was true.”
“When I saw them, they were friends and had worked together as a group,” Greengrass says.
“There was something about them that already looked and felt like a crew.” None of the four
had any formal film experience, but they were determined to give their characters a tangible
humanity. “The degree of intensity they projected and the nuances of character they found were
incredible — and the ability to do all of that opposite the extraordinary power of Tom Hanks was
something special,” says Greengrass.
First-time actor Barkhad Abdi takes on the role of Muse, the pirate captain. Maisler says that
immediately upon meeting Abdi, she knew Greengrass would want him for the demanding and
complex role of Phillips’ primary adversary. “The weight on the shoulders of a young, untried
actor in particular to carry a layered role like Muse’s — which demands a capacity for menace
as well as compassion and contemplation — is tremendous,” says Maisler. “It takes a very
special kind of person. The bar was very high. Barkhad demonstrated a great deal of natural
ability and I knew he could bring to life all of the dimensions of the character as written on the
page — but he’d also make the role his own. He could be commanding but quiet; we could see
that he made a very strong impression on people. The other Somalis we had him working with
in the auditions seemed to automatically treat him as a leader.”
Born in Mogadishu and raised in Yemen, Abdi moved with his family to Minneapolis in 1999, when he was 14 years old. He is acutely aware of the pressures that many Somalis have faced as economic conditions deteriorate in their war-torn country, even while ships lined with valuable cargo pass
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their shores. This personal understanding drew him to explore the reasons why a young man like Muse, no longer able to make a living from his town’s traditional trade in Somalia’s overfished waters, would turn to piracy. “I think if things had been different, Muse could have been happy as a fisherman. But when he’s unable to make a living that way, and when he sees men from his village become pirates, he wants his share of the money that comes to them,” Abdi explains. “I still have family in Somalia, so I know what’s going on there,” he continues. “I know that my character is in a place where people have very little in the way of opportunity. But I think today, all over the world, we all have dreams that we can live big. That’s the bottom line for Muse. He has big dreams — and since he has so little, he also feels he has nothing to lose by turning to piracy.
“When Muse boards the Alabama, for him it’s all about business: the captain calls the shipping
company, the shipping company calls its insurance carrier, a ransom is paid, and no one gets
hurt. But it doesn’t work out that way, and he finds himself in a terrible bind that he knows will
be fatal if he can’t find a way out. Muse is a foot soldier in a complex pirate-ring funded by
powerful investors, and he knows he can’t return empty-handed. As the captain of his crew,
it’s his job to find a solution. He realizes the only resolution is to sail the lifeboat to Somalia and
offer Captain Phillips for ransom. He’s in a tiny lifeboat surrounded by American warships — it’s
this desperate situation. Still, he’s able to maintain a sense of command and power. That’s what
makes his character so compelling to me.”
Producer Dana Brunetti notes, “For coastal villagers like Muse, access to a lawful economy
is often blocked. In piracy, they see an opportunity to fit into an alternate economy: in this
case, one that can bring wealth many orders of magnitude beyond what is possible through
any other means in Somalia. You’ve got the wealth of the world sailing past your shore, there
for the taking. Somalia has been controlled for more than two decades by warring factions who
keep the population under tight control. Of course, Muse is a dangerous young man, but what
becomes clear as the film unfolds is that he feels as trapped in the siege as does his hostage. It
was the full person, the full human being, that we were searching for in Muse’s character and in
Barkhad’s performance — something that transcended the criminal act he’s involved in without
blunting it, because that’s the reality.”
Abdi hopes the film’s depiction of Muse will help audiences gain some insight into the tragedy of Somalia and the more complex motivations of the pirates. “Piracy is a crime, and the film never seeks to condone it, but I think people will come away with compassion for Muse. He ends up confronting the full power of America — a malnourished young man wearing rags up against three massive American warships. You feel his predicament. He’s a criminal of course, but he is also a person in a bind. I remember coming to America for the first time as an immigrant and having to learn to navigate this overwhelming, extremely wealthy and powerful country. I don’t want to draw a comparison between the two predicaments, but I could understand what it must have been like for him to stare up at that awesome military ship and think, you know, ‘Now what?’”
Tom Hanks was especially impressed with how far Abdi took his character into palpable reality.
“This story depends on Barkhad portraying all of the sides of the character — he never lets
Muse become a paper-thin villain,” says Hanks. “For a young, first-time actor to inhabit such
a complex role with such command was striking. He conveys an incredible range of emotion
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and nuance of expression — that’s not something that can be taught. His character begins as
something we think we know — a fearsome pirate leading an armed crew in a terrifying criminal
hijacking of an unarmed ship — and without ever apologizing for that, he pulls the audience into
a much deeper emotional engagement with the human being behind that act: a young Somali
who harbors aspirations all of us can understand, but who is utterly blocked from pursuing them
because of incredibly arduous life circumstances in Somalia.”
Najee — the pirate Phillips dubbed the “tall guy” in his memoir — is played by Faysal Ahmed,
who is of Somali descent and was born and raised in Yemen, where he met Barkhad Abdi. Ahmed
describes Najee as “the muscle of the group, someone who grew up with violence — and that’s
the only answer he knows.” Like Abdi, Ahmed won the visa lottery to come to the United States,
but still has family living in Somalia, giving him an intimate perspective on current events there.
“I think a lot of Somali emigrants would love to go back to Somalia if it had a stable government,”
he observes. “To me, it is my home, even though I have never been there.”
For Ahmed, the highlight of making the film was his fight scenes with Tom Hanks. He recalls:
“Making those seem realistic was very difficult, especially because the set was so narrow. I
accidentally connected with a real punch at one point, but Tom was great about it. He did his
own stunts in that scene and he pushed me toward steadily improving my work. I’m thankful to
him for that. It was no small challenge to put myself in the head of this man. I asked myself: what
would a normal person — a ‘normal pirate’ — do in this situation, having fought desperately to
take this ship, against incredible odds, and then to have my prize — the only thing left to show
for the risks I’ve taken — nearly escape? We entered the pirate mindset and when it came time
to shoot, we were ready. It was hard, but it was also an amazing experience.”
Elmi, the taciturn boat driver, is played by Mahat M. Ali, who was born in Somalia and grew up in
Kenya, before coming to Minnesota while still in grade school. “I think there was a question mark
for Paul, and that was, were we going to be up for the challenge of the roles, physically,” says
Ali. “He knew very well that the roles weren’t just difficult emotionally — but that it was going to
be really hard work, the kind where you collapse into bed after a long, hard day. Were we up for
that? Yes, of course we were. Paul was right — it was very hard — but it was worth it.”
Seventeen-year-old Barkhad Abdirahman, who was born in Kenya of Somali descent, plays Bilal,
the youngest of the pirates. Abdirahman says of his character, “He’s the guy who does what
he’s told; I think he behaves the way any normal kid would behave in a war.” For Abdirahman,
Greengrass’s realistic directorial style and on-set environment gave him a greater understanding
of the intense situation his character faces — especially as a very young man. “Paul created so
much energy and excitement that he really brought us into what was happening on the boat,” he
adds. “It’s a pretty insane place to be for Bilal. He’s overwhelmed. He’s under a lot of pressure —
he’s really just a teenager, and he’s not at all equipped to handle this situation.”
All four actors entered intensive training in Malta prior to production, undergoing a rigorous daily
regimen, comparable to boot camp, designed by stunt coordinator Rob Inch. “They had to learn
how to fight, how to handle guns, how to handle boats, how to lift ladders, and how to work in
choppy waves,” Inch explains. “We wanted to really immerse them in that high-seas world.”
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“We were really out there,” says Abdi. “And when I thought about how hard the training was, everything I went through to get to that moment, when I was climbing up the side of a container ship, I couldn’t help but think that these four men would’ve learned to do the same things we’d trained to do. We had that in common now. For me, as a Somali, that’s powerful — it put me in Muse’s shoes in a way our preparation wouldn’t have if Paul hadn’t been as committed to the training. I’m positive that this had a tremendous effect on the way I played the rest of my scenes.”
As intense as it was to film the taking of the Alabama and the scenes on the container ship,
nothing prepared the actors for filming on the lifeboat. “I’d seen pictures of the lifeboat, and
the National Geographic documentary about the incident, but you can’t imagine what it’s like
to be on the lifeboat until you actually step inside,” says Abdi. “It’s small, it’s tight, but it’s the
smell that really got us all at first: the seawater and the humidity, the heat and sweat. There’s no
ventilation in a boat like this. Inevitably, all of us got very dizzy and seasick, especially the first
few days, and that made it difficult to concentrate. I can’t imagine being shut up in that lifeboat
twenty-four hours a day for five days — the length of time Phillips and the pirates were confined
there during the real incident.”
While the media closely covered Captain Phillips’ rescue from the lifeboat by Navy SEALs,
less well known is what transpired aboard the Maersk Alabama early in the crisis, as Phillips
attempted to outwit the pirates and regain control of the ship — a period during which Phillips’
twenty crewmembers played a key role.
Michael Chernus (The Bourne Legacy) portrays Shane Murphy, Captain Phillips’ Chief Mate and
second in command. Of shooting on the Alabama, Chernus says, “We’d leave port and be out
at sea for twelve or fourteen hours; you get to know your cast-mates quickly — and well — in
circumstances like that. We became a kind of crew — and started to communicate like one. That
helped us respond to each other in a very real way. We bonded in a way I’ve never experienced
on a film set before. Another unanticipated benefit of working on the ship, which had been
temporarily decommissioned for the shoot, was that the Alexander [the ship standing in for the
Alabama] had, living on it, real Maersk crewmembers with years of experience at sea. Every
actor had a real-life counterpart on the ship, so I was able to hang out with the chief mate of
the Alexander and ask him what he would do in particular situations. That helped us familiarize
ourselves with a whole lifetime’s worth of knowledge in a short time.”
David Warshofsky (There Will Be Blood) plays Chief Engineer Mike Perry, another veteran
colleague of Captain Phillips. From his post in the ship’s Engine Control Room, Perry tries to
track the pirates’ movements elsewhere on the Alabama, and sabotage their ability to obtain
operational control of the ship. Corey Johnson, who has appeared in three Greengrass films (United 93, The Bourne Ultimatum
and The Bourne Legacy), plays the ship’s second mate, Ken Quinn, who remains on the bridge
with Phillips. For his performance during the pirates’ takeover of the bridge, Johnson recalls that
Greengrass directed him not to think about responding to the attack in the most heroic way, but
rather in the most human way. “It’s not un-heroic to show fear,” says Johnson. “Captain Phillips
tells the crew, ‘Maintain your dignity’, to show some grace under pressure and to be resourceful.
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To me, that’s the source of their courage. My character feels a responsibility to the rest of the
crew, as they all did. He’s not going to go down screaming and pleading. They all try to stay
focused, keep doing their jobs, and defuse the situation.”
Once Phillips was taken captive on the lifeboat, the American government responded: the U.S.S.
Bainbridge, headed by Captain Frank Castellano, was dispatched in the Indian Ocean to track
the pirates and negotiate a swift and peaceful conclusion to the stand-off, or — if that wasn’t
possible — to buy time until the Navy SEALs could arrive.
“Castellano was not a guy you heard a lot about in the news,” says actor Yul Vazquez, who
portrays the Bainbridge captain. “The reporting focused mostly on Captain Phillips and the Navy
SEALs. But Castellano was an important part of the story. He was the first responder to the event
and he felt it was his responsibility to ensure a peaceful ending to the crisis.” Castellano knew
that if he was to do anything to escalate the standoff, the pirates might panic and harm Captain
Phillips. At the same time, he was ordered to check the lifeboat’s progress toward Somalia,
which he could only do by aggressively blocking the lifeboat with his massive warship. Forced
into a situation where he had to be adaptive and nimble, Castellano forged a rapport with the
pirates, feeding them, helping to anticipate their needs, and trying to keep them relaxed in order
to maintain control of the situation. Says Vazquez, “The most important thing to Paul was that
my character be seen as a man with a tremendous degree of pressure bearing down on him.
He’s trying to do the right thing, and he did do the right thing, until the pirates gave him no
other options. Paul wanted to see that pressure on my face and in my eyes — to see this guy
struggling his utmost to end this ordeal, but to end it well.”
In the film, the majority of the men seen working alongside Castellano inside the Bainbridge CIC
(Combat Information Center) are real-life officers and sailors who were stationed aboard the
USS Truxtun, which stood in for the Bainbridge. The group also includes two sailors who served
aboard the Bainbridge during the real event in 2009.
The final piece of the casting puzzle involved the Navy SEALs — the elite warriors renowned
for being a breed apart. Though the role of the SEAL commander, played by Max Martini, was
extensive and involved enough to require an actor, Greengrass wanted the SEALs under Martini’s
command to be the real thing. “As I’ve said, we wanted to make this film as authentic as we
could in every way we could,” says Greengrass. “I’m convinced that audiences know when they
are seeing something that doesn’t quite measure up — they may not know why something seems inauthentic, but they know. Navy SEALs are one of those things — like shooting on the
sea — where there’s no substitute for the real thing.”
As a result, civilian SEAL adviser Eric Casey secured the services of ten former SEALs to take the roles of the men who carried out the close-in sniper operation. “It’s hard to replicate SEAL mannerisms and skills without very extensive training,” Casey explains. “They have a certain persona and a very particular way of carrying themselves that’s hard-won. It can’t easily be taught.”
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To bring to Captain Phillips the intensity and realism that Paul Greengrass’s films are known for, Greengrass brought in a visual team headed by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, BSC. Ackroyd, a longtime Greengrass collaborator, was the cinematographer on Greengrass’s United 93 and Green Zone, as well as on Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, for which Ackroyd was nominated for an Academy Award®.
Greengrass and Ackroyd come from a documentary tradition, and both men agree that there are certain habits of non-fiction filmmaking that they have yet to shake — and that have proved beneficial on the sets of their feature films. “In a feature film, you have many more takes and many more opportunities to capture a scene than in documentary,” Ackroyd says, “so you always have to remind yourself about the urgency and importance of every frame. If you tell yourself that every frame is the only time this will ever happen, and it will be the most important frame of the film — and if you can keep that concentration up throughout a million feet of film — then you are giving the editor the best material you can for him to cut the best film.”
Greengrass agrees, noting that this style of shooting goes hand-in-hand with the kind of interaction he wants the actors to have with the material. “You never lose an instinct for what’s urgent, what’s real. We work very hard with the actors to get them to play not just the screenplay; the script is important, but we also want the actors to be attuned to — and to examine for themselves — each situation, and the motives of the characters inherent in each scene. And, as we get the actors to that place, where they are playing and inhabiting the immediacy of the scene, we have to capture that intensity — the looks, the moments.”
Producer Dana Brunetti says that Ackroyd’s style of shooting not only lends itself perfectly to Greengrass’s direction, but to this film in particular, because of its locations. “Paul and Barry shoot in a very in-the-moment, urgent, vérité style — a lot of handheld shooting, not a lot of dolly tracks — which is supremely well-suited to the telling of a hostage crisis story, and uniquely suited to shooting on a container ship,” notes Brunetti. “The ship is so tight and confined, and the hallways and stairwells are incredibly narrow. Barry put that camera on his shoulder and ran along following the actors, whipping the camera all around and up and down the ship. The lifeboat was more contained, so it became about finding the detail and the intensity in those spaces.”
Greengrass adds that these locations provided an intense visual and physical challenge — one that required Ackroyd to be extremely flexible. “Barry and I had a long discussion before production began about creating a look for Captain Phillips that is very restrained and highly focused on character,” says the director. “As the film progresses, you are inhabiting a smaller and smaller space — so the challenge visually is to keep those tiny spaces very alive and interesting. That sometimes means putting Barry into some of the most grueling and absurdly cramped positions. I don’t think he could have made this film if he didn’t practice yoga.”
Ackroyd often had two or three cameras operating for each scene. On the container ship, Ackroyd mounted his camera on his shoulder, while another camera operator, Cosmo Campbell, rigged a PHOTOGRAPHY AND DESIGN
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special short-armed Steadicam that allowed him to get through bulkhead doors and small spaces. Greengrass and Ackroyd do not block the scenes with the actors, giving them free rein to roam where they like, with the handheld cameras following. Often, this means the actors are running up and down stairs and in and out of rooms with the camera team close behind. Ackroyd has noted that this way of working liberates actors. “Once you stop asking actors to perform for the camera, it gives them a kind of freedom. Even in a confined space like the lifeboat, we told them, ‘Go wherever you want, and we’ll follow.’ It’s a challenge, but it has a powerful effect on the performances. The actors end up giving more because of that, and what you capture contributes to the film’s ability to move people. If there’s something exciting going on in a scene, the camera gets excited. And when the mood is sad, the camera reacts with sadness. In this film especially, the camerawork ties into emotional moments in ways that are unexpected and unscripted.” In their collaboration on United 93, Greengrass and Ackroyd experimented with various techniques intended to obliterate any awareness of the camera — among the actors as they performed on set, as well as among the audience as they watch in the theater. They took those methods one step further on Captain Phillips. “Paul and I both felt that if we successfully did our job, our presence would be barely felt by the actors,” Ackroyd notes. “Our aim in this film was for the camera to be simply observational and as truthful as possible. At the same time, we were not making a documentary. Rather the style is a kind of hyperrealism that allows the audience to see many perspectives on each moment and on the choices that the characters are making. We looked for the humanity in the shot.” Hanks says he was inspired by the authenticity and immediacy of Greengrass’s and Ackroyd’s shooting style — and that the result was one of the richest experiences of his career. “One of the questions I asked Paul on this set was, ‘Where is the camera?’ Because I never saw it,” says Hanks. “They are all about capturing the behavior of real people in the moment, and I think Paul’s willingness to discover the movie as we shot allowed him to capture the full reality of the story.”
Ackroyd’s photography in the film also makes maximal use of natural light. “I always shoot in natural light when I can because you can shoot in 360 degrees,” he explains. “Having to light shot-
by-shot is like putting a straightjacket on the camera and camera operator. So instead, we planned our scenes out like a sundial, following the sun around. We had a narrow shipping lane that we could move in, and so — unlike shooting in a fixed location — we could alter course, turn around, and get sun in the same direction on the ship, no matter which way we went. It was like tacking in sailing. Chris Carreras, who is Paul’s first assistant director, became the proxy captain, setting the ship’s course — ‘Let’s go five degrees port now’ – to keep the light as consistent as he could. It’s the same principle you use on land, but because we could move the ship, we took advantage of that, and Chris became expert at it.” Early in pre-production, Ackroyd decided to employ 35-millimeter film cameras, primarily using the Aaton Penelope, which is often sought after for handheld cinematography and documentaries. The Aaton allowed Ackroyd to move nimbly through the narrow stairwells and passageways of the ship. “When you shoot digitally, in most cases you’re only trying to reproduce the aesthetic look of film anyway. On top of that, when we looked at the conditions we would have to film in — getting on pirate skiffs with bungees, getting sprayed and splashed from the waters of the cargo ship — electronic cameras didn’t make much sense,” says Ackroyd. “Film cameras are over a hundred
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years old. It’s a simple, classic technology. It’s like how cars still use combustion engines — it’s because they work.” Ackroyd also employed 16mm film cameras for the scenes focusing on the Somali pirates. “I thought the grain and texture of 16mm would work well for us, and it does — but the real reason I wanted to do it was because in a 16mm format, I could choose a 12:1 zoom,” he explains. “With the 12:1 zoom, I could get a wide shot inside the skiff with the four Somalis, or I could frame each one individually or as groups. And I could use the same lens to zoom into the bridge of the container ship and find Captain Phillips on the bridge with binoculars, or someone running along the deck, and I’d be able to link the two shots, moving fluidly from one to the other.”
Then there was the film’s cramped lifeboat, into which Richard Phillips descends alone with his four captors. The production used several replicas of the Alabama’s 28-foot-long lifeboat, all equally uncomfortable. “That kind of lifeboat drives like a bowl of spaghetti,” explains marine coordinator Daniel Franey Malone. “It’s all over the map. It’s top-heavy and it doesn’t take much to rock it around. And it’s incredibly difficult to shoot in.”
Greengrass and Ackroyd say that the lifeboat was among the most unforgiving shooting
environments they have ever experienced. “The lifeboat is incredibly cramped,” says the director.
“Intense heat. Intense seasickness. The thing’s tipping on every axis. We had to pull people out
at regular intervals.”
Ackroyd operated the camera himself in the lifeboat, as he did in most scenes, putting his body on the line for the film. But he doesn’t mind the struggle — in fact, he relishes it. “That’s how I know I’m alive!” he says. “All of the physical things, the aches and pains… I like the struggle, or the sense of struggle. If things become easier, I feel that maybe we’re not achieving what we could achieve. If there’s not a struggle, I don’t feel satisfied.” “Barry had incredible guts and courage,” says Greengrass. “Squinting through that lens, he was constantly seasick — but you wouldn’t know it watching the movie. How he kept the image as stable and coherent as it is, I have no idea.”
Further articulating the look and feel of Captain Phillips is the work of production designer Paul Kirby, who had worked with Greengrass and Ackroyd on Green Zone. “Paul Kirby’s design on this film was supposed to be ‘invisible.’ He provided an environment for the actors to perform in, and for Barry to shoot in, that was as close to the real world as could be achieved,” says Gregory Goodman. “But the ‘invisible’ style is extraordinarily difficult. The audience knows when it sees something phony, even if they can’t put their finger on it. On top of that, Paul faced immense logistical issues — not least of which was finding, designing, and building a Somali village that would kick off the movie. He did that and then some — he made it seamless with the rest of the film.”
Greengrass tasked Kirby with designing four different worlds for the film: the Somali village, the container ship, the lifeboat, and the Navy vessel. “I tried to design sets that would seamlessly join the real world and the imagined world,” Kirby explains. He adds, “In this film, we go from expansive — the enormous container ship from high above, so high that it looks like a dot in the middle of the sea — to increasingly claustrophobic, until we’re focused on Tom Hanks’ eyes as he thinks his life is about to end in a 25-foot lifeboat, with the force of the U.S. Navy bearing down on it,” says Kirby.
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“We wanted the audience to feel that journey — into Captain Phillips’ soul, really. Even if they’re not conscious of it, they’ll feel it and remember it the following day. And I hope it stays with them.”
Another challenge for Kirby was designing the fishing skiffs the Somali pirates use in the attack on the Alabama. “The skiffs had to look like Somali village boats, but had to be completely seaworthy and secure for the cast in every respect, even under very rough conditions,” says Kirby. Inside the boat, Kirby and the stunt team outfitted the skiff with straps and footholds designed to help the actors as they maneuvered on the boat in the swells. He also exaggerated the prow of the boats, a subtle way of heightening the tension. “We wanted the pirate skiff to look and feel like a weapon as it cut through the water.”
Costume designer Mark Bridges, an Academy Award®-winner for The Artist, began his work by conducting a formidable amount of research, not only digging deeply into the original news accounts of the hijacking, but exploring both the Somali and American seafaring traditions. He wanted clothing that would achieve the verisimilitude that Greengrass sought. Eyl, the Somali village we see in the beginning of the film, is traditionally a fishing port; men
there typically wear shorts or rolled-up pants that keep their ankles free, and a specific kind of
sandal. Bridges and his team created twelve copies of the costumes for each of the pirates. “It
took a month to distress all the sandals, shorts, shirts, and jackets of each costume to the proper
level of wear,” he explains. During production, Bridges and his staff had to be in a constant
state of vigilance, or their month of work would be literally washed away. “We underestimated
the strength of the seawater; it took out much of the dirt and distressing that we had thought
was permanently on the clothes. I could see it. I’d walk by a costume and I’d stop short: ‘That’s
changed color. Let’s get it back to the shop.’ We had kept four perfect, undistressed costumes
for each of the pirates; we were going to use them after Malta to shoot the first scene in the
film (in the Somali village), and those were useful as a point of reference as we refreshed the
costumes that lost their wear and tear.”
“For the Maersk crew’s costumes, we interviewed Richard Phillips and Maersk officials, determining what Phillips wore on his arrival at port vs. what he would wear after embarking,” recalls Bridges. When we first see Phillips as he takes command of the Alabama, he’s in his captain’s uniform (the same merchant marine uniform, displaying rank, that Phillips would have worn). Research into Maersk-issued clothing from the period, in 2009, revealed a technical but critical issue: the Maersk jumpsuits had recently changed from the all-cotton blend the Alabama crew wore in 2009 to a poly-cotton blend — a meaningful distinction because poly-cotton does not age well, making it difficult to give the uniforms the worn look that the period required. “We were lucky to find a contact at Maersk with some old cotton stock. The boiler suits from the period were made of cotton, which breaks down well, allowing us to give the costumes a real, lived-in feel that was authentic to the work wear on the ship at that time.”
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Paul Greengrass’s work with his editor, co-producer, and longtime collaborator Christopher Rouse, A.C.E. started well before a single frame was shot, while the director was working with screenwriter Billy Ray in shaping the screenplay. An Academy Award®-winner for his
work on The Bourne Ultimatum, Rouse says, “Paul and I spent more time together during the script development and preproduction processes on Captain Phillips than we ever had before. We had regular story sessions as the screenplay evolved; we spent months talking about every aspect of every scene in the film. For the action scenes we create storyboards and animatics, so that Paul has pre-visualized sequences heading into production. But otherwise our process is the same, whether a particular scene is an action sequence, or a dialogue-driven sequence,” Rouse says. “It’s not just about the kinetics of an action sequence — we analyze how action supports story and character as well. We get into the integral details: who the characters are, what the characters are about, what their agendas are, what their obstacles are. Once he went out to shoot, Paul had vetted the piece very thoroughly over the course of several months. He was able to probe the piece on every level — examine and reexamine it — and a lot of problems that might have arisen during shooting were solved before the cameras even rolled.” As an example, Rouse cites the structure of the first act of the film, which balances the perspectives of Phillips and Muse. It was important to Greengrass to intertwine Phillips’ and Muse’s stories, Rouse says: “The film portrays each man as a casualty of circumstance. It was key to achieve appropriate balance between the perspectives of the two characters, and it took a lot of back and forth between Paul, Billy, and me to get it just right.” Screenwriter Billy Ray adds, “It was important to all of us not to let Muse devolve into a caricature of a villain; despite Muse’s aggression and potential for violence, Paul never stopped pushing to give him moments of real vulnerability.”
Greengrass had this to add about his process — from the script, to the set, to the editing room: “Billy envisioned the fundamental markers of the film: the characters, the narrative, the sense of the set pieces — he conveyed the essence of it. But at a certain point we had to go off to sea to shoot, and get the actors involved. Shooting at sea, on real ships, re-enacting the event as closely as we could, lent the film a sense of immediacy that we couldn’t have prepared. I like to shoot material at length, because then you get the unplanned moments, and you get people to inhabit the story as a reality,” Greengrass adds. “It’s not just a movie, it’s something really happening in front of them — and that’s when you get that sense of urgency, that sense of excitement. And then Chris can take the material I shoot and create the right tempo, balance the points of view, make sure that Phillips stays at the center of the story . . . he creates the template that pulls it all together. The relationship between a screenplay and a shoot and a cut is the magic of film.”
Having worked with Greengrass on United 93, Green Zone, and the Bourne films, Rouse has become accustomed to intuiting the constant movements of Greengrass’s camera, and creating from those movements an engrossing editorial rhythm; that played a big role in the architecture of Captain Phillips.
EDITING
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“Paul and Barry’s style of moving the camera instantly provides a scene with emotion and rawness,” Rouse says. “The moving camera creates tension, gives great dynamics to action sequences, and also supports the way Paul works with actors, infusing his sometimes improvised scenes with visual immediacy. Editorially, I embrace the camera movement as another rhythmic element in the scene, attempting to feel and shape it from cut to cut as I would the rhythms of dialogue. In terms of pacing, Paul and I don’t talk about specifics much. If I’ve anchored myself properly in story, character, and theme, it all flows naturally.”
In the editing room, Rouse and Greengrass were able to continually ramp up the film’s tension, despite the fact that the action keeps getting compressed into tighter and tighter spaces. “It’s inherently tense — the power of the U.S. Navy is bearing down on this tiny lifeboat in the middle of the ocean,” Rouse says. “We spent a lot of time with these scenes, both on the page and in the editing room. In particular, the climactic sequence at the end of the film, that culminates in the SEAL snipers taking their shots, took months to work out.” Rouse explains in more detail: “In the final reel, the action is reaching a peak: the lifeboat has just been hammered by waves from the enormous warships, putting Phillips and the pirates on a razor’s edge, while at the same time, the SEAL Commander is trying to assess line of sight for his shooters, and to manipulate Najee into letting the Bainbridge pull the lifeboat into closer range. In the midst of all this, the scene hits an emotional pitch, as Phillips comes to believe the standoff is reaching its crisis point and that he’s going to die — and decides to write a letter to his family as a result. “This was a tricky construct, because several threads had to be knitted together. We’d built to this point over the entire movie, and so the question became, how do we bring all of the converging elements together to create a powerful, exciting climax, but still retain the deeper, more nuanced, characterful, and thematic aspects of the piece? “Paul wanted Phillips desperate and active through this sequence, to build the emotion in the strongest way possible to Phillips’ writing of the letter. My goal was to keep Phillips at the center of events, milking each moment of Tom’s performance (realizing the lifeboat was coming
in range of the snipers, seeing the pen, deciding to write the letter, clocking Najee, grabbing the pen, then searching for paper). At the same time, I balanced those moments against everything else that was occurring — keeping all the characters present for the audience through the sequence: the SEAL Commander surveying the snipers’ shifting lines of sight from the Bainbridge fantail, Najee arguing with Elmi and the SEAL Commander, Bilal starting to realize that Phillips’ letter-writing portended something significant.
“During all of this, it was crucial to show the enormous scale and scope of the warship maneuvers, and, just as importantly, their effect on the characters — in particular Phillips, who realizes that the Navy is bringing the situation to a head, and decides to write the letter as a result. We also had to convey that the SEAL Commander has sold Najee a bill of goods [i.e., allowing the Navy to reel him within sniper range] — a bill of goods which, once accepted, sends the sequence into its endgame. Finally, I tried to build a small crescendo culminating in several back to back actions: Najee acceding to the SEAL Commander, Phillips successfully getting pen and paper, and the tow rope starting to be reeled in.
[ 2 2 ]
“We were trying to get the balance right. It wasn’t an easy proposition but I think we were able to do that — to ratchet up the tension while staying honest to the deeper dramatic elements that underpin the sequence.”
As the film intensified, layer by layer, to its ultimate catharsis, Greengrass felt he and Rouse were in perfect synchrony. “Chris did an incredible job,” Greengrass says. “The sense of excitement he cultivated and the way he has brought out the characters make it a beautiful piece of editorial work.”
For Rouse, as for all of Greengrass’s collaborators, it’s the director’s ability to juggle disparate elements — moments of private emotion, grand-scale global realities, and cinematic suspense — that creates a unique, powerful, humanist brand of filmmaking all Greengrass’s own. “Paul is an absolute master of capturing deeply intimate aspects of characters who are journeying through richly thematic territory,” the editor and co-producer observes. “I think that ability is a product of Paul’s worldview, his exceptionally literate background, fused with a powerful journalistic sensibility, his great dramatic instincts, and his enormous heart. All of those aspects are front and center in this material. Our job is to help them be felt and understood.”
[ 2 3 ]
March 2009. At home in Vermont, Captain Richard Phillips (TOM HANKS), a merchant
mariner, prepares to journey around the Horn of Africa. The ride to the airport with his
wife, Andrea (CATHERINE KEENER), is tense: his career keeps him away for months at a
stretch, and now in his fifties, the job feels more perilous than ever. When Andrea ponders the
future, she’s filled with doubt, and Phillips understands why. He thinks their son Danny doesn’t
take school seriously enough: where men of Phillips’ generation could rise easily through the
ranks, Danny may struggle to find a decent job even with a diploma.
Eyl, Somalia. Muse (BARKHAD ABDI) is awakened by a friend with urgent news. The warlord
Garaad has dispatched bosses to enlist men for new piracy missions, sending skiffs to hijack
and ransom the foreign cargo ships that daily pass Eyl’s coast. Muse has captained before and
won’t pass up another chance for work. In town, he finds Garaad’s men, and, to the chagrin of
others vying for captaincies, the bosses pick him to assemble a crew. Muse runs to the beach,
where, mobbed by dozens clamoring for a spot on Garaad’s skiffs, he quickly chooses Bilal
(BARKHAD ABDIRAHMAN) and Elmi (MAHAT M. ALI); but he wants someone strong to round out
the group. Najee (FAYSAL AHMED), a commanding presence at the back, stares him down. Muse,
impressed with his intensity, nods in assent. The four arm themselves from a cache of automatic
weapons and embark on a skiff, its motor screaming against the surf.
Salalah, Oman. Phillips arrives at port and boards his cargo ship, the MV Maersk Alabama, as
it’s loaded with 2400 tons of commercial cargo, 200 tons of food aid, and more. On the bridge,
Phillips’ first mate, Shane Murphy (MICHAEL CHERNUS), runs down their itinerary, which takes
them through the Somali basin. “Let’s tighten up security,” the captain advises just before they
disembark. What neither man says, but both know, is that the Alabama’s route past the Horn
of Africa has become a hotbed for pirates targeting freighters. Worried his crew is unprepared,
Phillips orders a security drill on the water.
The security drill has barely begun when the bridge detects two approaching skiffs. Phillips dials
maritime security, but nothing reassuring is forthcoming (“Alert your crew, get your fire hoses
ready … Chances are it’s just fishermen”); when Phillips makes out the crew’s weapons through
his binoculars, he’s certain — “They’re not here to fish.”
Suspecting that the pirates are listening to his communications, Phillips turns the second skiff
back with a clever piece of theater, as he radios himself that a Navy warship is en route. Then he
has his chief engineer goose the Alabama’s engine, churning out waves large enough to disable
the first skiff’s motor: Muse and his crew find themselves dead in the water. For the Alabama,
it’s a crisis averted, but at a debriefing in the mess, the mood is uneasy: the pirates have guns
and the Alabama does not. As one crewman puts it, “Cap: they’re comin’ back.”
THE STORY
[ 2 4 ]
Sure enough, Muse’s crew renews their efforts the next morning, hurtling toward the Alabama
with more horsepower and a jury-rigged boarding ladder. Phillips, summoned above deck,
watches as they approach and suddenly open fire on the bridge. Taking cover, he activates the
high-pressure hoses on the ship’s perimeter — meant to deter an approach from any angle —
but the skiff keeps coming. When one of the hoses slips, Murphy runs from the bridge to reset it;
but, taking advantage of the hole in the much larger ship’s defense, the pirates pull alongside the
Alabama, hook their ladder over the rail, and board as their skiff washes away in the undertow.
Seconds before the pirates breach the bridge, Phillips addresses Murphy and the crew on
his walkie-talkie, instructing them to hide in the engine room until they hear the non-duress
password. “Remember: you know this ship, they don’t,” he reminds them, shutting the Alabama
down and transferring control to the engine room.
Flashing their guns, the pirates storm the bridge as Phillips and a few of his crew stand helpless.
“Relax,” Muse tells Phillips. “No Al Qaeda here. Just business.” Muse and his crew are thrilled
to learn that the ship is American: the ransom will be massive. But when he can’t activate
the control panel, he sours. “Where is the crew?” “I don’t know,” Phillips lies. Muse erupts,
threatening to kill every crewmember on the bridge if the others fail to appear. To pacify the
pirates, Phillips offers to search the ship with Muse, who has requisitioned the captain’s walkie-
talkie. They set off with Bilal providing backup, while Najee keeps watch on the bridge, and Elmi
patrols the decks.
Leaving the confined crew in the swelter of the engine room, Murphy races to the mess to
retrieve water. Meanwhile, on Phillips’ guided tour, Muse finds the Alabama crew nowhere in
sight, and demands to investigate the engine room, below deck. Buying time, Phillips diverts
Muse and Bilal to the mess for water, where they barely miss Murphy, who takes cover in a
cold storage unit and, noticing Bilal’s bare feet, radios the crew to leave broken glass outside
the engine room door. The trap works: Bilal, leading Muse and Phillips downstairs and into the
engine room, plants his foot in the glass, sustaining severe cuts. Phillips prevails upon him to
seek first aid, and the two of them head to the bridge, leaving Muse to search the engine room
alone. Before Muse’s flashlight can find the Alabama crew hiding among the machinery, they
surprise and disarm him, cutting his hand in the process.
When the news of Muse’s capture reaches the bridge, Phillips has the leverage to broker a deal:
his crew will release Muse and hand over the $30,000 sitting in the ship’s safe — if the pirates
leave the Alabama, by way of the lifeboat mounted on deck. To ensure a smooth transaction,
Najee insists that Phillips accompany the pirates into the lifeboat until their own captain joins
them — and then Phillips can return to his crew. But once they have Phillips and Muse inside, the
pirates go back on their deal — jettisoning themselves from the Alabama with a spray of gunfire,
with Phillips now their hostage.
As the Alabama trails the hot, cramped lifeboat, the U.S. Navy initiates a rescue operation headed
by the destroyer USS Bainbridge. Its Commander, Frank Castellano (YUL VAZQUEZ), is to resolve
the situation peacefully if possible, but the lifeboat must not reach the Somali coast. “This thing
is running big,” the dispatcher says; SEALs are en route, for additional support.
[ 2 5 ]
After nightfall, the destroyer ambushes the lifeboat, blasting it with a siren and blinding light,
halting it in its tracks. By morning, the Navy dispatches a negotiator aboard an RHIB, but the
pirates’ tempers flare when a ransom offer isn’t forthcoming, and Najee discharges his gun
beside Phillips’ head. “It’s falling apart in here,” Phillips says to Castellano, over the lifeboat
radio. The lifeboat breaks away, now with the Bainbridge as well as its newly arrived support —
the frigate USS Halyburton, and the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer — in pursuit.
A nervous day passes, and when night descends again, Phillips senses opportunity. Fortified by
the increased Navy presence, he gets permission to step on deck to relieve himself, but makes a
break for the water — and for the Bainbridge in the distance — instead. A hail of Najee’s AK-47
rounds and an underwater scuffle later, Phillips is dragged back on board.
While Najee rains blows down on Phillips, on the Bainbridge, the SEALs parachute in and assume control of the Navy operation. In a feint, the SEAL Commander (MAX MARTINI) radios Muse, claiming to have contacted the pirates’ tribal elders. The SEAL Commander pushes a deal: Muse can come aboard the Bainbridge to parley, while the lifeboat, low on fuel, will be towed to an exchange point. Phillips tells a shaken Muse, who’s pondering his options, “There’s gotta be something other than being a fisherman and kidnapping people.” “Maybe in America,” Muse replies.
Arriving in RIHBs to collect Muse, the Navy attaches a towline to the front of the lifeboat and
delivers Phillips a clean change of clothes — a bright yellow shirt… Phillips recognizes the sign
— the SEALs want him to stand out in the dark. Having stonewalled for as long as possible,
Muse at last consents to board the Bainbridge; with the pirate leader aboard the Navy ship and
the lifeboat in tow, three snipers take their positions on the destroyer’s fantail. To execute their
order, all three will need to find a clear line of sight to their targets — and they will need to do so
in synchrony. Hoping to lure Najee toward a window for a clean shot, the Bainbridge generates a heavy wake, rocking the lifeboat on its towline. Phillips, sensing a showdown is near, locates
a pen and paper, and scribbles a last letter to his family.
Najee snatches the note from Phillips, obstructing the snipers’ view in the process. The pirates
bind and blindfold Phillips, and Najee, beside himself with anger, picks up his gun. Knowing
the Navy is listening, Phillips asks them to relay his goodbyes to his family. Najee, finger on
his trigger, steps forward, just as the SEALs give the command to stop the tow: the lifeboat
lurches, jolting Najee into a sniper’s sightline. In the Bainbridge CIC, all three targets are green.
Three pops, three shattered windows, and Phillips, disoriented, spattered with blood, shakes
his blindfold loose to three dead bodies on the floor of the boat. In the Bainbridge holding room,
officers converge on Muse, who’s zip-cuffed and taken away.
Recovering and getting his bearings in the sick bay, the shocked Phillips can hardly say his
name. A Bainbridge medic assures him of what he can’t seem to believe — “you are safe and
you are fine” — as he releases a raw swell of emotion he didn’t see coming.
[ 2 6 ]
PAUL GREENGRASS
AND THE DOCUDRAMA TRADITION
JONATHAN ROMNEY
Among today’s filmmakers, few confront the drama and complexity of current events as truthfully and viscerally as Paul Greengrass. The British-born director makes movies about what he calls “the world in action,” and he has built his reputation on a powerful alchemy of fiction and documentary; over the last decade, Greengrass has emerged as the confident hand behind such taut, intricate thrillers as The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Green Zone—but he’s made an indelible mark with dramas that embrace documentary techniques, offering an urgent dispatch on the events of our times. These are films that reconstruct real-life crises in all their turbulence and political complexity, charging them with the immediacy of action cinema: United 93, one of the 9/11 hijackings; Bloody Sunday, a notorious incident in the Northern Ireland conflict; and now Captain Phillips, the
story of a cargo ship under attack from Somali pirates.
Cinema has always sought new ways to engage with the world, and Greengrass belongs to a
tradition of directors who approach the medium with the eye of a documentarian, hoping to
avoid the traps and distortions inherent in fictional storytelling. In their commitment to creating
an authentic reality on screen, these directors were inescapably political, both in their choice
of subject matter and in their determination to reveal truths about the economic and human
conditions of their times.
One such director is Roberto Rossellini, a linchpin of the neo-realist movement, who presented
an unvarnished tableau of postwar Europe; his dramas, such as 1945’s Rome, Open City, had a
profound effect on contemporary audiences who were unaccustomed to movies that seemed
closer to reportage than to fiction, taking place in the here and now and confronting the harsh
realities of the times. In the 1950s, Poland’s Andrzej Wajda made his mark with intense and often
expressionistic dramatized accounts of his nation’s struggles during World War II (Kanal, Ashes
and Diamonds). A decade later, the Greek-born, French-based Costa-Gavras, especially admired
by Greengrass, used emotionally charged dramas to engage the audience with often morally
challenging political issues – most famously in 1969’s Z, about events surrounding the killing of
a Greek left-wing activist.
But the film that serves perhaps as the truest model for Paul Greengrass’s work is Gillo
Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), which combined dynamic, fast-moving narrative with
detailed recreations of specific events, together with a detached, politically questioning approach
to its subject, the Algerian War of Independence. As Greengrass would do later, Pontecorvo places
emphasis on events—places, crowds, the complexity of incident—and on larger social forces
underlying the conflict, rather than encouraging the audience to sympathize with a particular
character. The Battle of Algiers presents the ideologies of both sides: the guerillas fighting for
independence and the French army ruthlessly enforcing colonial rule. The film sees both sides
[ 2 7 ]
resort to brutal methods, but it also grants both the chance to articulate their philosophies.
Thus the audience must draw its own conclusions, though the film’s own sympathies eventually
become clear in a chilling montage of the results of the French torture policy.
Greengrass follows a similar approach in his 2002 film Bloody Sunday, which traces a notorious
day of violence in Northern Ireland in 1972 on which 26 civilians were shot by the British army.
As The Battle of Algiers does, Bloody Sunday follows in depth the events of a single day to
demonstrate how the operations of military authority can all too easily spin out of control,
crushing individuals and populations in their path. Though the audience initially encounters the
events of Bloody Sunday through the eyes of civil rights campaigner Ivan Cooper, played by
James Nesbitt, the overall drama shifts between the perspective of the British forces and that of
the peace marchers and other locals caught up in the day’s turmoil. Greengrass makes it clear
that not everyone in the Derry community shares Cooper’s peaceful ideals and that the IRA has its
own militant agenda; at the same time, the audience is made aware of the British army’s deeply
ingrained animosity toward the Northern Irish, and the film lays bare their entrenched attitude
of casual violence toward the protestors. In the context of the conflict at large, it becomes clear,
the peaceful efforts of a few individuals stand little chance of averting catastrophe.
This same Pontecorvo-style interest in the entirety of a story, from its broad societal implications
right down to its finest details, is on display in Captain Phillips. Captain Phillips is fundamentally evenhanded in its humanism and its understanding of the larger forces that shape the lives of
the film’s characters. The pirates in this story are not the shadowy, one-dimensional villains of
so many action movies. Rather, as the film makes clear from the outset, they are real people,
struggling bitterly for survival in the face of changes wrought by globalization. We see the harsh
conditions in which Muse and his companions live, no longer able to survive as fishermen and
forced to adopt a brutal new trade, under pressure from their Somali warlord bosses. But neither
are Muse’s counterparts in the privileged West immune to the vagaries of the global economy.
The film understands this as a condition of life today: everyone must endure the tumult of
economic and political change.
Greengrass learned his craft as a documentarian on World In Action, a British television series
renowned for its energetic approach to investigative reportage. His early attempts to dramatize
current affairs include the Gulf War story The One That Got Away (1996); The Murder of Stephen
Lawrence (1999), about a young Londoner killed in a racist attack; and Resurrected (1989), about
the ordeal of a British soldier returning from the Falklands. It was on Resurrected, Greengrass
says, that he learned how effective the merging of documentary and fiction could be. As he
told The Guardian in 2007, in the World In Action series, “we were using the dispassionate,
observational documentary eye I had developed [in our recreations of real-world] events, and
the collision between the two allows you to get at a bigger truth than you could by using just the
one approach or the other.”
There is a particularly strong docudrama tradition in British television and cinema, championed
by several directors that Greengrass acknowledges as influences. One is Ken Loach, a UK
filmmaker known for his profound commitment to cinema as an instrument of political change.
Loach’s 1960s work both on television and the big screen (Kes, Cathy Come Home) had such
[ 2 8 ]
documentary force that it was widely hailed as a kind of supplementary news source: it provided
a vital, forthright perspective on day-to-day British life that was missing from the mainstream
news of the time. Loach has continued to be an outspoken political force in British cinema;
his 2006 Cannes Palme d’Or winner The Wind That Shakes the Barley offered a controversially
sympathetic depiction of the early days of the IRA.
Another influence on Greengrass was Peter Watkins, who favored documentary techniques both
in his historical films (Culloden) and in his imaginative evocations of possible future scenarios
(such as The War Game, whose apocalyptic vision of a post-nuclear Britain derives much of its
strength from its pastiche TV news style). Greengrass also counts as a major inspiration the
late Alan Clarke—a director known for his no-holds-barred representations of Britain’s violent,
dispossessed subcultures (The Firm, Scum) and for Elephant, a radically demystifying essay
on the meaning of violence in the Northern Ireland conflict. In The Guardian, Greengrass has
hailed Clarke as a prime influence: “As a director, you have to be like Alan Clarke—anonymous,
subversive, compassionate, and moral.”
Greengrass’s approach to filmmaking is increasingly relevant in today’s media landscape, where
the line between documentary and fiction is more blurred than ever. His lucid, searching style
has especial currency at a time when more citizens are scrutinizing the narratives of government
and media alike—a key theme in Green Zone and the Bourne films.
In those movies, Greengrass rejuvenated genre cinema by infusing it with the immediacy of
documentary. Green Zone meticulously recreated the American intelligence apparatus’s
search for WMDs in Iraq, vividly grounding the thriller in a particular historical moment. And
Greengrass’s two episodes of the Bourne series used a vibrant reportage style to locate a spy
fiction in everyday reality. Case in point: the sequence in The Bourne Ultimatum in which Jason
Bourne (Matt Damon) meets a journalist contact at London’s Waterloo Station; Greengrass was
obliged to shoot in this crowded public space using a minimal crew, essentially catching the
action in its spontaneous rush, as best the challenging environment allowed him: “It forced us
to be true to our roots,” he says in his director’s commentary, “to operate like a guerilla unit,
seizing the shots on the run amongst everyday life . . .” Such sequences brought a new vitality
to espionage cinema, giving it a realistic grounding in the world we know—in real locations, but
also amid the constant, destabilizing presence of surveillance and technology.
Just as he tempers his work in the spy genre with hard political reality, Greengrass brings a thriller-
like intensity to films that recreate the confusion and intimacy of real-life crises. Bloody Sunday,
United 93, and Captain Phillips evoke the violent, complex rush of incident through vigilant, mobile camera work and kinetic, often staccato editing. These films bear the fruit of intensive research, echoing Pontecorvo’s method of interviewing real-life participants in the Algerian conflict and recruiting them as performers. In United 93, his 2006 film about the hijacked 9/11 flight that never reached its target, Greengrass avoided well-known faces; he cast the film with less-familiar actors and with non-actors—flight attendants, ground crew members, air traffic control officials who had been at work on 9/11. To further the sense of immediacy, Greengrass encouraged his cast to improvise from an outline rather than having them follow a script.
[ 2 9 ]
Whether recreating real-life events or filming fiction, Greengrass prefers to let the camera act as an observer, following the action as it happens, instead of insisting that his actors take their lead from a pre-planned pattern of shots. Greengrass has said of his style of moviemaking: “It’s directed in the moment, in the present tense . . . I hope that when it works you get this sense of extreme emotional intimacy and performed truthfulness with an extreme sense of captured reality.”
Whether on the streets of Derry in Bloody Sunday, the narrow passenger aisles of United 93,
in the cramped cargo ship corridors of Captain Phillips, or in the teeming, hectic city spaces
of the Bourne films, Greengrass’s aim is the same: to immerse the audience in action that is
happening almost too fast for us to keep up with it. Yet he orchestrates this action, as frenetic
as it is, in a way that ensures the viewer a clear sense of what’s taking place on screen and
its meaning in the wider context of events. Immersing us directly in the intense experience
of events usually reported in the media as complete narratives with artificial closure imposed
on them, Greengrass’s filmmaking encourages us to step back from a conventional, inherently
skewed, and simplistic approach to film, one that divides all stories into the actions of heroes
and villains. Greengrass makes us understand what it’s like to be caught in the rush of history as
it is happening—his films function as acts of political demystification, encouraging the viewer to
look past the reductive pictures offered by conventional media.
Greengrass is fascinated, above all, with the contemporary world and its apparent state of
permanent crisis. “I’m very interested in the idea of what happens when the world moves out of
control,” Greengrass has said. But his own masterfully controlled cinema, like the docudrama
tradition from which it springs, allows the viewer to see through the chaos—to glimpse, if only
for the length of a feature film, the inner workings of our complex, contradictory world.
Jonathan Romney, former chief film critic at the Independent on Sunday, is also a regular contributor to
Sight & Sound and a weekly reviewer for FilmComment.com. He also contributes to Screen International.
[ 3 0 ]
“Relax, Captain, relax. Just business. No Al Qaeda. You stop the ship.”
—Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse, pirate, ‘Captain Phillips’
Humans have traded by ship for at least two thousand years. The greatest empires were those that best exploited the sea: Greece, Rome, Phoenicia. But now the sea is perceived as a place for leisure and cruising, not for work or industry. Ask anyone about shipping by boat and he or she will conjure images of sailor towns, spices, slaves, of an antiquated world. Today we travel by airliners, not ocean liners. We see the oceans as patches of blue on a moving electronic map. In fact, our fast, hi-tech world would collapse without container ships, enormous vessels that
travel more slowly than a cautious driver. Ninety percent of world trade travels by sea, carried
by 100,000 working merchant vessels. Barely any nation now is industrially self-sufficient, and
since containerization was popularized in the 1970s, no nation need be. Once Malcom [sic]
McLean, a U.S. shipper, devised a metal box that could be fitted to ships, trains, and trucks alike,
the world changed. Before the container, shipping costs ate twenty-five percent of profits on
even the cheapest goods. Now, the extreme efficiencies of this “intermodality” mean a sweater
can travel 3,000 miles for twenty-five cents, and when economic pressures are hard, it can
travel for free. The United States relies on ships to bring two-thirds of its oil supplies; the UK
will ship in most of its gas by 2015. Shipping containers carry anything, everything: nail polish,
car batteries, salmon and shrimp; bananas, carbamate pesticide, televisions and telephones; animal hides and animals; humans and drugs. When the container ship Emma Maersk arrived
at Felixstowe at Christmas 2006, she carried 150 tons of New Zealand lamb, 138,000 tins of cat
food, 12,800 MP3 players, 33,000 cocktail shakers, and two million Christmas decorations. That
was a tiny selection from her 13,000 boxes. It is difficult to see how globalization could have
thrived without shipping. On paper, shipping is regulated, and carefully. Countries control twelve miles of the sea beyond
their coastlines, and beyond that is the high sea, governed by the United Nations Convention on
the Law of the Sea, a 1982 agreement that runs to 320 articles. But the sea dissolves paper. In
practice, the ocean is still the world’s wildest place, both because of its fearsome natural danger
and because of how easy it is out there to slip out of the boundaries of law and civilization that
seem so firm ashore. Shipping is the freest of free markets. Even offshore bankers have not
developed a system as intricate and elusive as the “flag of convenience” or “open registry,”
whereby ship owners can fly the flag of any sovereign state for a fee. As the ship is then subject
to the laws of that flag state, it can enjoy advantages such as cheaper taxes and less stringent
labor laws. Nearly seventy per cent of ships now fly a flag belonging to a state that need have
nothing to do with their owner, cargo, crew, or route. Most ship owners are reputable, but for
the disreputable, there is no better place to hide than behind a flag. One report found that thirty-
four flag registries used anonymity as a key selling point. A former U.S. Coast Guard commander
called this open-registry system “managed anarchy.”
TO SEA
ROSE GEORGE
[ 3 1 ]
With the freedoms that open registries provide, many ships, unshackled from union wage and
manning restrictions, now carry small crews—nineteen men for a ship carrying 7,000 boxes is
generous—from multiple countries, often poor ones. On a container ship I travelled on through
the Gulf of Aden to Singapore, there were eight different nationalities around one dinner table.
The people of the rich world are supplied, fed, and heated by ships crewed by men from its poor
ones: the Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burma. A ship flying an American flag, with an
American crew paid American wages, is now rare. After the Second World War, the U.S. had a
fleet of 1,000 ships. Now there are fewer than 100 U.S.-flagged vessels.
The rich world doesn’t notice seafarers any more because it barely produces any. A Western
European tanker captain once told a shipping seminar about being asked on a website to choose
his occupation. He chose “shipping” and was offered a further choice: FedEx or DHL? The sea
has retreated from our industrialized world, enough that a UK senior admiral accuses us of
having “sea blindness.” It’s not hard to see why: even in our smartphone age, the seas remain
isolated, and isolating. The shipping business, a modern industry employing more than a million
seafarers (and many more millions ashore), still doesn’t provide eighty percent of its workers,
even when they live for months at sea, with the basic internet facilities any seven-year-old
would regard as routine. Though the internet as we know it is anchored by cables on the sea
bed—cables laid by ships—it’s a rare deckhand who has free and consistent internet access
on board. Even captains must depend on satellite dial-up, and most crews can only Skype or
browse when they get ashore, if they have time.
Only “sea blindness,” too, could account for how violent piracy became accepted as a routine occupational hazard for seafarers. In 2010, when thirty-three Chilean miners were trapped underground for more than two months, nearly 1,500 journalists set up camp at the mine. At the same time, twenty-three men were passing their second year as hostages on MV Iceberg, anchored in plain sight off the Somali coast, and there were nearly 500 other hostages nearby. Fifteen crew on the Marshall Islands flagged Marida Marguerite, carrying a cargo of chemicals. The glycol-ethyelene and eighteen men of MV Golden Blessing; another eighteen men on the unlucky chemical tanker MV Olib G. So many desperate men in dire straits, yet hardly any journalist went near, although by the end of the year, pirates had taken a record 1, 181 seafarers prisoner. In the Indian Ocean, that blindness also extended ashore. Many Americans remember Somalia
from Black Hawk Down as a place of chaos, collapse, and fury. After decades of bitter war,
Somalia became a byword for “failed state,” and no one saw behind its chaos into the reality: that
this failed state still functioned, just differently. Even refugee camps have thriving businesses. In
Somalia, there was desperation but also working supply lines - of ladders, khat and the plentiful
small arms that decades of civil war had provided – as well as countless young men for pirate
sorties. Add the first few million-dollar ransoms, and there were enough contributing factors to
make piracy flourish for more than a decade.
Another factor was revenge. If we are to believe the pirates’ origin myth, they began to take innocent seafarers hostage to compensate for the bounty plundered by foreign fishing vessels that arrived after war began, robbing Somali waters of their fish and dumping toxic waste. In this story, the pirates are freedom fighters, rebelling against their contemptuous colonial overlords. Going out to sea in a small boat is inherently dangerous, especially when you’re living on a starvation diet, but something kept pushing them out there, and some of it was poverty. Two million Somalis exist on
[ 3 2 ]
humanitarian aid, most of it brought to Mogadishu’s port by ships that other Somalis attack and try to capture. If a Somali man reaches the age of fifty-five, he is a lucky one. Another factor was intelligence. Piracy is thought to be chaotic, but it depends on calculation.
Somalia is a failed state, but one with smartphones, internet cafés, and a huge diaspora with
good connections. These pirates began to understand their prey. They understood that these
ships passing by, these slow and easily scalable ships, could be theirs for months. The ships’
owners have insurance, the insurers will pay, and an unspoken agreement could hold: that this
was indeed “just business.”
Pirates soon understood too that most of the ships they saw passing were unarmed. Protection,
at least until the last two years, consisted of hoses rigged to jet water at boarders; barbed wire;
and skill and good luck. Geography also favoured the pirate: the vastness of the Indian Ocean
means even a powerful naval warship can patrol only a fraction at a time. Even when naval
forces are at full capacity, their job, in the words of one naval commander, is like two police
cars patrolling all of Western Europe. The pirates learned quickly that ships were entities like
no other— that the average ship passing them would likely be owned by a national from one
country, crewed by nationals from many others, and insured by a company somewhere else—
that these ships were moving targets belonging to no nation, or at least to no nation nearby.
There was nothing new to this business model. Kidnap and ransom has worked for thousands
of years onshore and off—since before Caesar was taken hostage by pirates on the way from
Rome to Bythnia and ransomed for fifty silver talents. Somalia’s pirates may have guessed at the
dangers of the ocean, but they also quickly understood that they risked little. They were brutal in
their treatment of their hostages, despite proclaiming this to be a “bloodless business.” Behind
that bloodlessness, hostages have been stabbed, shot, near-drowned, starved, driven mad, and
routinely used as human shields. But the best human shield pirates always had was inertia,
governmental and private. For years, the complex, competitive shipping industry found it difficult
to mount any collective protest. Somali pirates, like any good asymmetric opponent in a war,
learned the weak points of its opponents, and the weakest point in this case was the amorphous
nature of the adversary. All nations, under UN law, have the right to use “all necessary means”
to suppress piracy, but the gap between paper law and practice was huge: until 2010, hardly any
developed nation would take on the cost or trouble of prosecuting pirates, so all counter-piracy
forces could do was disrupt (by removing outboard engines, fuel) or detain the pirates, only to
release them, kindly and carefully, onto the nearest Somali beach. For most of the latest golden
age of piracy, consequently, patrolling militaries were forced to release eighty percent of the
pirates they captured. The pirates who chose Maersk Alabama as their prey fell into the other
twenty percent, and paid heavily: Alabama was not only unusual in its crew and nationality, but
in the reaction it provoked once attacked. USS Bainbridge immediately detached itself from the
counter-piracy force CTF-151 to be able to use its own rules of engagement, including lethal
force, and the U.S. also agreed to try the first pirate for 200 years, on U.S. soil.
Although Alabama’s rescue was unusual, it was not game-changing. Pirates knew how few U.S.
ships there were, and how reluctant most nations were to use their firepower or courts to stem
piracy. The risk, they calculated, was still worth taking. By early 2011, there were more than
700 hostages held by Somali pirates, and this remained the case until the opposing side—the
counter-pirates—made two substantial changes in tactics. First, more ships began to use armed
[ 3 3 ]
guards. Ex-military men, often from the Special Boat Service or Navy Seals, found spending
weeks on a ship more lucrative – at several thousand dollars a day – and less lethal than working
security details in Iraq or Afghanistan. In 2011, twice as many men left elite units in the British
Army than usual, almost certainly headed to sea. Secondly, those expensive prosecutions in the
US, Germany and elsewhere may have been financially costly, but they paid for themselves by
setting up a meaningful deterrent where none had existed before. Tracking the financial flows of
ransom money, which the UN began to do in 2011, has also helped. Somali pirates are now on
the retreat, though not entirely. Even now, sixty-eight seafarers are being held captive in or just
off Somalia. There are still lost, forgotten men held hostage for doing their job, which is to bring
us ninety per cent of everything we need and want.
The men of MV Iceberg were released in December last year, though the crew had been reduced
by two: one had gone mad and drowned, the other had died of stress. I try to picture an airline
industry that would tolerate a jumbo jet being held in plain sight on a runway for two years. Or
twenty-four Greyhound drivers held hostage for one thousand days. It wouldn’t happen. It did,
because it could, in shipping, in a free market where the freedom can be the untethered kind, in
the oceans that are the world’s wildest place.
Rose George is the author of Ninety Percent of Everything, The Big Necessity and A Life Removed. A freelance journalist, she has written for The New York Times, Slate, and The Guardian. She lives in Yorkshire, England.
[ 3 4 ]
Over the past two decades, pirates have wrought terror and havoc in the busy commercial
waters off the coast of Somalia. Nearly one hundred successful hijackings have been carried
out since 2005, over a billion dollars in ransom money has changed hands, and scores
of innocent seafarers have lost their lives. Much like conventional forms of organized crime,
the pirates are part of a large and sophisticated network, operating within a rigid hierarchy
of authority. The lowest tier of the hierarchy is composed of 3000 to 5000 pirates, many of
them impoverished fishermen desperate for any source of income that they can find.1 At the top of the hierarchy sit ten key ‘instigators’ based in Puntland, who raise money and coordinate
every detail of the attacks.2 Little is known about the instigators; they are powerful community
figures with links to wealthy expatriates. They have managed to completely evade capture or
prosecution, while at the same time inflicting considerable damage to commercial shipping.
According to a 2012 report from the non-profit Oceans Beyond Piracy, hijackings are responsible
for the loss of $18bn annually from the global economy, largely due to a reduction in shipping
activities.3 How has piracy managed to deliver such a blow to this global industry? And why does
it continue to thrive? Piracy is successful because it is highly organized and abundantly supported by investors both
within and outside of Somalia. Local businesspeople in Puntland front the capital for pirate
operations, expecting a significant return; and it is an open secret amongst the Somali diaspora
in England, Finland, The Netherlands, and the United States that they too may buy shares of a
pirate venture through informal money exchange channels.4 A pirate “stock exchange” even
exists in Harardhere, Somalia – a key congregation point for pirates – through which individuals
can invest in sorties. Ordinary Somalis may back a sea gang either with money or a contribution
of weapons, and expect a dividend after the ransom has been paid.5
Of course, the formalized nature of piracy funding does not in any way diminish the serious
destruction that pirates cause. They inflict grave bodily and psychological harm on seafarers,
their activities drive up the cost of shipping, and they effectively blunt the possibility of tourism
in the places where they operate. At the same time, however, many native Somalis see pirates
as protectors, and as crucial economic contributors in the often-impoverished areas they
inhabit. The United Nations’ Human Development Index — which scores countries according
to the health, education, and living standards of its people — ranks Somalia near the bottom
compared to the rest of the globe. Most Somalis live on $500 a year or less. Meanwhile, pirate
incomes are as much as 157 times higher than Somalia’s GDP.6 In 2010, forty-four ransoms were
1 ‘No Hijacking by Somali Pirates in Nearly a Year’, Associated Press, 3 May 2013; Percy, S. & Shortland, A. 2011.
‘The Business of Piracy in Somalia’, DIW Discussion Paper No. 1033, August p. 6
2 The Pirates of Somalia: Ending the Threat, Rebuilding the Nation, p. 89
3 The Economic Cost of Somali Piracy 2012, Oceans Beyond Piracy, p. 1
4 Ibid
5 Ibid
6 Percy, S. & Shortland, A., op Cit, p. 5
THE SCOURGE OF SOMALI PIRACY
ANDREW FEINSTEIN
[ 3 5 ]
paid totalling $238m.7 As of 2011, the average pirate could earn at least $33,000 a year, and
as much as $78,000.8 Their average lifetime earnings range between $168,000 and $394,000
depending on success rates of attacks.9
The failed state of Somalia – a country plagued by endemic poverty, lawlessness and the easy
availability of weapons – has provided fertile ground for piracy. To understand its root causes, one
must look at Somali governance over the past four decades. Between 1969 and 1991, the country
was ruled as the personal fiefdom of military strongman Siad Barre. His leadership, based on a
program of nationalization and collectivism, set the country on a course for ruin. He was known
to brutally repress political dissent – torturing and executing anyone who opposed him – while
at the same time he developed his own personal network of patronage. His government, riddled
with corruption, soon impoverished the country, and ordinary Somalis were plunged into deeper
and deeper poverty. Crippling droughts in the mid-1970’s and the mid-1980’s only exacerbated
their circumstances.10
Somalia has one of the most well-armed populations in the world, and Barre is largely responsible
for that as well. He had relied entirely on military power to maintain his position, importing
massive quantities of weapons, first from the Soviet Union and then, when his alliance with the
USSR fell apart in the 1970’s, from the West. The capital, Mogadishu, is still replete with informal
arms bazaars. Sixty-four percent of Somalis own one or more weapons.11 In 1991 Barre’s regime
was, in fact, finally toppled by a coalition of armed groups. Deeply unstable and armed to the
teeth, Somalia then erupted into a civil war.
Barre’s demise brought with it a profound fracturing of power throughout the country. Somalia
split into semi-autonomous fiefdoms run by local warlords and businessmen. The political
affiliations of these warlords run along family and clan lines; and, unfortunately, many of them
rule with a hand that is just as oppressive as Barre’s. Hundreds of thousands of Somalis have
died in the crossfire of the civil war, and their country’s infrastructure is essentially in ruins. Since
2000 there have been numerous attempts to form a stable, unified national government. In 2006,
a Transitional Federal Government was created with support from the international community and the African Union, but its power does not extend beyond the borders of Mogadishu.12
Given their recent political history, it is unsurprising that the majority of Somalis live in abject
poverty. Meanwhile, in the midst of their day-to-day hardship, the shipping channel off the coast
remains one of the busiest in the world, with about 16,000 commercial vessels passing through
the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden every year.13 It is not hard to fathom how economic need
7 The Economic Cost of Somali Piracy 2012, Oceans Beyond Piracy, p. 10
8 ‘The Economics of Piracy’, Geopolicity, 2011, pp. 10-12.
9 Ibid
10 See Ismail, I. Ahmed and Green, R.H. 1999. ‘The Heritage of War and State Collapse in Somalia and Somaliland: Local-Level
Effects, External Interventions and Reconstruction’, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 1, p. 115 -116; ‘Report of the Panel of
Experts on Somalia Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1425 (2002)’, S/2003/223, p. 13; ‘Somalia: In the Market for War’,
Guardian (UK), 7 June 2010; Cliffe, L. 2005. ‘Armed Violence and Poverty in Somalia’, Centre for International Cooperation and
Security and University of Bradford: Department for Peace Studies, March, p. 7
11 Cliffe, op cit.
12 Percy & Shortland, op cit.
13 Sorenson, K. 2008. ‘State Failure on the High Seas: Reviewing the Somali Piracy’, FOI Somalia Papers: Report 3,
-FOI-R-2610-SE, p. 15
[ 3 6 ]
and geographic opportunity might drive average Somalis to piracy as a means of supporting
themselves and their extended families and clans.
Pirates have plundered in Somali waters since at least the early 1990s. During the civil war,
some of the regional warlords financed their efforts by hijacking ships off the coast and reselling
the cargo. Much of early piracy targeted foreign fishing vessels that were illegally competing
with local fishermen for the abundant rock-lobster and valuable pelagic fish within the 12-mile
inshore artisanal fishing zone. As a result, pirates were often perceived as enforcers, protecting
the livelihoods of local fishermen — good Samaritans of the sea. Over time, however, the
interception of foreign fishing boats clearly became a protection racket: trawlers were forced to
pay ‘fines’ or for ‘licenses.’ If they failed to do so, pirates would threaten to kidnap or otherwise
harm the offenders.14
It was in 2005 that the most recent and brutal manifestation of piracy began in earnest. Pirates
shifted targets, focusing on larger commercial vessels, such as oil tankers and cargo haulers, specifically in order to extract ransom – unlike traditional piracy, in which the sale of captured
cargo was key. The first ship seized by Somali pirates for ransom was a liquefied petroleum
tanker captured in April 2005. The ship and its crew were later released after payment of a
$315,000 ransom. As word of the successful operation spread, further attacks were unleashed.
Thirteen ships were successfully hijacked that same year.15
Piracy rapidly escalated over the next seven years. In 2008, 42 ships were successfully hijacked,
despite a crackdown by international navies.16 The EU Naval Force recorded a total of 163
attacks in 2009, of which 46 were successful. In 2010, 174 attacks were launched, 47 of which
effectively took possession of vessels.17
As the number of pirate attacks began to climb, their operations grew more sophisticated. Some
pirate groups started to employ ‘mother ships’ that would serve as logistical bases and storage,
thus increasing the length of time they could spend at sea.18 So too expanded the network
of Somalis involved: subcontractors were brought in to hold the hostages and middlemen to
negotiate the ransoms; money launderers were hired to render cash drops into assets; local
farmers kept the pirates and their hostages fed; and arms traders and khat dealers naturally had
their parts to play as well. Local government officials also received money in the form of bribes
or, in the case of some regional warlords, ‘anchorage fees’ for the use of territory under their
control. The beneficiaries of piracy live in every strata of Somali society.19
Piracy itself is still a low-technology enterprise. A small number of skiffs with attached outboard
motors depart from the mother ship and approach the target. A single skiff keeps its distance,
acting as a lookout. The pirates are usually armed with AK-47s and RPGs. Upon reaching the
ship, they simply scramble aboard and hold up the crew. Once vessels are successfully hijacked,
14 Percy, S. & Shortland, A. 2011. ‘The Business of Piracy in Somalia’, DIW Discussion Paper No. 1033, August p. 5 15 Ibid
16 Ibid
17 ‘Key Facts and Figures’, EU Naval Force for Somalia, www.eunavfor.eu/key-facts-and-figures/
18 Percy, S. & Shortland, A. 2009. ‘The Pirates of Somalia: Coastguards of Anarchy’, Working Paper No. 09-42 in the Economics
and Finance Working Paper Series, Brunel University, December, p. 2
19 The Pirates of Somalia: Ending the Threat, Rebuilding the Nation, p. xxiv
[ 3 7 ]
they are navigated to the Somali coast, where they are anchored for the length of ransom
negotiations, which in some cases can last for several months. Guards are deployed to protect
the hostages from raids by rival pirate gangs and also to ward off international navies. For each
operation, a “sea commander” coordinates the actual hijacking, and a “ground commander” is
in charge of logistics after the ship has been captured. The division of labor and management
responsibility is clearly delineated at every level.
Ransoms are negotiated by a committee of five representatives from the pirate operation: the
instigator, two main investors, and the ground and sea commanders. They usually work with
the shipping lines via maritime lawyers, private security firms and insurance companies, most
of which are based in London.20 Once ransoms have been negotiated, funds are transferred via
hawala systems of money transfer, or by cash drops off the coast — always in large denomination
US dollar bills. Burlap sacks or waterproof suitcases containing the cash may be conveyed via
tiny skiffs, or dropped from helicopters and delivered by parachute.21
The business of piracy not withstanding, one can hardly underestimate the significant human
and economic toll of these attacks. Between 2009 and 2012, about 2000 hostages were taken by
pirates, and they inflicted considerable physical and psychological damage. Sixty-two hostages
died in captivity during this time. Kidnapped seamen are often punched, kicked and burned;
some are “tied up in the sun for hours, locked in freezers and had fingernails pulled out with
pliers.”22 Beginning in 2011, shipping companies finally took it upon themselves to employ private
security firms to protect their crews and their assets.23
In 2013, heightened security on ships and aggressive prosecutions of captured pirates in
international courts have brought down the number of hijackings off the Somali coast. However,
pirate attacks on Africa’s West coast have increased at a staggering rate, and its growth may
be credited to many of the same socio-economic factors responsible for the foment of piracy
in Somalia. Ultimately piracy is a maritime issue that can only find solutions on land, through
dramatic political reforms. Somali state power remains limited and there is no national coast
guard that can police pirate activity. The economic prognosis for the country remains bleak, and
it is unlikely to improve without significant political progress and foreign aid. In the meanwhile,
Somalia offers little by way of alternative employment to pirates who have made a personal
fortune from ransoms. Piracy has benefited so many people — on land and offshore — that
without protective measures, one may only assume that it will continue to plague the sea.
Andrew Feinstein is the author of ‘The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade’ described by the
Washington Post as ‘the most complete account of the arms trade ever.’ He was recently named as one of the
100 most influential people internationally working against armed violence.
20 Ibid, p. 93 - 94
21 Choudhury, S. ‘Mysterious World of Somali Pirates, www.somalithinktank.org.
22 The Pirates of Somalia: Ending the Threat, Rebuilding the Nation, p. xxiv , Table 1.2, p. 6
23 Ibid, Figure. 1.4, p. 7
[ 3 8 ]
TOM HANKS (Captain Richard Phillips) holds the distinction of being the first actor in 50 years
to be awarded back-to-back Best Actor Academy Awards®: in 1993 as the AIDS-stricken lawyer
in Philadelphia and the following year in the title role of Forrest Gump. He won Golden Globes®
for both of these performances, as well as his work in Big and Cast Away. In 2009, Hanks was
honored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center with the Chaplin Award.
Hanks recently made his Broadway debut in Nora Ephron’s “Lucky Guy.” His performance earned
him Drama Desk, Drama League, Outer Critics Circle, and Tony® nominations. On screen, Hanks
was most recently seen in Cloud Atlas. His upcoming films include Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks.
Hanks received his big break in the ABC television comedy series “Bosom Buddies.” This led to
starring roles in Ron Howard’s Splash, as well as Bachelor Party, Volunteers, The Money Pit, and
Nothing in Common. In 1988, the Los Angeles Film Critics recognized Hanks’ performances in
both Big and Punchline by awarding him with a Best Actor Award.
Hanks has also starred in A League of Their Own, Sleepless in Seattle, Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan (for which he was honored with his fourth Academy Award® nomination), The Green Mile, Cast Away (his fifth Academy Award®-nominated performance), Road to Perdition, Catch Me If You Can,
The Terminal, The Ladykillers, The Polar Express, The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons, Charlie Wilson’s War, Larry Crowne (which he also co-wrote, produced, and directed), and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. He provided the voice for the character Woody in three Toy Story films; Toy Story 3 won the Academy Award® and Golden Globe® for Best Animated Feature Film.
In 1996, Hanks made his feature film writing and directing debut with That Thing You Do! He also served as an executive producer, writer, director, and actor for HBO’s Emmy®-winning miniseries “From the Earth to the Moon” and executive producer, writer, and director alongside Steven
Spielberg of HBO’s “Band of Brothers,” which was honored with an Emmy Award® and a Golden Globe® for Best Miniseries. In 2008, Hanks, with his production company, Playtone, executive
produced the critically acclaimed HBO miniseries “John Adams.” The series went on to win an
Emmy® for Outstanding Miniseries and a Golden Globe® for Best Miniseries. In 2010, Hanks and
Playtone executive produced their next collaboration with HBO, “The Pacific,” which won the
Emmy® for Outstanding Miniseries. Hanks and Playtone most recently executive produced the
Emmy® and Golden Globe®–winning HBO political drama Game Change, starring Julianne Moore
and Ed Harris.
BARKHAD ABDI (Muse) makes his acting debut in Captain Phillips.
Abdi was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, and raised in Taiz, Yemen. He came to the United States
with his parents and siblings in 1999, when he was 14 years old. He attended Minnesota State
University Moorhead. ABOUT THE CAST
[ 3 9 ]
Abdi is currently directing a film, Ciyaalka Xaafada, about the lives and struggles of the first
generation of Somali-Americans living in Minneapolis. He has also directed several music videos.
The youngest pirate, BARKHAD ABDIRAHMAN (Bilal), was born in Kenya of Somali roots. He
moved to Minneapolis with his mother, father, sister, and three brothers when he was 12; his
grandparents still live in Somalia. Since graduating high school last year, Abdirahman has worked
as a manager in his family’s daycare center; he hopes to attend college someday.
FAYSAL AHMED (Najee) is of Somali ancestry and was born and raised in Yemen as one of nine
children. In 1999, at age 14, he moved to the United States with his mother and some of his
siblings; he has a sister in Somalia whom he has never met.
Ahmed is interested in poetry and theatre; he worked with the Bedlam Theater in Minneapolis
as a Youth Program Coordinator.
MAHAT M. ALI (Elmi), who plays the pirate’s navigator, was born in Kenya before immigrating to
Minnesota in 2006. He graduated from high school in 2010 and attended two years of college.
MICHAEL CHERNUS (Shane Murphy) was recently seen in Tony Gilroy’s The Bourne Legacy and Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men In Black 3.
Upcoming films include Goodbye To All That, written and directed by Angus MacLachlan
(Junebug), and Glass Chin, directed by Noah Buschel.
Chernus’ other recent film credits include Oscar® nominee Vera Farmiga’s directorial debut
Higher Ground, Bradley Rust Gray’s Jack and Diane, Michael Urie’s He’s Way More Famous Than
You, Ed Zwick’s Love and Other Drugs, and the indie comedy Feed the Fish. Chernus was seen in
Oren Moverman’s drama The Messenger and in Bart Freundlich’s comedy The Rebound, and he
plays the lead role in Kirt Gunn’s award-winning feature Lovely By Surprise, which was honored
with the Special Jury Prize at the Seattle Film Festival.
On television, Chernus appeared most recently in the Netflix Original Series “Orange Is the New
Black.” He made a memorable appearance in the first-season finale of HBO’s “Bored to Death”
and may be most recognizable for his recurring role as Ryan Flanagan on the NBC hospital
drama “Mercy.” He also had a recurring role on the fourth season of “Damages,” as well as a
multi-episode arc in Showtime’s “The Big C.” Other television appearances include “The New
Normal,” “Nurse Jackie,” and “Royal Pains.”
Also an accomplished stage actor, Chernus won a 2011 Obie Award and received a Lucille Lortel
Award nomination for his performance in Lisa Kron’s “In the Wake” at The Public Theater in
New York City. He most recently co-starred with David Hyde Pierce in the Manhattan Theater
Club production of “Close Up Space” at New York City Center. Other New York credits include
such theaters as Playwrights Horizons, the Roundabout Theatre Company, Primary Stages, New
York Theater Workshop, The Atlantic Theater Company, and many productions at the Rattlestick
Playwrights Theater (where he played the lead role in Annie Baker’s play “The Aliens,” named
the best play of 2010 by The New York Times).
[ 4 0 ]
His credits in regional theater include productions at the Williamstown Theater Festival, The
Yale Repertory Theatre, and the Guthrie Theater, among others. Internationally, he appeared in
Adam Rapp’s “Finer Noble Gases” at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and was honored with the
Fringe First Award; he also appeared in London at the Bush Theatre. Chernus is a graduate of the
Juilliard School’s Drama Division.
Captain Phillips marks COREY JOHNSON’s (Ken Quinn) third collaboration with Paul Greengrass,
having previously appeared in United 93 and The Bourne Ultimatum; Johnson recently reprised
his character of Wills in The Bourne Legacy. Other film credits include Day of the Falcon, X-Men:
First Class, The Last Days of Lehman Brothers, Universal Soldier: Regeneration, Kick-Ass, The Fourth Kind, The Contract, Hellboy, Black Hawk Down, Harrison’s Flowers, Do Not Disturb, The Mummy, and Saving Private Ryan.
MAX MARTINI (SEAL Commander) most recently appeared in Pacific Rim for director Guillermo
del Toro. Additional film credits include Robert Zemeckis’ Contact, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, and such independent films as Backroads, Cement, and Tail Lights Fade.
On television, Martini most recently played a recurring role on the first season of the ABC hit
drama “Revenge.” He is perhaps most recognized for his work as Mack Gerhardt on the CBS
series “The Unit,” directed by David Mamet. Other television credits include the SyFy Channel’s
Emmy®-nominated series “Taken,” John Sacret Young’s “Level 9,” Chris Carter’s “Harsh Realm,”
and recurring and guest star roles in “24,” “Hawaii 5-0,” “Criminal Minds,” and “Burn Notice.”
Martini is active in the theatre. He co-founded Theatre North Collaborative, a theatre company
in New York City composed of American and Canadian actors and dedicated to producing new
works from both sides of the border.
CHRIS MULKEY (John Cronan) is currently in production on the feature film Surface, with Gil
Cates Jr. directing.
Mulkey will next be seen in Last Weekend. Other film credits include First Blood, Radio, Bulworth,
The Fan, 48 Hours, North Country, and Cloverfield. Mulkey was nominated for Independent Spirit
Awards for both Best Actor and Best Screenplay for his work on Patti Rocks.
Television credits include “Twin Peaks,” “Friday Night Lights,” “Saving Grace,” HBO’s “Boardwalk
Empire,” and the miniseries “Broken Trail,” starring Robert Duvall. He most recently had a
recurring role on TNT’s “Southland.”
Mulkey won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for his work in “Blue Window,” from South
Coast Repertory. His recent stage work includes “Jesse Boy,” at Santa Monica’s Ruskin Theater,
and “August: Osage County,” at the Park Square Theater, in St. Paul, Minnesota; he was also
a member of the Minneapolis Children’s Theatre Company. Off-Broadway, he starred in “Pure
Confidence” and in Jane Martin’s “Flags.”
[ 4 1 ]
YUL VAZQUEZ (Captain Frank Castellano) will next be seen in the feature films Runner Runner,
directed by Brad Furman; Blood Ties, by Guillaume Canet; Glass Chin, by Noah Buschel; and Kill the Messenger, by Michael Cuesta.
He currently appears on the Starz drama “Magic City,” and he has recurring roles in FX’s “Louie,”
CBS’ “The Good Wife,” and HBO’s “Treme.”
Vazquez starred on Broadway in the Tony®-nominated play “The Motherf**ker with the Hat”. For
his portrayal of the eccentric Cousin Julio, he received nominations for a Drama Desk Award, an
Outer Critics Circle Award, and a Tony Award®.
Vazquez has appeared in over 35 films, including The A-Team, Amigo, Salvation Boulevard, Little Fockers, American Gangster (for which he shared a nomination for a SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture), War of the Worlds, Bad Boys II, Runaway Bride, and Nick of Time. He has also starred for Steven Soderbergh in Che and in Traffic, for which he and his fellow cast members won the SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.
He has had numerous roles on some of television’s most popular shows, including his recurring
character, Bob, the “angry gay Puerto Rican,” on “Seinfeld”; one of Samantha’s love interests
on HBO’s “Sex and the City”; and Reuben the Cuban on HBO’s “The Sopranos.” Other television
appearances include “Law & Order: SVU” and “Fringe.”
Vazquez is also a founding member of the LAByrinth Theatre Company. Theatre credits include
“The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” (The Public Theater) opposite Sam Rockwell, directed by
Phillip Seymour Hoffman; “The Stendhal Syndrome” (Primary Stages); and “The Floating Island
Plays” (Mark Taper Forum), among others.
DAVID WARSHOFSKY (Mike Perry) most recently appeared in Now You See Me for Summit Entertainment. He has played roles in There Will Be Blood; Public Enemies; Welcome To
Collinwood; Last Exit to Brooklyn; Born on the Fourth of July; G.I. Jane; Unstoppable; Fair Game;
and many films that have screened at the Sundance Film Festival, including The Future, Little Birds, and Personal Velocity.
Warshofsky’s recent television appearances include “The Mentalist,” “Medium,” “Justified,” several episodes of “Law & Order,” and “Generation Kill.” He will soon have a recurring role on
FX’s award-winning series “Sons of Anarchy” and on Frank Darabont’s new series “Lost Angels.”
On Broadway, he has appeared in “Biloxi Blues,” “Carousel,” and “On the Waterfront.” Other stage credits include “Henry V” at the New York Shakespeare Festival, “Blue Window” at Manhattan Theatre Club, “Romance Language” at Playwright’s Horizons, and the national tours of “Biloxi Blues” and “South Pacific.” He originated the role of Swetts in the world premiere of Tony Kushner’s “A Bright Room Called Day,” which was directed by Oskar Eustis at the Eureka Theatre.
[ 4 2 ]
PAUL GREENGRASS (Director) earned an Academy Award® nomination for Best Director and a
Best Original Screenplay nomination from the Writers Guild of America for his work on United 93.
He also won BAFTA’s David Lean Award for Direction and Best Director awards from the London
Film Critics’ Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the National Society of Film
Critics, among others; he has been nominated for a BAFTA for Best Director, and he won Best
Director honors at the London Film Critics’ Awards for his work on The Bourne Ultimatum—the film received three Academy Awards® and two BAFTAs.
Greengrass has also directed the feature films Green Zone, The Bourne Supremacy, and Bloody
Sunday. Bloody Sunday was honored with the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film
Festival and the World Cinema Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and Greengrass
was named Best Director at the British Independent Film Awards.
Greengrass has had a long and distinguished career in British television: he has written and directed TV films concerned with social and political issues, including “The Murder of Stephen Lawrence” (winner of BAFTA’s Best Single Drama Award in 2000 and the Special Jury Prize at the BANFF World Television Festival), as well as “The Fix,” “The One That Got Away,” and “Open Fire.”
He produced and co-wrote the 2004 television film “Omagh,” set in the aftermath of a real
IRA car-bombing that killed 29 people in Omagh, Northern Ireland. “Omagh” won BAFTA’s Best
Single Drama Award in 2005 and was named Best Irish Film at the Irish Film and Television
Awards (IFTA) in 2004. “Omagh” was also nominated for the IFTA’s Best Script award.
Greengrass spent the first decade of his career covering global conflict for the ITV current affairs
program “World in Action” and writing and directing many documentaries. He also co-wrote the
bestselling memoir Spycatcher with Peter Wright, former assistant director of Britain’s MI5.
BILLY RAY (Screenplay by) made his directorial debut with Shattered Glass, which he also wrote,
for Lionsgate; he has written and directed Breach and has co-written State of Play. Most recently,
Ray was the co-writer of The Hunger Games, directed by Gary Ross.
Ray’s work will next be seen in Departure, which he wrote and will direct. Other upcoming work
includes a remake of The Thin Man, which Rob Marshall will direct.
Ray is on the Board of Directors of the WGA. He currently lives in Los Angeles.
SCOTT RUDIN (Producer). Films include Grand Budapest Hotel; Inside Llewyn Davis; Frances
Ha; Moonrise Kingdom; The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close;
Moneyball; Margaret; The Social Network; True Grit; Greenberg; It’s Complicated; Fantastic Mr.
Fox; Julie & Julia; Doubt; No Country for Old Men; There Will Be Blood; Reprise; The Queen;
Margot at the Wedding; Notes on a Scandal; Venus; Closer; Team America: World Police; I Heart
ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS
[ 4 3 ]
Huckabees; School of Rock; The Hours; Iris; The Royal Tenenbaums; Zoolander; Sleepy Hollow;
Wonder Boys; Bringing Out the Dead; South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut; The Truman Show; In
& Out; Ransom; The First Wives Club; Clueless; Nobody’s Fool; The Firm; Searching for Bobby
Fischer; Sister Act; and The Addams Family .
Theatre includes Passion; Hamlet; Seven Guitars; A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the
Forum; Skylight; The Chairs; The Blue Room; Closer; Amy’s View; Copenhagen; The Designated
Mourner; The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?; Caroline, or Change; The Normal Heart ; Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?; Doubt; Faith Healer ; The History Boys; Shining City; Stuff Happens; The Vertical Hour; The Year of Magical Thinking; Gypsy ; God of Carnage; Fences; The House of Blue Leaves;
Jerusalem; The Motherf**ker With the Hat; The Book of Mormon; One Man, Two Guvnors; Death
of a Salesman; The Testament of Mary; Betrayal; and A Raisin in the Sun .
DANA BRUNETTI (Producer) is the president of Trigger Street Productions. In 2002, Brunetti, an
innovator in social networking, launched Trigger Street Labs, an online platform for feedback
and exposure for undiscovered writing and filmmaking talent.
In 2010, Brunetti produced the feature film The Social Network, which received eight Academy Award® nominations, including Best Picture, and was honored with many other awards, including a Golden Globe®, the National Board of Review Award, and the Critics Choice Award. Brunetti has produced the feature films 21, Fanboys, Shrink, Casino Jack, Mini’s First Time, Safe, and The Sasquatch Gang, and the documentaries Uncle Frank and America Rebuilds: A Year at Ground Zero .
On television, Brunetti produced HBO’s “Bernard & Doris,” which went on to receive ten Emmy®
nominations. He most recently produced the Netflix Original Series “House of Cards,” directed by
David Fincher; the series received nine Primetime Emmy Award® nominations. Brunetti and Michael De Luca are currently producing the film adaptation of the novel 50 Shades of Grey .
Earlier this year, Brunetti won a Special Achievement Webby Award for his impact on the web in
a continuously changing digital landscape.
MICHAEL DE LUCA (Producer), a former production chief for DreamWorks and New Line Cinema,
founded Michael De Luca Productions in 2004 and has a development and production agreement
with Columbia Pictures.
De Luca’s projects for Columbia have included David Fincher’s Academy Award®-winning drama The Social Network and the Oscar®-nominated film Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt.
Before he formed Michael De Luca Productions, De Luca served as head of production at
DreamWorks, where he oversaw the day-to-day operations of the live-action division and the
production of such films as Todd Phillips’ Old School and Adam McKay and Will Ferrell’s hit
comedy Anchorman .
He previously spent seven years as President and COO of New Line Productions, where he created
the highly successful Friday, Blade, Austin Powers, and Rush Hour franchises. He championed such groundbreaking sleeper hits as Se7en, Wag the Dog, Pleasantville, and Boogie Nights, and
launched the directing careers of Jay Roach, Brett Ratner, Gary Ross, Alan and Albert Hughes,
F. Gary Gray, the Farrelly brothers, and Paul Thomas Anderson.
[ 4 4 ]
GREGORY GOODMAN (Executive Producer) has served as producer, executive producer, line
producer, and production manager on a variety of films over the past twenty years. Most recently,
he produced X-Men: First Class, Gulliver’s Travels, and The Day the Earth Stood Still. Other
producing credits include Stop-Loss, Aeon Flux, I Heart Huckabees, Hit Me, and Summer Camp.
Goodman was the line producer on Candyman, Kalifornia, and Dead Connection. As executive
producer, his credits include 8 Mile, The Gift, and Three Kings.
ELI BUSH (Executive Producer) works with Scott Rudin. He is co-producer of Grand Budapest
Hotel, Frances Ha, Moonrise Kingdom, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Extremely Loud & Incredibly
Close, and “The Newsroom” (HBO). He is an associate producer of Inside Llewyn Davis, was one
of the producers of Mike Nichols’ production of Death of a Salesman, and is currently one of the
producers of Mike Nichols’ upcoming production of Betrayal, as well as a forthcoming production
of A Raisin in the Sun. He is the associate producer of The Book of Mormon.
KEVIN SPACEY (Executive Producer) has been artistic director of the Old Vic Theatre Company
in London for the past decade. In addition to overseeing all productions on the main stage,
he is responsible for a vast educational department, work within the community, the Old Vic/
New Voices program for developing emerging talents, and work in the new venue, The Old Vic
Tunnels, which are situated under Waterloo Station. Spacey has appeared in several productions
at the Old Vic, including “National Anthems,” “The Philadelphia Story,” “Richard II,” “A Moon for
the Misbegotten” (which subsequently transferred to Broadway), “Speed-the-Plow,” and “Inherit
The Wind.” Spacey most recently toured worldwide with the Sam Mendes production of “Richard
III,” which was part of the third year of the Bridge Project between the Old Vic and BAM.
Spacey has won Academy Awards® for his performances in The Usual Suspects and American
Beauty, the latter of which also garnered him a BAFTA Award. He has been nominated for six
Golden Globes®, most recently for his role in Casino Jack. Spacey’s film credits include Swimming with Sharks, Se7en, LA Confidential, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Negotiator, K-Pax, The Shipping News, Superman Returns, Beyond the Sea, Shrink, The Men Who Stare at Goats, Horrible Bosses,
and Margin Call .
Additionally, Spacey won the Evening Standard and Olivier Awards for Best Actor for his role in
“The Iceman Cometh,” as well as a Tony Award® for Best Supporting Actor in “Lost in Yonkers.”
He starred in both the Broadway and West End productions of “Long Day’s Journey into Night,”
directed by Jonathan Miller, and he made his professional acting debut as a messenger in “Henry
IV, Part I” in Shakespeare in the Park in New York City.
His production company, Trigger Street Productions, which he runs with producing partner Dana Brunetti, has produced multiple award-winning movies for film and television. Their films include The Social Network, which, under the direction of David Fincher, won a Golden Globe® for Best Picture and received multiple Academy Award® nominations; 21; and the independent features The United States of Leland, The Big Kahuna, and Fanboys. Trigger Street produced two films for HBO, “Recount” and “Bernard & Doris,” both of which garnered double-digit Emmy Award® nominations.
Spacey currently executive produces the Netflix Original Series “House of Cards,” in which he
stars as Francis Underwood, the beguiling, charismatic and ruthless House Majority Whip; the
[ 4 5 ]
role has earned him a Webby Award and nominations for both an Emmy Award® and a Critics Choice Award. The series is produced by Donen/Fincher/Roth and Trigger Street Productions in
association with Media Rights Capital.
With Captain Phillips, BARRY ACKROYD, BSC (Director of Photography) marks his third
collaboration with director Paul Greengrass. He shot the Iraq War thriller Green Zone and received
a BAFTA nomination for his work on the award-winning United 93 .
Recent film credits include Contraband, for director Baltasar Kormakur; Coriolanus, for Ralph
Fiennes; and Parkland, for Pete Landesman.
A native of Manchester, England, Ackroyd studied film at Portsmouth College of Art. Afterward,
he moved to London and began his career by working on documentaries. Ackroyd regularly
collaborated with director Nick Broomfield, for whom he shot The Leader, His Driver and
the Driver’s Wife; Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer; and Tracking Down Maggie:
The Unofficial Biography of Margaret Thatcher. He also shot the Academy Award®–winning documentary Anne Frank Remembered for director Jon Blair.
Ackroyd is well-known for his long creative association with British director Ken Loach, a
relationship spanning almost twenty years and culminating in their collaboration on The Wind
That Shakes the Barley, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival; the film
brought Ackroyd Best Cinematographer honors at the 2006 European Film Awards.
In 2010, Ackroyd received an Oscar® nomination for Best Achievement in Cinematography for
his work on the Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker for director Kathryn Bigelow; he also won
both the BAFTA and BSC Awards for Best Cinematography. Earlier, he directed the short film The Butterfly Man, for which he received a BAFTA nomination for Best Short Film. Ackroyd was also
nominated for the BAFTA TV Award for Best Photography and Lighting (Fiction/Entertainment)
for his work on the 2004 miniseries “The Lost Prince,” directed by Stephen Poliakoff.
PAUL KIRBY (Production Designer) started his film career working on Sir Richard Attenborough’s
Chaplin. He has worked on more than 25 films, including Shadowlands, The Fifth Element, and
three episodes of the James Bond series. Kirby served as art director on Batman Begins, Phantom of the Opera, and The Four Feathers .
Kirby gained his first production design credit during additional photography on Paul Greengrass’s
Green Zone, and recently reunited with director Lee Tamahori as production designer of
The Devil’s Double.
He has earned two nominations for the Art Directors Guild in Excellence in Production Design for
his work on Batman Begins and Phantom of the Opera .
He graduated in Production Design from the National Film and Television School in London.
CHRISTOPHER ROUSE, A.C.E. (Editor, Co-Producer) has collaborated with Paul Greengrass on
Green Zone, United 93, The Bourne Ultimatum, The Bourne Supremacy, and now on Captain Phillips. Rouse won an Academy Award®, a BAFTA, and the American Cinema Editors’ Eddie
[ 4 6 ]
Award for his work on The Bourne Ultimatum. He was also nominated for the Oscar® and an Eddie and won a BAFTA and an Online Film Critics Society Award for his work on United 93.
Rouse’s credits include Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity, John Woo’s Paycheck, and Frank
Marshall’s Eight Below. He co-edited The Italian Job for director F. Gary Gray and was an
additional editor on The Town for director Ben Affleck, as well as on the project Manito, an award
winner at the Sundance, Tribeca, and South by Southwest film festivals.
In 2001, Rouse received an Emmy® nomination for editing the miniseries “Anne Frank: The Whole
Story.” He also edited episodes of the award-winning “From the Earth to the Moon,” a miniseries
produced by Tom Hanks and Ron Howard.
MARK BRIDGES (Costume Designer) won an Academy Award®, a BAFTA Award, and the People’s
Choice award for his costume design for The Artist, directed by Michel Hazanavicius. Other
works include The Fighter, for director David O. Russell; Greenberg, for director Noah Baumbach;
Yes Man; Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus; Be Cool; I Heart Huckabees; The Italian Job;
8 Mile; Blow; Deep Blue Sea; Blast from the Past ; and Can’t Hardly Wait. A frequent collaborator
with director Paul Thomas Anderson, Bridges has designed the costumes for Hard Eight, Boogie
Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood, and The Master .
Bridges received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theater Arts from Stony Brook University and a Master of Fine Arts degree in costume design. He served as assistant costume designer on In the Spirit and design assistant to Colleen Atwood on Married to the Mob before beginning a nine-film collaboration with designer Richard Hornung as design assistant on the films Miller’s Crossing, The Grifters, Barton
Fink, Doc Hollywood, Hero, Dave, The Hudsucker Proxy, Natural Born Killers, and Nixon .
Bridges’ costume designs were part of the Hollywood Costume exhibit at the Victoria and Albert
Museum in London last fall. His designs were also part of the 1998 Biennale di Firenze Fashion/
Cinema exhibit and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences exhibit “Fifty Designers,
Fifty Costumes: Concept to Character,” which was shown in Los Angeles and Tokyo in 2002.
Bridges was also one of the film artists included in “On Otto,” an installation at the Fondazione
Prada in Milan in the summer of 2007. His career and design work is included in the new Costume Design book in the Film Craft series by Deborah Nadoolman Landis.
HENRY JACKMAN (Music by) most recently composed the score for the DreamWorks animated
film Turbo. Jackman composed the score for Wreck-It Ralph and has been honored with the
Annie Award for his composition; he also recently completed scores for GI Joe: Retaliation, This Is the End, and Kick-Ass 2 .
Other recent credits include the family films Puss in Boots, Winnie the Pooh, and Gulliver’s Travels, and the action films Man on a Ledge, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, X-Men: First
Class, and Kick-Ass .
Jackman began in 2001, co-writing, mixing, and producing albums for such well-known artists
as Seal, Björk, and Art of Noise. He has also produced three self-composed and widely praised
library albums. In 2006, on the strength of Jackman’s first library album, Transfiguration, film
composer Hans Zimmer began to work with him on such films as The Da Vinci Code, Pirates of
[ 4 7 ]
the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Kung Fu Panda, and The Dark Knight. Jackman’s first solo
score for a feature film was the DreamWorks Animation feature Monsters vs. Aliens.
MIKE PRESTWOOD SMITH (Re-Recording Mixer) previously collaborated with Paul Greengrass
as the lead re-recording mixer on United 93 and Green Zone. He has been honored with six
BAFTA nominations, including one for his work on United 93, and he won the BAFTA Award for
his work on Casino Royale in 2007.
Prestwood Smith’s credits include multiple mixes on the Harry Potter, James Bond, and Hunger
Games franchises and on films for such directors as Bernardo Bertolucci, Mike Leigh, Stephen
Frears, Guillermo Del Toro, Marc Forster, Rob Marshall, and Tim Burton. Most recently he mixed
Oliver Stone’s Savages, Shane Black’s Iron Man 3, and John Wells’ August: Osage County.
CHRIS BURDON (Re-Recording Mixer) served as re-recording mixer on United 93. His many
credits include Vera Drake; Children of Men; 10,000 BC; X-Men: First Class; Contraband; Hyde
Park on Hudson; and, most recently, Kick-Ass 2, Anna Karenina, and Seven Psychopaths. He has
worked with many prominent directors and producers, including Ridley Scott, Joel Silver, Guy
Ritchie, Roland Emmerich, and Matthew Vaughn.
MARK TAYLOR (Re-Recording Mixer) previously collaborated with Paul Greengrass on the sound mix for Green Zone .
For his work on “Band of Brothers,” Taylor was honored with an Emmy Award® and a C.A.S. Award. He also won an Emmy Award® for his work on “RKO 281” and a BAFTA Award for the mix
of Casino Royale. He has received multiple C.A.S. Award nominations for his work on “My House
in Umbria,” Quantum of Solace, and “Game of Thrones.”
Other credits include the mixes for Clash of the Titans and Wrath of the Titans, Sherlock Holmes
and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Kingdom of Heaven, Troy, Alien vs. Predator, Elizabeth, Trainspotting, and the upcoming film Mandela: Long
Walk to Freedom, among many others.
OLIVER TARNEY (Supervising Sound Editor) previously collaborated with Paul Greengrass on United 93 and Green Zone; United 93 received BAFTA and Golden Reel nominations for Best Sound.
His recent projects include Ridley Scott’s The Counselor, Stephen Frears’ Philomena, Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie, and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. He has also worked with Soundelux London on such features as Kingdom of Heaven, Casino Royale, and Quantum of Solace.
“Academy Award®” and “Oscar®” are the registered trademarks and service marks of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
[ 4 8 ]
COLUMBIA PICTURES PRESENTS
“CAPTAIN PHILLIPS”
DIRECTED BY
Paul Greengrass
SCREENPLAY BY Billy Ray
BASED UPON THE BOOK “A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS,
and Dangerous Days at Sea” by Richard Phillips with Stephan Talty
PRODUCED BY Scott Rudin
Dana Brunetti
Michael De Luca
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS
Gregory Goodman
Eli Bush
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Kevin Spacey
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Barry Ackroyd, BSC
PRODUCTION DESIGNER Paul Kirby
EDITOR
Christopher Rouse, A.C.E.
CASTING BY
Francine Maisler, CSA
MUSIC BY
Henry Jackman
COSTUME DESIGNER
Mark Bridges
CO-PRODUCERS
Christopher Rouse
Michael Bronner
A Scott Rudin
Michael De Luca
Trigger Street Production
A FILM BY
Paul Greengrass
CAST AND CREW LIST
[ 4 9 ]
CAST
Captain Richard PhillipsTom Hanks
Andrea PhillipsCatherine Keener
Muse Barkhad Abdi
Bilal Barkhad Abdirahman
Najee Faysal Ahmed
Elmi Mahat M. Ali
Shane MurphyMichael Chernus
Mike Perry David Warshofsky
Ken Quinn Corey Johnson
John Cronan Chris Mulkey
Captain Frank Castellano Yul Vazquez
SEAL Commander Max Martini
Nemo Omar Berdouni
Asad Mohamed Ali
Hufan Issak Farah Samatar
Maersk Alabama Crew Thomas Grube
Mark Holden
San Shella
Terence Anderson
Marc Anwar
David Webber
Amr El-Bayoumi
Vincenzo Nicoli
Kapil Arun
Louis Mahoney
Peter Landi
Angus MacInnes
Ian Ralph
Kristian Hjordt Beck
Kurt Larsen
Somali BoyBader Choukouko
Pirate LeadersIdurus Shiish
Azeez Mohammed
Abdurazak Ahmed Adan
Asad’s CrewDuran Mohamed Hassan
Nasir Jama
Kadz Souleiman
[ 5 0 ]
Navy SEAL GroupScott Oates
David Meadows
Shad Jason Hamilton
Adam Wendling
Billy Jenkins
Mark Semos
Dean Franchuk
Rey Hernandez
Christopher Stadulis
Roger Edwards
John Patrick Barry
Raleigh Morse
Dale McClellan
Hugh Middleton
Raymond Care
UKMTO OfficerStacha Hicks
US Maritime Officer Will Bowden
USS Bainbridge VBSS Officer Leonard Anderson
Stunt CoordinatorRob Inch
Assistant Stunt CoordinatorStuart Clark
Stunts Marvin Stewart-Campbell
Morgan Chetcuti
George Cottle
Julius Denem
Jon Donahue
Rick English
Bobby Holland-Hanton
Rowley Irlam
Lurye Lomuro
Buster Reeves
Florian Robin
Mens-Sana Tamakloe
Philip Somerville
Anthony Thomas Genova
Will Willoughby
Karanja Yorke
Unit Production Manager Todd Lewis
Unit Production Manager Gregory Goodman
First Assistant Director Chris Carreras
Second Assistant Director Nick Shuttleworth
[ 5 1 ]
Second Assistant Director Mark S. Constance
Unit Production Manager Sam Breckman
Set DecoratorDominic Capon
Property Master David Cheesman
Script SupervisorAnnie Penn
Camera OperatorCosmo Campbell
First Assistant Camera Oliver Driscoll
Second Assistant Camera Glenn Coulman
Costume Supervisor Mark A. Peterson
Makeup/Hair DesignerFrances Hannon
Chief Lighting TechnicianHarry Wiggins
Assistant Chief Lighting TechnicianChris Mortley
Key Grip Kevin Fraser
Best Boy GripAnthony Benjamin
Dolly Grip Dave Rist
Production Mixers Chris Munro
Boom OperatorStephen Finn
Special Effects Supervisor Dominic Tuohy
Production CoordinatorJonathan Scott
Production SecretaryKevin Baulcomb
Production Controller Edward Allen
Accountants Stan Conger
Becky Maxwell
Lucy Herrera
Construction Coordinator Kevin Antony
Set Designer Peter Russell
Marine CoordinatorDaniel Franey Malone
Assistant Marine CoordinatorMichael Douglas
Unit Publicist Alex Worman
Still PhotographersHopper Stone
Jasin Boland
[ 5 2 ]
Third Assistant Director Tom Brewster
Assistant to Mr. GreengrassAmy Lord
Assistants to Mr. RudinJason Shrier
Dan Sarrow
Assistant to Mr. De LucaKristen Detwiler
Assistant to Mr. Brunetti Andrew Alderete
Assistant to Mr. GoodmanTamazin Simmonds
Assistant to Mr. HanksAllison Diamond
Production Assistants Clare Aldington
Jimmy Buxton
Joseph Quinn
Amy Roberts
Denise Rowena Formosa
Casting Associate Kathleen Driscoll-Mohler
Casting Assistants Elizabeth Chodar
Michelle White
UK Casting Dan Hubbard, CSA
UK Casting Associate Gemma Sykes
Minnesota Casting Debbie DeLisi
Minnesota Casting AssociateLynn Younglove
Extras CastingDavid Pinkus
C-130 Logistical CoordinatorWilliam Grantham
C-130 Jumpers Ronald Alan Lee
Keith A. Pritchett
Shawn A. Tufts
Nix White
Larry E. Summerfield II
Somali TranslatorsOwliya A. Dima
Mohamedamin Isaq Abdulrahman
Transportation CaptainSamuel Sharpe
POST PRODUCTION
Additional Editing Mark Fitzgerald
Post Production SupervisorMichael Solinger
VFX Editor Tina Richardson
[ 5 3 ]
1st Assistant Editors Tom Harrison-Read
Kevin Hickman
Assistant Editor Esther Bailey
Apprentice EditorsKim Boritz
Jason Overbeck
Post Production Coordinator Rebecca Adams
Post Production Assistants Luke Clare
Adoma Ananeh-Firempong
Re-Recording MixersChris Burdon
Mark Taylor
Mike Prestwood Smith
Supervising Sound Editor Oliver Tarney
Sound Effects Designers James Harrison
Michael Fentum
Assistant Sound Editor Rachael Tate
Supervising Dialogue EditorBjørn Ole Schroeder
Dialogue Editor Rob Killick
Sound Effects Editor Dillon Bennett
Supervising ADR Editor Simon Chase
Foley Editor Mark Taylor
Foley Artists Peter Burgis
Jason Swanscott
Foley Mixer Glen Gathard
Voice CastingVanessa Baker
Post Sound Services provided byDe Lane Lea London
MALTA UNIT
Production Services byMediterranean Film Studios
Unit Production Manager Katryna Samut Tagliaferro
Art DirectorCharlo Dalli
Costume CoordinatorErnest Camilleri
Makeup Artist Bianca Muscat
Makeup/Hair Artist Dorey Sheppard
Location Managers Mark Sansone
Ravi Dube
Assistant Location Manager Thomas Schembri
Production CoordinatorSallie Beechinor
[ 5 4 ]
Assistant Production Coordinator Diana Navia Arca
Production SecretaryLaurence Chisholm
Accountant Yolanda Galea
Production Assistants Karen Xuereb
Sarah Michelle Attard
Dive CoordinatorAbigail Borg
Underwater Director of PhotographyMark Silk
Underwater First Assistant Camera Matthew Wesson
Underwater GafferBernie Prentice
MALTA-2ND UNIT
2nd Unit DirectorChristopher Forster
First Assistant Director Ahmed Hatimi
Second Assistant DirectorColin Azzopardi
Third Assistant Director Julian Galea
Script SupervisorJulia Chiavetta
Director Of PhotographyNiels Reedtz Johansen
Camera OperatorSara Deane
First Assistant Camera Russell Kennedy
Second Assistant Camera William Morris
Boom Operator William Towers
Video Assist John Babas Farrugia
VIRGINIA UNIT
Art DirectorRaymond Pumilia
Property Master Steven H. George
"C" Camera OperatorJacques Haitkin
First Assistant "B" CameraKristopher Hardy
First Assistant "C" CameraEthan Borsuk
Second Assistant "A" CameraTonja Greenfield
Second Assistant "B" CameraJordan Boston Jones
Second Assistant "C" CameraSam Pearcy
Aerial Director of PhotographyRonald Goodman
Key Makeup Artist Trish Seeney
[ 5 5 ]
Key Hair Stylist Brenda McNally
Chief Lighting Technician Jay Kemp
Best Boy ElectricThomas Keenan
Rigging Gaffer Austin Cross
Key Grip Charles Marroquin
Best Boy GripNick Haines-Stiles
Dolly Grips Andrew Sweeney
James Heerdegen
Key Rigging Grip Charles A. Harris
Boom OperatorRichard Bullock
Video Assist Alex Applefeld
Special Effects CoordinatorCaius Man
Location Manager Colleen Gibbons
Leadman Stephen G. Shifflette
On-Set DresserKeith Jackson
Assistant Property Master J. Edward Fitzgerald
Key Armorer David Fencl
Production Assistants Scott Hatfield
Harry Fallon
Technical Advisors Eric Casey
Richard G. Hoffman
Marine Coordinator Bruce A. Ross
2nd Unit - First Assistant DirectorsEric Fox Hays
Steve Battaglia
2nd Unit - Second Assistant Director Jason Altieri
BOSTON UNIT
Art DirectorPaul G. Richards
Set DecoratorLarry Dias
Property Master Robin L. Miller
"B" Camera OperatorCharlie Libin
First Assistant "B" CameraChristopher Raymond
Costume SupervisorLynda Foote
[ 5 6 ]
Chief Lighting TechnicianFrans Weterrings
Rigging Gaffer Roger Marbury
Key Grip Frank A. Montesanto
Best Boy GripGeoff Rockwell
Sound Mixer Pud Cusack
Boom OperatorJoel Reidy
Video Assist Joshua L.T. Pressey
Location Manager Charles Harrington
Production Office Coordinator Shari LaFranchi Blakney
Construction CoordinatorJoseph Kearney
Morocco - Line Producer Khadija Alami
Morocco - Production/Location Manager Driss Benchhiba
Morocco - Production Coordinator Widad Taha
Music Supervision byMichael Higham
Supervising Music EditorJack Dolman
Music Editors Daniel Pinder
Richard Whitfield
Conducted byNick Glennie-Smith
OrchestrationsStephen Coleman
Score Recorded, Mixed and Produced byAl Clay
Music Production ServicesSteven Kofsky
Music ContractorPeter Rotter
Synth ProgrammingAlex Belcher
Kevin Globerman
Additional Music byAl Clay
Jack Dolman
Titles byMatt Curtis
Digital Intermediate byCO3 London
Digital Colorist Rob Pizzey
Digital Intermediate ProducerRob Farris
Dailies byTechnicolor
Negative Cutter Mo Henry
Visual Effects Producer Dan Barrow
[ 5 7 ]
Visual Effects byDouble Negative
VFX SupervisorCharlie Noble
VFX Producer Andy Taylor
CG SupervisorStuart Farley
Compositing SupervisorTilman Paulin
VFX Line Producer Danielle Legovich
CoordinatorsJudith Gericke
Mariana Mandelli
Sara Emack
CG Sequence SupervisorHuw J Evans
Compositing Sequence SupervisorsIsaac Layish
Michael Bell
Scott Pritchard
On-Set Lead Data WranglerRussell Bowen
On-Set Data Wrangler Eloise Payne
On-Set Lidar Craig Crane
Storyboard Artist Soren Pedersen
Previs Artist Tito Fernandes
Compositors Adam Hammond
Alicia Aguilera
Ben Dick
Carlos Caballero Valdes
Charlie Ellis
Christopher Jaques
Graeme Eglin
Jim O’Hagan
Judy Barr
Kamelia Chabane
Kia Coates
Kirsty Clark
Peter Howlett
Philip Smith
Stephen Tew
Susanne Becker
Tara Walker
Will Martindale
Yuko Kimoto
Matte Painter Christian Furr
FX SupervisorDavid Hyde
FX Sequence SupervisorJamie Haydock
FX Artists Alessandro Costa
Claire Harrison
Yu Zhang
John M. Dowell
Terry Marriott
Viktor Rietveld
[ 5 8 ]
CG Artists Christian Bull
Richard Durant
Texture Artist Derek Gillingham
Prep Artist Melissa Lee
Roto Artists Carlos Conceicao
Eleonor Lindvall
Luan Hall
Mark Tica
Martin Necas-Niessner
Michael Lowry
Milad Firoozian
Peter Welton
Matchmove SupervisorDavid Crabtree
Matchmove Artist Kim Dunne
VFX Editor Edward Cross
Assistant VFX Editor / Previs EditorPatrick Dean
I/O SupervisorPete Hanson
Additional Visual Effects byNvizible
VFX SupervisorAdam Rowland
VFX Producer Kristopher Wright
VFX CoordinatorLisa Kelly
Compositors Moti Biran
Gavin Digby
Riccardo Gambi
Charlotte Larive
Simon-Pierre Puech
Matt Kasmir
CG SupervisorsMartin Chamney
Stefan Gerstheimer
CG Artist Oliver Cubbage
Additional Visual Effects byProof
2D Compositor Zissis Paptzikis
[ 5 9 ]
MUSIC
“UP IN HERE”
Written by Kovasciar Myvette
Performed by KOVAS
Courtesy of Downtown Music Services
By arrangement with Infinite Rhythm
“HILM B HILM”
Written and Performed by Musa Hanhan
Courtesy of Crucial Music Corporation
“WONDERFUL TONIGHT”
Written and Performed by Eric Clapton
Courtesy of Polydor Records Ltd.
Under license from Universal Music Enterprises
“THE END”
Written and Performed by John Powell
Courtesy of Universal Studios
© 2013 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is the author of this film (motion picture) for the purpose of copyright and other laws.
SPECIAL THANKS TO:
The 2009 crew of the Maersk Alabama:
Richard Phillips • Hector L. Sanchez • William Rios • Shane M. Murphy • Kenneth Quinn
Mohamed Abdelwahab • A.T.M Zahid Reza • Michael A. Perry • Richard E. Hicks
John Cronan • Jimmy Sabga • Andrew Brzezinski • Clifford Lacon • Mario Clotter
John A. White • Dick Mathews • Matthew T. Fisher
THE CREW OF USS TRUXTUN (DDG 103)
CDR John Ferguson CDR Andrew Biehn
LCDR James Zolinski LT Kevin O'Brien
LT Shane FoxLTJG Daniel Giller
LTJG Maria Katrina Ablen ENS Elyse Yarborough
ENS Michael RowlandCWO2 Bradley Peck
Command Master Chief Paulette Brock SCPO Andre Delarosa
Chief Petty Officer Andrew GarciaPetty Officer Danielle Albert
Petty Officer Nathan Cobler Petty Officer Katie Henry
Petty Officer Salvador BarwickPetty Officer Roderick Sember
Petty Officer Christian Giribaldi-Fonseca Petty Officer Troy Laliberte
Petty Officer William Tillotson Petty Officer Robert Smith
Petty Officer Matthew LittrellPetty Officer Christopher Hatfield
Seaman Jesus Sanchez Fernandez
Naval Station Norfolk
[ 6 0 ]
USS Bainbridge (DDG 96)
USS Wasp (LHD 1)
USS Halyburton (FFG 40)
Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron Nine (HSC-9)
USS Kearsarge (LHD 3)
The United States Department of Defense
Entertainment Media Liaison - Philip Strub
USN Film Office - Bob Anderson
Navy Liaison - LT Chris Hwang
Assistant Project Officers - LT David Daitch
LT Chad Dulac
John F. Reinhart CEO – Maersk Line, Limited
and the 2012 Crew of the Alexander Maersk
The Somali communities of Minnesota, Ohio and London
Hans Zimmer
Filmed on Location in Malta, United Kingdom, Virginia, Massachusetts and Morocco.
Produced with the support of the financial incentives provided by the Government of Malta.
British Film Institute
The Commonwealth of Virginia – Bob McDonnell, Governor
The Virginia Film Office
The City of Virginia Beach
The Virginia Marine Resources Commission
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts
While this story is based on actual events, certain characters, characterizations, incidents, locations and dialogue were fictionalized or invented for purposes of dramatization. With respect to such fictionalization or invention, any similarity to the name or to the actual character or history of any person, living or dead, or any product or entity or actual incident is entirely for dramatic purposes and not intended to reflect on any actual character, history, product or entity.
Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) and its wholly-owned film divisions did not receive any payment or other consideration for the depiction of tobacco products in this film.
This motion picture photoplay is protected pursuant to the provisions of the laws of the United States of America and other countries. Any unauthorized duplication and/or distribution of this photoplay may result in civil liability and criminal prosecution.
No. 47635
