Why the US Navy – and Denzel Washington – almost torpedoed Crimson Tide

Telegraph

08-05-2025

The recent death of the great Gene Hackman allowed his millions of fans to reassess his storied career. Although most would consider his Seventies work, including The French Connection and Night Moves, to be his finest acting, there was still a great deal of residual affection for his character work throughout the Nineties and early Noughties. One film, and one performance in particular, stands out.
Hackman's appearance as the stern, upright submarine captain Frank Ramsey might have been a by-the-book antagonist part in the hands of a lesser actor, but Hackman manages to turn him into a truly fascinating and multi-faceted character, who ends the film with dignity and integrity intact. How this came to be, and how an always-prescient picture now looks even more timely, is testament to just how bloody good a film Crimson Tide is.
The major creative players – director Tony Scott and producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer – had had notable success nearly a decade before with the much-loved Tom Cruise vehicle Top Gun, which, amongst its other strengths and charms, essentially acted as a two-hour recruiting vehicle for the US air force. Crimson Tide could never be described as the same thing, replacing all-American jingoistic patriotism with a darker, morally complex dilemma at the core that resonates today, just as it did upon the film's original release in 1995.
The barely glimpsed villains are a group of Russian ultranationalists who have seized hold of nuclear weapons that they then use to threaten the United States and Japan. The crew of a nuclear submarine, the USS Alabama, receive contradictory orders while underwater. The first suggests that they should fire their weapons against the Russians, with a concomitant risk of beginning World War Three in the bargain, and the second, which is only partially received, appears to be a retraction.
Hackman's hawkish Ramsey, a military man to his core, prepares to obey orders and fire the missiles, while his more cerebral second-in-command, Denzel Washington's Lieutenant Ron Hunter, is convinced that the situation will only be worsened by following incomplete orders. The scene is therefore set for a genuinely fascinating and horribly tense battle of will. It's the kind of picture that Hollywood seldom makes these days, complete with two outstanding star performances by two of the finest actors in the industry.
When the film was first conceived, expectations were that it would be another rabble-rousing piece of propaganda – Top Gun underwater, if you will – and the US Navy were only too keen to offer as much assistance to the film-makers as they had done on the earlier film. Therefore, Scott, writer Michael Schiffer, Simpson, Bruckheimer and others were allowed access to the real-life nuclear submarine USS Florida in 1993, where they were permitted to watch the vessel go through many of the emergency routines and responses that the fictitious USS Alabama would in the finished film.
However, this access had been obtained through sleight of hand – some might call it plain lying – as the Navy had been given a misleading synopsis of the film. It was airily described as being a mixture of the other big submarine thriller of recent years, Hunt for Red October, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and was said to be about a ship's super-computer going rogue and attempting to launch nuclear missiles while the crew desperately try to stop it.
It's not a bad premise (and sounds a lot like the central McGuffin in this summer's Mission: Impossible picture), but the Navy wished to make it clear that such a thing was impossible and that no computer, however advanced, would be able to accomplish anything by itself. Three decades later, with the inexorable rise of AI, it would be hard to make a statement so definitively.
Whether Scott, Bruckheimer et al had ever intended to make the picture as originally conceived or not, they soon dismissed any idea of a HAL-esque supercomputer and made sure that Schiffer's shooting script was far more realistic in nature. Unsurprisingly, this angered the US Navy, who withdrew all cooperation from the picture; they were particularly irked by the idea that the film would revolve around a mutiny taking place on board a military vessel, followed by a counter-mutiny. This was very much not the image of all-American competence that they wanted to portray, and had the film-makers not been both cunning and resourceful, the project might have foundered before it began.
As these discussions took place, the actors came together. 'The casting was interesting. 'Bruckheimer later said. 'We'd talked to Al Pacino and Warren Beatty; both were really interested but each wanted each other's role so that didn't work out. And then we went to Denzel and Gene Hackman.'
While Hackman was a bona fide leading man who had recently won an Oscar for his role in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, Washington was not then known for action or thriller roles; he had won an Oscar for Glory a few years before, but was probably best associated with his performance as the eponymous Malcolm X in Spike Lee's biopic.
Yet Washington's academic, thoughtful mien, as contrasted with Hackman's death-or-glory bluster, works perfectly in the context of the picture, allowing the two men to play off against one another, but also dodging many of the clichés and expectations of the picture. Most films would have Hunter being appointed against Ramsey's wishes, but Crimson Tide makes it clear that Ramsey has picked him as his XO, despite knowing full well that he has no previous combat experience, but instead is drawn to his thoughtfulness and considered approach.
Scott, who was coming off the hugely successful Quentin Tarantino-scripted True Romance, was also a more assured director than he had been when he made Top Gun. Although he had some significant flops in the late Eighties and early Nineties, including the Kevin Costner disaster Revenge and the Tom Cruise racing picture Days of Thunder, he had embraced a more go-for-broke approach with True Romance, helped immensely by man-of-the-moment Tarantino's witty, potent screenplay.
It was therefore unsurprising that Scott brought many of his collaborators on that film with him, including James Gandolfini (who was cast as Hackman's unstintingly loyal right-hand-man, alongside a pre-Lord of the Rings Viggo Mortensen as Washington's lieutenant) and composer Hans Zimmer, whose work on the film would rank amongst his greatest scores. But it was Scott's (and the producers') decision to bring Tarantino along that would lead to a schism at the heart of the picture.
Most big-budget Hollywood pictures, then and now, use a variety of well-paid script doctors to contribute dialogue and ideas, but Crimson Tide was unusually public about the three writers who were recruited, although none of them were credited. Chinatown creator Robert Towne was brought on board to write intellectually scintillating discussions about honour and free will in armed service, and Schindler's List's Steve Zaillian helped shape the respective characters of Ramsey and Hunter.
Tarantino, meanwhile – by far the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood after the success of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction – was hired primarily to inject his own brand of pop cultural idiosyncrasy, which explains why characters have apparently surreal discussions about the Silver Surfer and Star Trek. (The character name 'Russell Vossler' is a reference to Tarantino's friend and former video store co-worker Rand Vossler.) As he proudly said: 'I wrote a lot of the dialogue for Crimson Tide and [Hackman] said that my dialogue is as wonderful as anyone's ever said it was…it was a dream to go to the Cinerama Dome and watch Gene Hackman do my stuff.' Bruckheimer said that Tarantino's rewrite 'knocked it out the park.'
However, he did not mention Washington, and the reason for this omission was a much-documented feud between the two men. While on set, Tarantino came up with an idea for the film's conclusion, which was a straightforward lift from True Romance and Reservoir Dogs: a group of heavily armed man all pointing guns at one another in an increasingly tense situation.
At the centre of this Mexican stand-off, the Ramsey and Hunter characters have a charged discussion about, of all things, horses, in the form of Lipizzaner stallions. 'Some of the things they do defy belief,' Ramsey says. 'Their training program is simplicity itself. You just stick a cattle prod up their ass and you can get a horse to deal cards.' Pointedly, he remarks that the horses are all white, only for Hunter to respond: 'They are not from Portugal; they're from Spain and at birth, they're not white; they're black.'
It's effective in the context of the scene, if slightly heavy-handed, but Washington was deeply unhappy at the dialogue in its original form, which he considered racist. Tarantino had already elicited controversy in his own pictures for what many saw as white-man appropriation of African-American terms and language (something that he tacitly made amends for in his next picture, Jackie Brown) and Washington, angered by this taking place on a film in which he was the only lead actor of colour, called Tarantino out on set.
The surprised writer asked if they could go somewhere more private for their discussion, only for Washington – who has always had a reputation for speaking his mind strongly – to respond angrily ''No, if we're going to discuss it, let's discuss it now.' The dialogue was then altered to Washington's specifications, but the argument led to a lengthy feud between the two men, who have never worked together since. But the actor did say in 2012 that ''I buried that hatchet. I sought him out 10 years ago. I told him, 'Look, I apologise.' You've just gotta let that go. You gonna walk around with that the rest of your life? He seemed relieved.'
Yet on-set tensions were only one part of the difficulty during production. When the Navy withdrew their support, the film-makers reached out to other countries, and the French Navy were willing to assist with technical assistance, including the use of the aircraft carrier Foch. Yet some of the filming required skilful guerrilla activity. When the Alabama prepares to sail to sea – in one of the film's most memorable scenes, as Hackman's stirring speech is accompanied by Zimmer's equally stirring music – the crew had to shoot against the backdrop of the decommissioned USS Barbel, which had been sold for scrap and was about to be destroyed.
And in the scene when the Alabama submerges, the crew obtained clandestine footage of a real-life nuclear submarine setting out to sea by dint of waiting at the naval base at Pearl Harbour until one set off; amazingly, this was not illegal, perhaps because the Navy had never considered the likelihood that any film company would do such a thing.
In any case, the finished picture was released on May 12 to laudatory reviews. Roger Ebert's comments that 'This is the rare kind of war movie that not only thrills people while they're watching it, but invites them to leave the theatre actually discussing the issues' were typical, and many critics were pleasantly surprised that a Tony Scott picture could deal with intellectual and moral dilemmas with real gusto. Although, naturally, there are also big explosions and thrilling scenes of missile combat with rogue Russian submarines.
The film has continued to be a much-loved highlight in the careers of everyone involved with it, and began a lengthy collaboration between Scott and Washington that only ended with the director's death by suicide in August 2012. And at a time when nuclear conflict between nations seems even more possible than three decades ago, it has a chilling resonance that only increases year after year, too. As Hunter says at one point: 'In my humble opinion, in the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself.'