Following its premiere at Cannes Festival last year, Brazilian filmmaker Joe Penna speaks to Anna Stopford about his debut feature Arctic – a tale of extreme survival and human spirit starring the formidable Mads Mikkelsen.
Where did you get the idea for the film?
I found this image online of what Mars would look like when it’s been terraformed, with trees and grass and water, making an atmosphere on the planet, and I thought it was an interesting setting. So, my co-writer Ryan Morrison and I ended up writing a whole script of a guy who is stranded on Mars, basically the same exact story as Arctic. We sent it to our agents who said, “Great, we like the script, but maybe you should see this trailer for Ridley Scott’s new movie coming out soon, it’s called The Martian, and it’s stepping on your toes a little bit.” We saw it and thought it was a little too close, so we changed the setting to the Arctic. The challenge went from ‘he can’t breathe’ to ‘it’s really cold.’
Was that shift of context frustrating?
At first, because we had written the entire script, and maybe we should have looked into it a little more. But eventually we realised by moving the setting to a place that everyone knows it’s a situation that you can imagine yourself in a little more easily than terraformed Mars, hundreds of years into the future.
It was filmed over 19 days in Iceland. How did you plan a shooting schedule when the weather was so unpredictable and volatile?
It was unpredictable and unplannable. At first, we sent out multiple versions of the call sheet saying ‘if it’s snowing, this is what we’re shooting; if it’s raining, this is what we’re shooting; if it’s sunny, this is what we’re shooting.’ At a certain point we had five or six weather apps saying five or six different weathers for the next day, and they would all be right at different points of the day. We just ended up sending emails saying ‘be ready for the whole movie, we don’t know what we’re doing tomorrow, so be on your toes.’ Sometimes in the middle of a shot, not even a scene, the sun would come out and it was just a crazy blizzard a second ago, and we’d have to switch what we were doing. Thankfully, Mads was always wearing the same parka, so we could start a new scene right away.
Were there any days you thought you weren’t going to pull it off?
Every single day! But my editor was on set with me. We knew we were never going to be able to get pickups, you hear about The Revenant, and they went to Argentina just to chase the snow, but we didn’t have that kind of budget. We knew that whatever we didn’t shoot in Iceland wasn’t going to be in our movies. Having the editor there and cutting the scenes together and sometimes running out with a post-it note saying ‘I need a transition between these scenes, can you get a shot that bridges the two of them?’
What was your favourite fact you learnt whilst making the film?
It’s not my favourite but the most disturbing fact I learnt was that when you get very cold your nerve-endings freeze, and you start feeling incredibly hot. They’ve found people who have frozen to death who had ripped all their clothes off, stripping down naked, which incurs more damage and accelerates your death. Also, there’s a saying about what to do if you meet bears – “If it’s black – fight back; if it’s brown – lie down (play dead); if it’s white – good night” – because there’s nothing you can do, the polar bear is just going to keep coming after you!
You used a live polar bear for some of the scenes. How did that work?
She was real, her name is Agee. I saw a review about the horrible CGI effects of the polar bear and how it didn’t look real, but funnily enough, we didn’t have the money to CG the polar bear so we found one. She’s the only live trained polar bear in the whole world, she lives near Vancouver, so we went up there and shot with her. Mads wasn’t available on that day, so I’m actually the one wearing the parka in those scenes. So, if you look really closely, you will see a different kind of beard.
Favourite film of 2018?
Dogman – it exceeded every expectation of mine. The way that film was crafted I thought was really well done.
Arctic is released in the UK on 10 May.
