‘Tall Ship’ Sailor Is ‘Master & Commander’ Extra

‘Tall Ship’ Sailor Is ‘Master & Commander’ Extra

Emily Pritchard, trained in wind-powered seamanship, poses with her marlinspike, a tool used in the splicing of ropes. She crewed for four months on the H.M.S. Rose during the filming of Russell Crowe's new movie, "Master and Commander." (Herald photo / Robert Eddy)

When movie director Peter Weir put out a call for extras for "Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World," an early 19th-century sea epic based on the novels of Patrick O’Brian, he specifically asked for folks—preferably guys—who could sail a "Tall Ship."

Turns out, however, that the pool of folks, male or female, who knows how to handle a three-masted barquentine is pretty small.

That’s the story of how the distinctly feminine Emily Pritchard of Randolph Center became a sea-faring extra in the multi-million-dollar flick. The rousing "Master and Commander," starring Russell Crowe and now showing in area theaters, includes dramatic Napoleonic-era sea battles and the inevitable storm-at-sea footage.

Pritchard is in there, somewhere.

"You can see the back of my head for sure in one shot: I was standing when I wasn’t supposed to stand."

As Pritchard notes, when the special effects folks are dousing the extras with 500 gallons of water blown in by jet engines, you want someone with experience up in the rigging.

And, the tight-knit community of Tall Ship sailors, who sail for love, not fortune, she added, come a lot cheaper than stunt men.

Round the World

Pritchard, 25, is an accomplished sailor. A 1996 graduate of Randolph Union High School and a 2000 graduate of Bates College of Maine, she sailed out of Nova Scotia in November of 2000, on an around-the-world voyage on the Picton Castle, a 180-foot Tall Ship that functions primarily as a training vessel. Nineteen months later she returned home.

"I boarded with a whole lot of enthusiasm and not a whole lot of knowledge; I returned with the competency and ability to do practically anything, on the basic level," Pritchard said.

She and other trainees learned a range of skills from traditional "marlinspike seamanship" to more contemporary innovations.

Pritchard tarred masts, made sails, learned her knots, and steered the vessel. Trainees were also tutored in allied arts, such as celestial navigation and reading the weather.

For the most part, the Picton Castle kept to equatorial waters, where conditions were gentler than in northern seas. Still, Pritchard and her crewmates sailed through a few memorable storms.

"They were just enough to make you feel kind of mortal," she recalled.

Besides serving as a well-regarded training vessel, the Picton Castle, in association with the non-profit "World Wise," delivers donated goods to island communities around the globe.

This gave Pritchard time ashore with various "awesome island communities," who often hosted the crew in their own homes.

"I really got a chance to see and be invited into communities in a way I wouldn’t have done if I had flown in as a tourist," she said.

Pritchard’s voyage ended in June 2002, and she headed back to Vermont, a little disoriented.

At Sea, on Land

Her sailing voyage, she quipped, "was enough to ruin your life."

"It was a struggle to determine, most of all, where I fit in; all of a sudden, the community we had (on board) had disintegrated."

The "what’s next" question was quickly resolved, as word circulated around the Tall Ship community that "Master and Commander" needed sailors.

About one month after she left the Picton Castle, Pritchard was on-site on the Baja Peninsula in Mexico where the film was shot.

She and her fellow extras (five or six of them women) had not one, but three Tall Ships to handle.

First was an "actual ship," the HMS Rose, purchased for the film and serving as "The Surprise," a British Navy warship captained by hero Jack Aubrey.

The crew, dressed up in 1806 garb, sailed the ship in the waters just offshore. The vessel was used for long-distance shots, Pritchard said, and for some close-ups on board, "to get a sense of the real motion and real sounds."

The sailors also tended the life-size model of "The Surprise," built in an eight-acre tank in Rosarito, Mexico: "We’d set those sails and take care of the rigging."

Also constructed in the tank was another full-size model, this one of the enemy ship, a French dreadnought.

"It is amazing the amount of money they spent to make this movie historically accurate," Pritchard commented.

The huge tank, the one built for the filming of "Titanic," was where sailing conditions got wild.

Artificial Weather

Most of the tank is only three or four feet deep. The exception is a 40-foot pit housing a "gimbal" mechanism, on top of which the huge model ship was built. The device could tip the vessel in any direction.

"So you’d have this electrified ship motion, wave machines, and gigantic fans to blow rain," Pritchard explained. "There were jet engines lined up alongside, blowing smoke, or creating fog—there were a lot of ways of manipulating weather."

Filming occurred six days a week, and each day, Pritchard had one hour in the makeup chair. With her teeth yellowed, sideburns and stubble pasted onto her face, and eyebrows penciled dark, she was daily transformed into a man.

"I kinda felt like an undercover in a guys’ locker room," she joked. "It was so well done people wouldn’t know there was a woman next to them."

After her rugged 19 months on the Picton Castle, Pritchard entered into her film adventure "really cynical and almost bitter, expecting not to like Hollywood and what it represented to me."

After all, she had just left a tight-knit group of friends and "an environment where participation meant survival."

The film project, Pritchard said, represented "a total collision of two different worlds."

"As a sailor, you’re taught to be super resourceful, efficient and hard-working, busting yourself through the day to get done.

"With Hollywood, almost everything took an incredible amount of time to accomplish. If something broke, you could buy another. It was a completely different lifestyle."

Surprisingly enough, however, both the sailors and film folk found themselves "fascinated" with each other’s worlds, and, eventually, a mutual regard and friendliness developed.

It helped, Pritchard noted, that the filming occurred in a fairly remote area, so the bar the sailing crowd went to was the same one frequented by the technical crew, and by Russell Crowe and other actors.

"It was like a camp," she said. "I got a sense it was kind of unusual to have that kind of close contact among all levels" on location.

She’s seen the film, once, and found it "bizarre to see people I know up there."

The final product, she feels, "is well done, artfully done."

Pritchard’s Hollywood whirl ended a year ago, leaving her, she laughed ruefully, "More clueless than ever" about her future.

Since then however, a plan has begun to take shape.

For Pritchard, her sailing experiences, both the real one and the Hollywood version, amount to "a privilege" that comes with a responsibility.

"I feel really lucky to have had them and I feel that I need to do something with them, especially the Picton Castle experience.

"What I want to focus on now," she continued, "is to go after my teaching degree to be a secondary social studies teacher with an emphasis on globalization and sustainability."

"Otherwise," she added, "it was just something kind of excessive, and that’s not what I want to remember in my life."

(Pritchard’s brother Michael set off for a year’s voyage on the Picton Castle this November. Watch The Herald for a report from Mike.)

By Sandy Cooch