THE BOUNTY

"I discovered Fletcher had left his footprint in the lead guttering on the roof and scratched his initials in metal. I put my foot inside his imprint and discovered it fitted perfectly."

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      David Lean, the distinguished director of such classics as "The Bridge on the river Kwai", "Lawrence of Arabia" and"Doctor Zhivago" decided to have a go at a fifth version of the novel "Mutiny on the Bounty". Lean was determined to tell the true story of the mutiny and its aftermath. He envisioned making two films and commissioned Robert Bolt to do the screenplays. Bolt completed the two scripts, but the exorbitant cost of making them scared the producer, Dino De Laurentis, who insisted that the scripts be condensed to make one feature . Bolt did so, but Lean dropped out of the production in its early stages. Young New Zealand director Roger Donaldson was recruited to direct the project.

      David Lean had approached Christopher Reeve to star Fletcher Christian, but Reeve, upset by all the changes, pulled out of the film just six weeks before shooting was scheduled to commence. Finally, Mel was cast as Fletcher and Anthony Hopkings as Bligh. Daniel Day-Lewis, Sir Lawrence Olivier joined them.

      Mel tried very hard to mould the character of Fletcher into something that he thought would appeal to everyone, and cleverly, asked a London psychistrist to assess different aspects of Christian´s life. Then he made a pilgrinage to the house in the Lake Disctrict of Cumbria where Fletcher was born.



      Meanwhile, an exact replica of the Bounty from original plans held at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London, was built by a New Zealand Company. Its cost: $2,5 million. Final estimates of the film budget were in the region of $40 million.

      The soundtrack was composed by Vangelis.

      "The Bounty" begins with a military inquiry into a mutiny and his wake, which captain Bligh explains in a series of flashbacks, beginning with his friendship with Christian, a young but experienced seaman. The ambitious Bligh wants to make a name for himself in His Majesty´s service. He always places the blame for his miscalculations and misjudgments on others, including Christian. Fearing for their lives, the crew mutinies and Christian leads them.

      Most of the film was shot on location in Tahiti and Gisborne under some difficult conditions. The first few weeks on Moorea went reasonably well. But then bad wheather set in and tempers frayed. Hurricane-force winds swept across the bay where The Bounty was anchored- Mel was knocked and washed to the other end of the vessel by a huge wave.. All in all, the shooting of this movie was not a particularly good period for Gibson.

      "The Bounty", that was given a royal premiere in London, finally arrived in movie theatres in the spring of 1984. The reviews were very critical. In a seven-week run in the US it took just $3,5 million, an absolute disaster considering the final cost of the project.

"The character of Fletcher Christian was lacking, and the only place I could do something was in the mutiny scene when he flips out."


THE BOUNTY

  • Director: Roger Donaldson
  • Producer: Bernard Williams
  • Screenwriter: Robert Bolt
  • Editor: Tony Lawson
  • Photography: Arthur Ibbetson
  • Music: Vangelis
  • Cast: Mel Gibson, Anthony Hopkings, Sir Lawrence Olivier, Daniel Day-Lewis, Tevaite Vernette, Wi Kuki Kaa.
  • USA 1984


"I didn´t want to get involved in the remake of a film which had been done a couple of times before."
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FLETCHER CHRISTIAN

Following the mutiny, Christian attempted to build a colony on Tubuai, but the mutineers terrorized the natives. Abandoning the island, he stopped briefly in Tahiti where he married Maimiti, the daughter of one of the local chiefs, on 16 June 1789. While on Tahiti he dropped off sixteen crewmen. These sixteen included four Bligh loyalists who had been left behind on the Bounty and two who had neither participated in, nor resisted the mutiny. The remaining nine mutineers, six Tahitian men, and eleven Tahitian women then settled on Pitcairn Island where they stripped the Bounty of all that could be floated ashore before Matthew Quintal set it on fire. This sexual imbalance, combined with the effective enslavement of the Tahitian men by the mutineers, led to insurrection and the deaths of most of the men.
The American seal-hunting ship Topaz visited the island in 1808 and found only one mutineer, John Adams (who had used the alias Alexander Smith while on the Bounty), still alive along with nine Tahitian women. The mutineers who had perished had, however, already had children with their Tahitian wives. Most of these children were still living.
Adams and Maimiti claimed Christian had been murdered during the conflict between the Tahitian men and the mutineers. According to an account by a Pitcairnian woman named Jenny who left the island in 1817 Christian was shot while working by a pond next to the home of his pregnant wife. Along with Christian, four other mutineers and all six of the Tahitian men who had come to the island were killed in the conflict. One of the four surviving mutineers fell off a cliff while intoxicated and was killed, and Quintal was later killed by the remaining two mutineers after he attacked them.
Christian was survived by Maimiti and his son, Thursday October Christian (born 1790).




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