'Master' co-writer steadies scripts by drawing on his own journeys

The movie's appeal is rooted in its literary source: Patrick O'Brian's 20-book series, featuring Captain "Lucky" Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) and his best friend and ship's surgeon, Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany). But it wins over fans of the book -- and earns the allegiance of moviegoers not partial to spectacles -- because it seasons the fantasy and reality of 19th-century adventure on the high seas with its own sensibility.

It conveys a healthy respect for both the man of action, Lucky Jack, and his more ruminative companion, Stephen, without romanticizing either. It makes you root almost as hard for the surgeon to explore the Galapagos Islands as for the skipper to seize a superior French ship.

Of course, major credit must go to the director and co-writer, Peter Weir. But one of his smartest choices was to pick the little-known John Collee as his collaborator on the screenplay. Unlike most scriptwriters in the post-MTV era, Collee draws on experience outside the sound stage and the screening room.

"Often," Collee says, "younger writers' whole experience is based on other films . . . But I've seen destruction and war and the inside of a jail, so when I'm writing that kind of stuff, which increasingly I do, I'm reprocessing memory rather than relying on invention."

Collee studied medicine in Scotland and practiced in England, then dispensed care in social, cultural, or ecological trouble spots from Madagascar and Gabon to the former Soviet Union and the Solomon Islands.

When he and his wife, Debs, had their first child, on the Solomon Islands, Collee decided it was time to settle down. They had two more children, and he chose screenwriting full time. After a stint in London, he moved to Sydney in 1996, where he figured he could help fill the gap between the international screenwriters based there and the talented Australian directors, such as Weir, George Miller ("Babe"), Scott Hicks ("Shine"), and Philip Noyce ("The Quiet American").

So far, his gamble has paid off. He's coauthor of Miller's next movie, "Happy Feet," an animated feature about a penguin.

From Los Angeles, Collee said: "George Miller is a former doctor, too, and I think we both at times feel stricken at having given up such a worthy profession." But even as a doctor, Collee focused on quenching his thirst for observation and activity.

"I gradually lost contact with the growing knowledge base of Western medicine. My medical skills were those that would be useful in a jungle or a desert island -- improvisation and realizing what could be done with a limited set of drugs and a splint."

On "Master and Commander," Weir and Collee initially based their script on "The Far Side of the World." But they found that a straying woman who falls victim to a bad abortion and the appearance of female pirates were "distracting from the real theme of male friendship." They cut the plot line to the concept of a ship-to-ship chase. They concentrated on "the eternal dilemmas contained in O'Brian's fictional world: When do we or do we not go to war? What sacrifices are worth making? What are the limits to friendship?"

In the end, they formed the script "from all the books. And we worked from memory. It was a good way of distilling everything down to the components that would stick," Collee said.