The process began in March 1993, four months before shooting began. She'd get up at 5 a.m. so she could finish her workout before her family (her husband of 16 years, sculptor Don Gummer, 46, and their children, Henry, 14, Mamie, 11, Grace, 8, and Louisa, 3) got going. "I had to get stronger, so I embarked on this impossible regimen only movie stars and athletes can keep up. I did yoga, weight training, and aerobic training (for three hours a day). I built strength in my upper body. Women don't have (prominent) rhomboid muscles, so you have to build here," she says, running her fingers down her spine. A crash course in the ways of white water would come in June on Oregon's Rogue River, where part of the film was later shot, but in the meantime, Streep also had to master rowing the single scull, since the film opens with a sequence on the Charles River in Boston. "Sculling involves a great deal of finesse, not strength, and the boats are very tippy," she explains. "I didn't want them fishing me out of the river every five minutes." She worked with a sculling coach on a little lake at the Salisbury School not far from her rural Connecticut home. Later, for her introduction to rafting, guide Arlene Burns took her on what was supposed to be a three-day trip on the Rogue. "We did it in a day," Streep recalls, laughing at the memory. "I liked it. I called up Curtis and said, 'I don't think I really have to train for this part.' I did have an instinct for it, but my eyes were bigger than my stomach." Streep laughs again when she remembers thinking it would be "pleasant" to spend four months on chilly rivers in Montana and Oregon. Actually, she says, it was pleasant-even when it was frightening. "I would have a perfectly scary day and go to bed and then I couldn't wait to get up and go again." "She battled with confidence," says Burns, who also worked with the film's river crew. "Through a lot of people telling her, 'Oh, this is so dangerous,' she started losing track of her aptitude in reading the water, to feel what's ahead and understand what you need to do to get there. A lot of people have been paddling for years and don't get it as well as she got it." Early on, Streep fell into the Kootenai River and was fished out downstream by a kayaker. "And then I had those rubber legs. White-hot fear in your lower extremities. I can still remember that boom-boom-boom feeling in my rib cage." What made it worse was knowing she was in charge. "I was scared for the other people in the boat, because really I was powering it. It was my boat. It was my fault if things didn't work." Except, that is, when she was a guinea pig. Hanson and crew were determined to get the camera close enough to convey a white-knuckle ride, so they expended considerable effort to film on the water. While the crew experimented, the $28 million budget shot up to about $44 million, says one studio source. They set up a floating barge Streep's raft could tow. They hooked a camera to the front of the raft, which weighed down its nose. And they tried to get close-ups with a camera mounted on the back of a raft ahead of Streep's. "But they could never keep focus," says the star. Hanson also brought in a camera-rigged helicopter that a pilot flew down into the canyon to get superior shots as the raft hurtled downstream. Burns was sent in place of Streep for the test. "Literally with all (her) might she was rowing to keep the helicopter wash from throwing them into the canyon," Streep recalls. "Kevin went up to Curtis and said, 'No f---ing way.' I was glad it was him saying it for once, not me."
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