.... Author Pat Conroy, June 1990

*Spoiler alert!  Some plot points are revealed in this section.

Months before principal photography began in South Carolina, Streisand and her production team studied tide and moon charts in order to ensure that the director’s vision of sunsets and beautifully lit water could be captured on film. “Tides and light controlled our shooting schedule,” said director of photography Stephen Goldblatt. “It is tricky when nature, not humans, is always in control. In this picture, landscapes are a core part of the story. The main character’s tie to the land is a primary force in governing him. Barbra wanted to emphasize that.”

With filming commencing on June 18, 1990, the production set up an office in a section of Beaufort, South Carolina called Oyster Cove. Several of The Prince of Tides’ sets were built on makeshift sound stages at the Technical College gym (the Wingo family’s home); in the Beaufort County Warehouse (Dr. Lowenstein’s apartment); and the Beaufort Arsenal (Savannah’s apartment, Eddie’s apartment, and Lowenstein’s office). The Beaufort Naval Hospital stood in for Savannah’s New York mental ward. And Nick Nolte is seen in the football stand at Beaufort Middle School. 

Nick Nolte took a house at 310 Federal, located on The Point, a historic neighborhood in Beaufort with watery views of the Beaufort River.  He was schooled in his character’s “low country” Southern accent by Wayne Zurenda, a Beaufort English teacher.

Streisand rented a two-story, yellow-frame house at 509 North Street during location filming.

Jim McDill, of the Beaufort County Economic Development Board, explained that Prince of Tides came to town after “about two and a half months of work that we did. The South Carolina Film Office, under the direction of Isabel Hill, contacted my office and said, ‘Jim, these are the locations that we are looking for in your county: We need [Savannah’s] apartment, we need ocean vistas, we need shrimp boats … Then we met for dinner one evening with Miss Streisand, who turned and said to me, ‘Well, Jim, why do you think we should shoot in Beaufort?’”

A local named John Williams told writer Randall Riese, “Streisand was going to move the production up to Wilmington, North Carolina, where the Carolco studios are. But all of a sudden, I guess over a weekend, Jim McDill and a few other people put together this package of studio space and convinced Streisand that Beaufort would do everything possible to make this an easy and profitable venture.” 

The very Southern-looking riverfront mansion, the Bay Street Inn at 601 Bay Street, was utilized as the exterior of Lila’s second husband’s home.

As for Barbra Streisand’s directing technique, she explained: “I like to know what I’m going to do, then to throw it away. Because I get bored easily. I don't like to do that many takes because I come from the theatre, where things are done without cuts. I like to stage things in just one shot. I have a video 8 camera and I go around, and I do the shots that I see in my head. At times I have models near the sets. I like to know what I’m going to do with the camera. Does a wall have to move?”

The mother of child actor Justen Woods (who played young Tom) recalled that “the most difficult scene to shoot was the scene when the children were jumping off the dock. They had to take a lot of precautions because there were alligators in the water. Barbra had the underwater divers go underwater first. She also had a standby helicopter there in case anything went wrong,” said Norma Woods. The children had to be dried off between each take of jumping into the water.

Movie magic created the actual underwater part of this scene. Rather than shoot the children joining hands underwater in the actual South Carolina water, they were flown to Los Angeles in November where they trained before filming the scene. “Staying underwater was the main thing,” Norma Woods said. “Justen worked at staying underwater for almost a minute. They also had to learn the formation that Barbra wanted.”

The handholding and children’s closeups were filmed at a tank at Columbia Studios in Culver City.  The children’s underwater trainer actually held them down for their closeups while Streisand directed via microphone from an observation window.

On Fripp Island, Nick Nolte had to film the scene several times in which he leaves Blythe Danner and begins jogging along the beach.  Of course, each new take required dry pants, and to save time, Nolte changed on the beach instead of back at his trailer. “It seemed as if every woman on Fripp was there,” said local Stuart Mitchell. 

Production designer Paul Sylbert told The Charleston Courier that Streisand “works from preparation that she does very early. She’ll get an idea for a kind of shot and it takes a long time to change her mind.”

They chose Fripp Island as the location for the Wingo’s beach home. “The Fripp Island beach was perfect,” Sylbert said. “We wanted a beach that matched everyone’s idea of what a beach should look like. The tides are great, with low tides revealing vast expanses of beach that stretch in all directions.”

Streisand and Sylbert conflicted when it came time to design the set for Dr. Lowenstein’s Manhattan apartment. “Barbra had a very different concept,” Sylbert said. “She wanted that house of hers to be, as she put it, ‘formal but comfortable.’ I had a completely different concept of it … from the character of Lowenstein and of the husband. Any man who could dominate this woman all those years, cheat on her, put her in a position that she felt ugly, had to be a very strong character. So I made an interior that was very clean, an international style connected very strongly with Europe. I wanted the severeness of it.  And I wanted the black and white as a contrast to how rich people deal with black and white as compared to poor people. If you notice in the beginning of the movie, where Nick grows up in the shrimper’s cabin, the floor is also black and the walls are also white. But they’re a very different black and white.”

The Manhattan apartment was where actor Jeroen Krabbé’s character played the violin and also teased Tom Wingo with a rendition of the Southern tune, “Dixie.” It was international violinist Pinchas Zuckerman who actually performed that music (Krabbé and Jason Gould fingered the notes an approximated the performance).

Dan Danielli, who worked for Zuckerman’s record label, got involved in the recording of “Dixie.” Zucherman improvised five rough versions of the tune into Streisand’s handheld recorder. Danielli then merged Streisand’s choices into one seamless tune and transcribed it on sheet music. “I brought the finished product back into the studio, Zukerman played exactly what I wrote down, Madame Streisand proclaimed herself satisfied with it, and indeed it was used in the film,” Danielli boasted. 

Nick Nolte told the press that “Barbra likes to explore. We shot some key scenes in several different ways. We also had long discussions about male-female relationships. It was the first time I had worked with a woman director. In working with male directors, I’ve found that the male actor and director have a kind of collusive attitude about the emotional points of scenes. With Barbra, there is a lot of continued exploration,” Nolte said.

Streisand wasn’t selfish when it came time to film her scenes as Lowenstein. “When I’ve acted in films that I’ve directed, I’ve put myself last as an actress,” she said. “I was the ‘cover set’ on Prince of Tides, which means that when it rained, we came inside and did my scenes. Working so closely on the script allows me to know the character, so I don’t waste time on my performance.”

Barbra Streisand’s experience as a female director was different than when she helmed Yentl in England.  “I was shocked when I made Prince of Tides in America,” Streisand stated. Streisand would ask for a shot to be done in a specific way and her cameraman would say, “No, you can’t do that.” Streisand, frustrated, said, “Everything I asked for he’d say ‘No.’”

Streisand even called her British cameraman from Yentl, David Watkins. “‘Why is he saying no?’ I asked him. ‘I’m used to the way you and I worked — I’d describe a shot and you wouldn’t have a problem. What is this?’ He didn’t know,” Streisand said.

“I realized something else was happening. There was a boys’ club,” she summarized.

A specific example of this misogyny was in a scene where Streisand directed Nick Nolte not to change the words because his mouth would not match when cutting from different angles. “When I cut, they have to match,” she told him. “And he said, ‘No, no, you don’t see my mouth from over there.’ He starts talking to the camera guy. And he says, ‘You don’t see my mouth moving, do you?’ The guy says no. I have my monitor right over there. I look back, and of course you can see his mouth. I go over to the camera operator, and I say, ‘Why did you just lie to him?’ He says, ‘It’s the boys’ club.’ Can you imagine? They were protecting him.”

With Nolte again, Streisand also described the end of a day in which — if the crew stayed for ten more minutes — they could have captured a scene in which Nolte’s character was tired.  Streisand stressed that Nolte, at the point, “is in that state. He doesn’t have to act anything.” The camera operator and crew banded together; they wanted to go home instead. “So I had to walk off the set,” Streisand said. “It would have literally taken 10 minutes, but they were fucking with me.”  Nolte did call her that evening to apologize, and Streisand explained to him that she really only cared about getting the best performance from him.

The next day, it took 17 takes to get a realistic portrayal from Nolte who, instead of being tired, was fresh in the morning.  Then the crew thought Streisand was somehow punishing them for leaving early the night before. “Today I wouldn’t ask the question,” Streisand said in 2018. “I would tell them. And if you don’t want to do it, don’t bother to come back to work tomorrow. I wouldn’t be afraid of that. But then, I was afraid of it.”

In 2019, more than twenty-five years after directing The Prince of Tides, Streisand told Robert Rodgriguez that her assistant director “was kind of a chauvinist. The cameraman and his crew were not helpful. That’s what I was up against directing that movie and it was really hard.”

The Prince of Tides finished principal photography in late September 1990. The last scene filmed was Nick Nolte’s emotional revelation scene in which his character tells Lowenstein about being raped. “This was the scariest scene for Nick,” Streisand said. “We worked all weekend. We did some work on the script, where I read these chapters to him about the rape out loud — all the words and all the horrible details, which were not going to be in this scene. I think he needed to trust me.”

Another way Streisand helped Nolte achieve the emotions in this scene was by shooting the rape scene earlier in the schedule, cutting it together, and showing it to Nolte “so that he could feel what he had experienced as a child, from the film’s point of view.”

Post-Production & Editing

“Every time they say, ‘You’ve got to lock the film in,’ I say, ‘I can’t. I lock it the day it’s released, when you pull it out of my hands.’ I say, ‘I can make this better,’ and that’s why I do different versions of things when I’m filming them,” Streisand said.

Streisand worked with editor Don Zimmerman to finalize The Prince of Tides in the months after filming was completed. Previously, he cut movies like Roxanne, Heaven Can Wait, and Coming Home. “I’ve never worked with a director who has known every line of dialogue in the movie by heart,” Zimmerman said while on location in Beaufort while Streisand was directing. “She amazes me that way.”

While spending ten to sixteen hours editing, Zimmerman commented that Streisand had “great gut instincts. She’s also very meticulous from a lock of hair on someone’s head to where a lamp is to the lighting in the room.  That’s to her credit,” he said.

The Prince of Tides was cut in the days before digital, non-linear editing using the Avid Film Composer — which wasn’t really adopted by the film community until the late 1990s. Before digital editing, the editor would have to physically take the film apart and put it back together every time the director wanted to see a different version. To save time in the editing room for Tides, Streisand used her 8mm video camera again.  She videotaped the edited versions and reviewed the tape so she could decide which she preferred. Then the editing team could easily reassemble the version she wanted.

Streisand and Zimmerman cut three versions of the climatic end scenes in The Prince of Tides.  All versions began with Tom and Susan’s goodbye outside of her office (“I’ve gotta find a nice Jewish boy, you guys are killing me…”).

The first version cuts to Tom and Susan at the Rainbow Room, where they had a bit more dialogue about breaking up.  Then Streisand cut to Tom returning home to Sally and the kids.

The second version skipped the Rainbow Room altogether!  As Tom and Susan hug outside her office, crying, Tom has a voice-over: “I held her in my arms as I told her it was her doing that I could go back. Six weeks before I was ready to leave my wife, my kids ... but she changed that. She changed me. For the first time I felt like I had something to give back to the women in my life. They deserved that.”  And the movie cut to Tom and Sally on the beach with the kids.

A third version reinserts the Rainbow Room but uses a different voice-over by Tom to relate the exposition.  There is no dialogue between Tom and Susan at the table. “I spent my last few hours with Lowenstein, dancing in the Rainbow Room. I held her as she said, ‘You just love Sally more. Admit it.’ I said, ‘No, Lowenstein. Just longer.’ I held her in my arms as I told her it was her doing that I could go back. Six weeks before I was ready to leave my wife, my kids ... but she changed that. She changed me. For the first time I felt like I had something to give back to the women in my life. They deserved that.” Then Streisand cut to Tom and Sally and the kids on the beach.

In case you’ve forgotten, what Streisand ultimately chose was to include some dialogue between Tom and Susan at the Rainbow Room, some voice-over by Tom as the couple danced, then more voice-over as Tom returns to Sally and the kids.

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