The Sand Pebbles (film) - Production

Production

For years, Robert Wise had wanted to make The Sand Pebbles, but the film companies were reluctant to finance it. The Sand Pebbles was eventually paid for, but because its production required extensive location scouting and pre-production work, as well as being due to monsoons in Taipei, its producer and director Robert Wise realized that it would be over a year before principal photography could begin. At the insistence of the film company, Wise agreed to direct a "fill-in" project, The Sound of Music, a film that became one of the most popular and acclaimed films of the 1960s.

The film company spent $250,000 building a replica gunboat named the San Pablo, based on the USS Villalobos -- a former Spanish Navy gunboat that was seized by the U.S. Navy in the Philippine Islands during the Spanish-American War (1898–99) -- but with a greatly reduced draft to allow sailing on the shallow Tam Sui and Keelung rivers. A seaworthy vessel that was actually powered by Cummins diesel engines, the San Pablo made the voyage from Hong Kong to Taiwan and back under her own power during shooting of the Sand Pebbles. After filming was completed, the San Pablo was sold to the DeLong Timber Company and renamed the Nola D, then later sold to Seiscom Delta Exploration Co., who used her as a floating base camp with significant modifications including removal of her engines and the addition of a helipad.

The Sand Pebbles was filmed both in Taiwan and in Hong Kong. Its filming, which began on November 22, 1965, at Keelung, was scheduled to take about nine weeks, but it ended up taking seven months. The cast and crew took a break for the Christmas holidays at Tamsui, Taipei.

At one point a fifteen-foot camera boat capsized on the Keelung River, setting back the schedule because the soundboard was ruined when it sank. When the filming was finally finished in Taiwan, the government of the Republic of China held several members of the crew, including McQueen and his family, supposedly "hostage" by keeping their passports because of unpaid additional taxes. In March 1966, the filming finally moved to Hong Kong for three months, and then in June it traveled to Hollywood, California, to finish its interior scenes at the Fox Studios.

Due to frequent rain and other difficulties in Hong Kong, the filming was nearly abandoned. When he returned to Los Angeles, Mr. McQueen fell ill because he had an abscessed molar. He had not wanted to see a dentist until he returned to California. His dentist and physician ordered him to take an extended period of rest—one that halted production again for weeks.

Fittingly it rained the night of the premiere, December 20, 1966, at the Rivoli Theatre in New York City. Afterwards, Steve McQueen did not do any film work for about a year due to exhaustion, saying that whatever sins that he had committed in his life had been paid for when he made The Sand Pebbles. The performance did earn McQueen the only Academy Award nomination of his career. He was not seen on film again until two movies of 1968, The Thomas Crown Affair and Bullitt (which included his fellow The Sand Pebbles actor Simon Oakland as Bullitt's boss).