Shailene Woodley on all things Adrift
Actress talks challenges of shooting on open sea
LOS ANGELE — Shailene Woodley found out on Day 1 of shooting the ocean adventure Adrift that seasickness was going to be an unwelcome part of her immediate film future.
As a storm rose on the Pacific Ocean, Woodley, 26, felt it coming on strong aboard the movie’s 55-foot sailboat set.
“It’s so graphic. But I couldn’t quite get my body to throw up. When you’re seasick and finally able to throw up, you kind of get your footing again,” she says. “I wasn’t able to do that. It was just an all-day nausea and quite miserable.”
Woodley was buoyed by the fact that she, co-star Sam Claflin and the small crew, who also suffered through first-day seasickness, found the sea legs to shoot for five weeks on the open ocean.
Adrift is the real-life adventure of Tami Oldham (Woodley), who survived 41 days stranded at sea in 1983. Newly engaged, Oldham and Richard Sharp (Claflin) were sailing on the trip of a lifetime from Tahiti to San Diego when they were struck by a hurricane.
The film’s cast and crew were all smiles heading out that first day on what seemed like a dream job. Two hours later, a storm picked up and smiles were replaced by pale looks.
“And the stench of vomit started creeping up on deck,” Claflin says.
A tough start, but Woodley notes it was “good preparation, immediately putting us on our toes, knowing what kind of resiliency we needed to harness.”
Director Baltasar Kormakur even used the actors’ queasy looks to convey worry about the approaching hurricane.
“What the audience sees in that scene is a look of nervous- ness,” says Woodley, laughing. “But it’s really Sam and I trying not to puke when the cameras are rolling.”
Woodley and Claflin set out on the open ocean for15-hour days off Fiji. (Hurricane scenes were shot on a set using digital effects for the storm.)
Along with the innumerable filmmaking challenges of shooting on the water, the cast and crew had to deal with everything from no cellphone signal to a shooting schedule largely dictated by the weather.
“And when you’re stuck on a boat with 15 people every single day, you’re all dealing with things like the toilets breaking and everyone just having to jump in the ocean to use the bathroom,” Woodley says. “There’s a lot of discomfort, there’s a lot of bodily smells. And a lot of humour.”
Woodley undertook a strict diet to reflect Oldham’s ordeal with dwindling food, typically eating a breakfast of two egg yolks with steamed broccoli, a similar lunch and no dinner. In a scene in which Woodley feeds herself and her wounded fiancé newly discovered peanut butter with her fingers, there is true joy in the actors’ eyes.
“We were both so bloody hun- gry,” Woodley says.
She makes clear that those challenges took place in a vastly different world from the heroic tale told onscreen, which Oldham wrote about in her 1998 book Red Sky in Mourning: A True Story of Love, Loss and Survival at Sea.
She’s in awe of the screen achievement and the daily, stunning nature moments captured for Adrift, which made the emotional toil worthwhile.
“When you see the sunrise and sunset from the middle of the ocean every day, no matter (what) you’re doing, life is put in perspective,” Woodley says.