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Starring: Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, Billy Boyd, James D'Arcy, Lee Ingleby, George Innes, Mark Lewis Jones, Chris Larkin
Directed by: Peter Weir
Screenplay: Peter Weir, John Collee, Patrick O'Brian
Release Date: November 14th, 2003
Running Time: 120 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense battle sequences, related images, brief language.
Box Office: $93,927,920 (US total)
Studio: 20th Century Fox
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 Russell Crowe in Master and Commander. |
 Master and Commander Production NotesBased on the best-selling novels of Patrick O'Brian, the film stars Russell Crowe as "Lucky" Jack Aubrey, who pits his crew of the H.M.S. Surprise against a much better armed and ruthless privateer, in a chase that takes him all the way to the far side of the world. Rising newcomer Paul Bettany ("A Beautiful Mind") plays the ship's surgeon Dr. Stephen Maturin.
In the course of the characters’ epic journey, the movie travels the world – from the coast of Brazil to the storm-tossed waters of Cape Horn, south through ice and snow, to the far side of the world, to the remote shores of The Galapagos Islands (becoming the first feature film ever to film there).
Master and Commander is directed by Peter Weir from a screenplay by Weir & John Collee, based upon the novels by Patrick O’Brian. O’Brian’s "Aubrey/Maturin" novels, so named after the lead characters, were declared by Richard Snow, in The New York Times to be "the best historical novels ever written." David Mamet, also writing in the Times, called O’Brian one of the greatest novelists writing in the English language over the past 30 years. As to O’Brian’s creation, Captain Jack Aubrey, the Times later noted that Russell Crowe "seems born to play him."
 The project originated over ten years ago when two legends – Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. and celebrated author Patrick O’Brian – had preliminary conversations about turning some of O’Brian’s Aubrey / Maturin stories into a film. It was Goldwyn who first saw the cinematic potential of O’Brian’s work, and he persuaded the author, who had not been to the movies in years, that the medium would well serve the adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin.
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