HEAT, SWEAT AND MIND-GAMES
George Fenwick goes behind the scenes of Survivor New Zealand.
IT’S 11am, and I’m already drenched in sweat. The ground is cracked and dry, the sun brutally, apocalyptically hot. There’s no shelter, no shade. I down a bottle of water. I sweat it straight out.
We’re on a tiny island in the middle of a lake in Thailand’s Khao Laem National Park. It’s a bare, treeless mound, just brown grass and parched earth. The expanse of water and the encircling mountains remind me ominously of a Hunger
Games arena — not helped by the fact that we’re surrounded by camera people, producers, directors and medics, all poised with a miscellany of television equipment.
Survivor New Zealand’s second season is moments away from beginning.
The first challenge stands here and on a pontoon just off shore. Silence is called on set, and a drone camera circles overhead. The contestants approach on long, thin fishing boats. Once they set foot on this little knoll, the real world disappears. They’re in the game.
Each of the 18 faces look dumbstruck as they approach. It’s understandable; just three days before, they’d been duped into thinking they were heading into the game then and there.
It was just a hoax. The producers simply needed to capture some genuine reaction shots. The crew joke with each other about the trick, quite pleased with their deception; the actual psychological strain such a setup would put on a human being seems to be of little concern. That is the nature of the game — the contestants are at the mercy of whatever curveballs are thrown their way, and that was nothing compared with what’s to come.
It’s clear from the getgo that this season of Survivor is going to be very, very tough. Observing the shoot with us is season one winner Avi DuckorJones, and though he battled the elements in Nicaragua in 2016, he agrees.
‘‘[Khao Laem] is really harsh,’’ he says later. ‘‘There’s this kind of stagnancy to the whole place that we didn’t experience because we had ocean breezes and storms rolling through. There was no respite from that heat, it was just there and inescapable — like omnipresent.’’
Series producer Tim Lawry can back that up.
‘‘We placed them there during the dry season, so [it’s] extremely, extremely hot,’’ he says. ‘‘I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, it’s a much more difficult environment to survive than our location in Nicaragua,’’ he says.
Back on the island, host Matt Chisholm is about to yell ‘‘go’’. The contestants are poised. They’ve been waiting for this for weeks, months.
They begin. They move at furious speeds, untying, running and swimming for their lives. The crew hangs back and lets the challenge unfold in real time, though eventually, someone yells ‘‘cut’’ — that’s executive producer Greg Heathcote. The contestants, adrenaline pulsing through their veins, are asked to pause. The crew needs a closeup of someone’s hands here, someone diving there.
The contestants wait patiently as producers assure them there’s not normally this much stopping and starting — shooting this complex challenge, in particular, requires it. But that’s the limit of the crew’s communication with the contestants. There are no words of comfort, no cold water handy for when the cameras turn off. They’re on their own.
About an hour of racing, swimming and puzzleplaying later, the challenge is over. The contestants are arranged into their tribes (a moment which, without spoiling the episode, provides the game’s first bombshell twist), and Chisholm sends them on their way.
An hour later, I find myself dripping wet, covered in muck from the lake. My chest is bursting with exhaustion, blood pumping in my veins. Turns out shoots don’t end with the contestants — a ‘‘Dream