‘Hunley’s’ Tragic Tale Surfaces

The opening moments are gripping and gruesome. Sailors trapped as their submarine takes on water. Life evaporating in excruciating detail. That is the reality of “The Hunley,” the true wartime story that TNT will premiere Sunday night.

What is as startling as the first few moments of the movie is when the story began. It was 1864, mid-February, in the later stages of the Civil War. Fashioned from a cylindrical iron steam boiler, the H.L. Hunley, a Confederate submarine, attacked the federal ship Housatonic in Charleston Harbor off the coast of South Carolina. In doing so, it became the first submarine to sink a warship. But the torpedo explosion that sent the Housatonic to the bottom of the harbor also sent the nine-man crew of the Hunley to its watery grave.

Armand Assante (“The Odyssey,” “Gotti”) stars as Lt. George E. Dixon, an engineering officer who took command of the sub after two other crews had drowned in early prototypes of the vessel. Donald Sutherland plays Beauregard, the Southern general who pushed for the Hunley to succeed. It would be called the South’s secret weapon.

Stripped to its core, “The Hunley” is a tale of redemption, says Assante.

“The Civil War had rendered Charleston meaningless at that time,” he says. “[The North] had literally choked them to death. The film shows, in a way, that in the Civil War people were pushed to the point of absolute desperation, and how the ingenuity of people came to the front and they managed to come up with a scientific weapon to strike back.”

The Emmy Award-winning actor was familiar with Civil War history but had never heard of the Hunley until doing the movie. “It was one of the most esoteric episodes that ever existed in the Civil War,” Assante says. “[It] produced the first submarine that actually the German U-boats were based on.”

Writer-director John Gray was asked to take a stab at writing “The Hunley” shortly after completing last year’s TNT Civil War drama “The Day Lincoln Was Shot.”

“Ted Turner had wanted to do this for nine or 10 years,” Gray explains. “They had a lot of different scripts developed on it and they couldn’t find a way to tell the story. So they said, ‘Do you want to take a whack at it?’ ”

Gray can’t remember the genesis of the idea, but suddenly during his research he decided to make “The Hunley” a love story.

So Lt. Dixon, despondent over the death of his beautiful young wife, takes on the suicide mission of commanding the Hunley. “I thought, this poor, haunted guy is going to use this submarine to deliver himself back to this woman,” Gray says. “Once I had this idea, the rest just fell into place.”

But truth be told, the real Dixon was not a widower. He wasn’t even married. But he did have a sweetheart named Queenie who gave him a $20 gold piece for luck. When Dixon was shot in the leg during the battle of Shiloh, the gold piece saved his leg and also his life. Dixon was also nearly 25 years younger than the 49-year-old Assante, who was originally to play Beauregard.

“We were having a hard time finding someone soulful enough to have the depth [to play Dixon]. We were locked into a young, 20-year-old sort of a guy,” says Gray. “Then TNT said to me, ‘Why don’t you ask Armand?’ At first he was so different than the image I had in mind, but we just felt he had the baggage. You take one look at that guy’s face . . . “

The reality of what the soldiers endured more than 130 years ago hit home when Assante had to get into the mock-up of the Hunley and shut the 145-pound hatch over his head with “water sloshing over the sides.”

“I said to the stunt man, ‘If this thing tips over I’m gone, so pray.’ [The Hunley] was like a coffin. I would liken it to something like being a fighter pilot leaving an aircraft carrier in World War II when you knew you had no place to land; or a kamikaze pilot, because the reality of ever returning was nil.”

Three different mock-ups of the Hunley were built. One was a complete exterior, which was used for scenes out of water. “We made it the way we think they made it--out of iron,” says Gray. “Then we made one that was only the top half that actually floated on the water. It had a motor and controls and we could make it move. Then we built the interior.”

The third mock-up, says Gray, was an engineering feat in itself because it was made to be shot from several different angles to get the visuals he needed.

Shooting the scenes inside the Hunley were brutal. “It took us by surprise because we did all the interior sub sequences at the end of the movie,” says Gray. “In our minds we had gone through so much with the other physical aspects of the film that when we got to this stage, we thought, how hard can this be?”

But it was immensely difficult to light the submarine and maneuver the camera. “It took almost three hours just to reset the sub from a different angle,” Gray explains. “We had to put the starboard hull back on to take off the port hull. What it meant for us was that we had to sit down and figure out every single angle that we needed for each scene in the sub and shoot all of those angles at once.”

What really took its toll was the week and a half of filming the drowning sequences. “We had this enormous gantry rigged up that extended all the way over this [water] tank. We rigged the camera to a platform, then to the submarine. Everything could be lowered in the water. So instead of having the sub in a solid place and flooding it, we would put the sub in the water and when we got the shot we would take it out.”

The actors had to be able to breathe and keep their eyes open under water.

“We went through enormous safety precautions,” says Gray, who describes the actors as “incredibly game.”

“We scheduled almost two weeks’ worth of training on their off-hours with safety divers so they could get comfortable moving under water,” says Gray. “The one shot I felt I must have was moving through the entire sub and seeing all the guys dead. So the actors had a safety diver with a regulator waiting right off camera. If there was a problem, they would tap their head and a diver would come in.”

* “The Hunley” airs Sunday night at 8, 10 and midnight on TNT. It repeats Wednesday at 8 p.m. and several times during the month. The network has rated it TV-PGLV (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14 with special advisories for coarse language and violence).