Inside the most northerly drama in history
WHEN THEY SAY “North”, they definitely mean it. Filmed at a latitude of 81 degrees north, new BBC drama The North Water claims to be the furthest north any drama has been filmed in history. Director Andrew Haigh (Lean On Pete, 45 Years, Weekend) and his cast (which includes Colin Farrell, Tom Courtenay, Stephen Graham and Jack O’connell) spent three weeks shooting in extreme sub-zero conditions in Svalbard, adapting the brutal, critically acclaimed 2016 novel by Ian Mcguire about a doomed Victorian whaling ship beset by murder and amorality. “They’re not on some grand noble voyage,” Haigh says of the characters. “I found the harshness and the toughness and the violence of that environment really fascinating.” As he explains here, the real-life environment was nearly as tough.
NOTHING BEATS THE REAL THING
“There was forever a discussion of doing it in an easier way. Like, can we do it on an ice rink? Can we do it in Scotland? Can we do it on a green-screen in a car park in Budapest? But to me, I didn’t want to do the show at all unless we could go up there. There’s a texture to the light that you can’t recreate. It creates a sort of strange, weird majesty that you can’t get anywhere else in the world. It’s like, ‘Where the fuck are they? It feels like another planet.’”
YOU NEED A GOOD SET OF SEA LEGS
“We were at sea for a month in the end. I think we came back to port once, to reload the ship. We had the prop ship [seen on screen]. We had an icebreaker to bring us into the sea ice, which some of the crew stayed on. And then we had what was called the ‘hotel ship’ — but it really wasn’t much of a hotel, it was pretty basic. Y’know, people were sharing cabins. This is not a luxurious place to live.”
IT’S NOT A GOOD PLACE TO GET SICK
“The first night, I was in my cabin, thinking, ‘This could just be a disaster. Am I bringing a hundred people up to the Arctic sea to get seasick?’ You feel a lot of responsibility. Someone had a tooth abscess at one point. We had to organise a helicopter to airlift them away. The helicopter couldn’t even land. So this poor make-up artist had to be dragged up by a winch onto the helicopter and then flown away!”
EXPECT ICEBERGS AND POLAR BEARS
“Every morning, we would wake up and the captain would work out which ice was safe ice to work on, and then off we’d go. You’d be on set and a walrus would come up. You’d have to go inside because the polar bears were too close. On the second day of the shoot, we were trying to film a whale hunt — me, and the DP, in a small speedboat, trying to film Colin Farrell rowing in the Arctic Ocean. Icebergs are popping up and the wind is picking up and it was like, ‘What on earth have I done?’ I feel in retrospect that I borderline lost my mind. But I do think that it was worth it. It was a privilege.”