Forget Chris Hemsworth — the whale is the true star of ‘In the Heart of the Sea’

It takes a special kind of mammal to make audiences root against Chris Hemsworth. Moby, the computer-generated whale in Ron Howard’s adventure epic “In the Heart of the Sea,” is just such a creature.

Based on the true whaling disaster story that inspired Herman Melville’s classic 19th century novel “Moby-Dick,” “In the Heart of the Sea” depicts the fearsome white sperm whale at the center of the tale as he has never appeared on-screen before: in photo-real form, with close-ups and character-revealing shots executed by artists at the London-based visual effects house Double Negative.

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“Ron didn’t want Moby to be a monster, a predator,” said Jody Johnson, visual effects supervisor for the film, which opened in second place at the weekend box office with an estimated $11 million in domestic ticket sales. “Whaling was a pretty barbaric ravaging of natural resources, and Moby was to be an elemental force awakened by this wrongdoing.”

An adaptation of Nathaniel Philbrick’s 2000 nonfiction book, “In the Heart of the Sea” follows the men on the Nantucket whaling ship Essex in 1820 as they are attacked by a massive sperm whale that rams their vessel and leaves them shipwrecked in the South Pacific for 90 days.

The beset crew includes capable first mate Owen Chase (Hemsworth), reckless captain George Pollard Jr. (Benjamin Walker), loyal second mate Matthew Joy (Cillian Murphy) and naive cabin boy Thomas Nickerson (Tom Holland). The script by Charles Leavitt, from a story by Leavitt, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, unfolds via a framing device, as decades later a haunted, adult Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson) relays the tale to a young Melville (Ben Whishaw).

In frightening action sequences that believably pit man against nature, Howard shows the Essex crew on the hunt, harpooning whales from small boats, dragged along the choppy sea until the animal is exhausted. Other sequences convey the majesty of the mammals, such as through aerial shots that show their size relative to that of the Essex, and one that reveals dozens of pods of whales converging in the South Pacific like buffalo running on the Great Plains.

The $100-million movie relies on a combination of techniques: Wanting to preserve the spontaneity of filming in real environments, Howard shot “In the Heart of the Sea” on tall ships in the open sea around the Canary Islands and at Warner Bros.’ massive facility in Leavesden, England, where an intricate back lot set served as a 19th century whaling wharf, and multiple indoor and outdoor tanks supplied controlled locations for action sequences like the ship’s sinking.

But for the creation of the whale, Howard would rely on the Double Negative artists to help develop a nuanced, motivated animal character.

The filmmaker first brought up “In the Heart of the Sea” to Johnson on the set of their 2013 car racing drama, “Rush,” which starred Hemsworth as Formula One driver James Hunt and which relied on precisely chosen digital effects to re-create period race tracks and dangerous stunts and crashes.

“The last two movies have been really revealing to me in terms of the way digital technology can be used to create total immersion,” Howard said.

The movie depicts the whaling industry as a rapacious one that irreparably thins populations to keep oil lamps lighted, and Moby is bent on avenging the loss.

“Moby needed to look real and believable, but we also needed to get the message across,” Johnson said. “It’s difficult to do with a whale, because whales don’t talk, they don’t emote. It was a challenge to develop a character like that without anthropomorphizing it.”

Moby’s back story

Though the story of “Moby-Dick” has appeared on-screen countless times, including the 1926 silent film “The Sea Beast,” starring John Barrymore, a 1956 John Huston version starring Gregory Peck and a 1998 TV project starring Patrick Stewart, “In the Heart of the Sea” is the first to use such advanced digital tools in its storytelling.

As the artists were designing Moby, they consulted a biologist who advised them on the sperm whale’s distinctive silhouette. After experimenting with the look of albino whales, they determined that the effect on-screen looked too fantastical and ghostly and decided instead that Moby’s color would come from a skin condition where molting had left behind white patches.

“We wanted to give Moby some history and suggest that he’d been out there protecting the pups,” Johnson said. “He’s battle-scarred.”

Moby’s massive eyes posed another quandary in their simplicity.

“A sperm whale’s eye is a black orb,” Johnson said. “You have to bring out the intricacies of the eye in terms of the movement to allow him to emote. We tried different [camera] angles to convey the ideas of any particular scene.”

In one crucial scene that builds up to Moby attacking the ship, the whalers are shown harpooning a mother and calf.

“We hear the banging and banging and banging,” Johnson said. “Out of the depths, here comes Moby. We see a flashing moment in his eyes.”

Another challenge was how to convey a sense of panic among the sperm whales, which the filmmakers accomplished by showing dozens of the creatures grouping into defensive formations.

“Nature was the inspiration,” Johnson said. “Real life is richer and more exciting than anything you can make up.”

One thing Howard did not ask his crew to do was observe or film any whales in the wild, choosing instead to focus on footage shot by marine filmmaker Howard Hall as reference.

“Ron was pretty keen not to disturb any whales,” Johnson said. “He thought that enough people had been to film them before and we didn’t need to.”

rebecca.keegan@latimes.com