Dreyfuss, whose career encompasses an impressive range of credits and awards including an Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe for The Goodbye Girl, was himself a constant source of one-liners for castmates and crew. He joked to reporters that he joined Poseidon for the opportunity “to do a lot of slipping, falling, drowning and screaming,” and simultaneously poked fun at his Jaws fame by claiming Petersen valued his “underwater acting” skill.
“Movies have reached the point where you can be taken anywhere in your dreams,” says Dreyfuss, whose own pre-production Queen Mary 2 cruise gave him a feel for the environment and scale of a ship of that stature. “We had five stages devoted to this film and all of them in various stages of chaos. You can take essentially a football field and turn it on a degree. You can tell this story as if it’s real. Movie technology has gotten to the point where it is the individual talent of the filmmaker that can make anything look like you are really there.” Conceding the powerful attraction of these kinds of survival stories, Dreyfuss adds, “It’s ‘Ten Little Indians’…and then there were nine, then eight and so on. We all want to know who makes it and who doesn’t and why; it’s human nature and it’s a great movie tradition.”
Starring as widowed mother Maggie James and her precocious son Conor are Australian actress Jacinda Barrett, whose U.S. feature credits include The Human Stain and Ladder 49, and 10-year-old Jimmy Bennett (only nine during production), a rising young actor with an already substantial resume including a recent role as Harrison Ford’s kidnapped son in Firewall.
“Maggie’s trying hard to support her child and create stability in his life because his dad died when he was very young,” Barrett says of her character, a single mother who works long hours and only took this holiday as a gift to the boy. Though proud of his self-assured maturity she knows it comes from his having grown up too quickly. “When the tragedy strikes, Conor tries to take care of his mother and comfort her in his usual way as if he doesn’t need a parent,” says Barrett. “But slowly a shift takes place and I think that as Maggie finds her strength more and more Conor is able to relinquish some of the grown-up behavior he’s been trying to uphold until, at the end, he’s just a kid who needs his mom.”
Barrett, who did her first gimbal work on Poseidon, found the level of action “exhilarating.” Of the production’s multi-camera system, she says, “I’d never shot with five cameras at once. It is a constant balancing act to set up the perfect shot for each camera and, as an actor, it keeps you on your toes as you never know exactly what all the cameras are seeing.”
Young Bennett, whose favorite scene is the one in which he leaps down from a piano bolted to the floor (now the ceiling) in the ruined ballroom, understands that, “Conor is pretty brave. He knows it and he enjoys it. When they’re climbing through the ship he’s always ready to do whatever he has to do, and he’s always asking ‘Mom, are you all right?’ because he doesn’t want her to be worried about him.”
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