Shipwrecked and starving: Chris Hemsworth on In the Heart of the Sea
Hemsworth stars in Ron Howard’s adaptation of the true story that inspired Moby-Dick, a tale of disaster, cannibalism and survival in the South Pacific in the 19th century
Most people have heard of Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby-Dick, the tale of a vengeful whale-boat captain’s search for the giant creature that sank his ship. But few know that Melville’s story, written in 1851, was based on the true story of a whaling ship, the Essex, that was sunk by a 26-metre sperm whale in the South Pacific in 1821.
The story, as written by the ship’s first mate Owen Chase, was well-known in the 19th century, but had been forgotten over the years. In 2000 Nathaniel Philbrick, a historian based on Nantucket, an island off the east coast of America that once served as the country’s whaling centre, authored a detailed account of the destruction of the Essex, using Chase’s work and a newly found manuscript written by Thomas Nickerson, the boat’s cabin boy.
That book, In the Heart of the Sea, has now been made into film, directed by Ron Howard and starring Chris Hemsworth, better known for playing Thor in the blockbuster Marvel movies, as Chase.
The film is relatively faithful to the main events in the historian’s account. But Howard, a director who’s comfortable making any kind of movie – Splash, Cocoon, Apollo 13 and Frost/Nixon are a few of works on his resumé – has voiced the film as an action film with drama, rather than a period piece. This, Howard says, was an attempt to avoid the stuffiness that often overwhelms period films.
In the Heart of the Sea spent 10 years in development, as it was difficult to work out how to compress the long and winding narrative into a traditional movie format. “It was when [scriptwriter] Charles Leavitt had the idea of using a meeting between Herman Melville and an ageing Thomas Nickerson, the Essex’s cabin boy, as a framing device, that it all started to come together,” says Philbrick, the historian.