You came back and wrote The Perfect Storm, anticipating no one would read it. But movie interest began even before it was published, right?

My agent sent me out to Hollywood with the manuscript before it was even a bound galley, and I met with producers. This was long before any buzz for the book; there was no indication it would do well. I was out there with this pile of paper, and they liked it.

Weren’t the rights sold for something like a million dollars?

No. $500,000. That was great.

Did you work on the script?

I met the screenwriter, Bill Wittliff. He did the adaptation of Lonesome Dove. I read the script; overwhelmingly I liked it, though there were a couple things I didn’t like because they seemed like Hollywood versions of the world I wrote about. I brought those things up with the producers, and they were changed. That was it.

But you’d made all that effort to be sure what you wrote was honest: not attributing made-up dialogue to the doomed fishermen of the Andrea Gail, for instance. Didn’t the moviemakers just abandon all that?

They had to show what I couldn’t show. And use dialogue as the Andrea Gail went down, of course. But other than that, they stayed very close to the book.

They even took pains to buy the sister boat of the Andrea Gail—not the Hannah Borden, its sister ship in the fleet, but the actual ship that was made with the Andrea Gail in the shipyard.

I mean, no one would really care about that; those boats basically look the same. But they had a dedication to veracity that far outstripped anyone’s expectations.

You weren’t on the set?

No. If I had hired a guy to build me a house, he wouldn’t ask my advice about pouring the foundation. Same thing here. Why would Wolfgang Petersen ask my advice about framing a shot?

Now, if I had written a novel that really came out of my mind, maybe that would have been different. But if Hollywood wants to know about Gloucester and how to represent it correctly, the last thing they should do is go through me. Ask Gloucester. And that’s what they did. They had a swordfisherman as a technical consultant, and they did their research.