Arctic thriller’s film crew struggled to find true frozen waste Colin Farrell and his co-stars in the BBC’s North Water shocked at the loss of wilderness at the north pole from global heating
It’s a problem that, a century ago, anyone on a ship in the Arctic Circle just didn’t have to worry about
: where is all the ice? Yet this was the unexpected stumbling block faced by the film-makers of a forthcoming BBC thriller set in the Arctic in the 1850s.
The North Water is an epic five-part adventure about an ill-fated 19th-century whaling expedition into the Arctic. In the pursuit of realism, its producers realised that they could not rely on special effects. Nor would shooting it in a studio tank or off the coast of Britain achieve the authenticity of filming in the Arctic, however extreme the conditions and challenges.
But, in travelling north to shoot the drama in a wilderness of pack ice, they ended up – thanks to the effects of global heating – just 22 miles away from the north pole.
“We had to keep going further and further north,” Hakan Kousetta, one of the executive producers, told the Observer. “It was quite shocking to realise how far we had to go. It really is like turning up to a desert and finding out there is not enough sand.”
He added: “We had made assumptions about where you’d find ice in the Arctic Circle. It turned out you have to keep going north to very extreme locations when, just a few years ago, you didn’t have to. We were filming in incredible places that look almost unreal.”
The North Water is a brutal story of a disgraced ex-army surgeon, who becomes a ship’s doctor on a vessel with a murderous psychopath on board, played by Jack O’Connell and Colin Farrell respectively. It is based on Ian McGuire’s acclaimed novel, about which the Observer reviewer wrote in 2017: “I have never read a novel that has unsettled me to this degree. It is relentless in its examination of life aboard an English whaling boat in 1852 – though it is difficult to understand why anybody would board this ship, bound for the Arctic, in the first place. When the surrounding waters freeze for hundreds of days on end, conditions worsen: the ship becomes a hotbed of sodomy, murder, drink and theft.”
It has been adapted for the screen and directed by Andrew Haigh, who, inspired by McGuire’s depiction of the brutal beauty of the Arctic, said: “I wanted us to feel the biting wind, the bitter cold. I wanted to capture that fear that comes from being so far from civilisation.” And, as he recalled: “All of us were terrified at times.”
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While the Hollywood Reporter noted that “some of the visuals of frozen, barren nature are jaw-dropping”, Variety wrote that the drama “creates a sense of chilliness that will permeate one’s bones on even the hottest summer night”.
The North Water was commissioned by the BBC and made by See-Saw Films for BBC Two and iPlayer, and will be available this autumn. Iain Canning, managing director of See-Saw Films – whose previous productions include the Oscar-winning The King’s Speech – said: “The North Water is a love letter to the Arctic. We wanted to capture the beauty of the area and believe it needs to be protected.”
More here:
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-r...e-frozen-waste