My original concept for Red October would be "Rachmananov goes to sea", and there's a little bit of that in there, but because of what happened politically - as the film was being edited actually - a lot of the emphasis of the film got shifted, and basically what McTiernan and I realized was that the thrust of the movie was that it became a mystery. It became in a sense a thriller, as opposed to a political statement. The fact that they were going to blow up the United States with this boomer - at one point they had considered editing the film so that the audience didn't know if in fact that's what he was going to do for the first eight reels. That sort of became [not] the issue, because the threat of Russia doing that was lessened severely at the beginning of 1990. That film was released in March [1990], so it became a dead issue.

We also thought that the film would share two very distinct styles - distinctly Russian at the beginning, then as the sub moved closer to the United States and we're more involved with the Jack Ryan character, and the flattop coming in and the rescue mission, that it would become more Copland-esque. But again, that whole notion got side-tracked because the main dynamic of the film was a mystery. It became a lot more Herrmann-esque than anything else, with a Russian twist.