Colin casts off in a seafaring saga
Colin FIRTH found his sea legs in choppy waters, portraying an infamous yachting cheat.
The actor, who won an oscar for The King’s Speech, plays Donald Crowhurst: an amateur round-the-world yachtsman. His harrowing journey in 1968 ended in disgrace and tragedy, after he duped family and race organisers, finally taking his life.
‘Colin was on that boat, and there was no sea-sickness from him — or any of the leading actors,’ said producer Pete Czernin.
The film is called The Mercy, after an entry in Crowhurst’s log, discovered when his trimaran, the Teignmouth Electron, was found abandoned. ‘i can no longer play the game. it is the end. it is the mercy,’ he had written.
Czernin described the film as ‘a very heroic story’: ‘it comes down to that saying how a man’s reach must exceed his grasp. We all have dreams, and we all try to put those plans into action. And he [Crowhurst] saw himself as able to achieve something.’
But he found himself in an awful predicament. neither he nor his boat were equipped for a challenging ocean voyage. After a while, he started falsifying his locations on the ship-to- shoreradio messages he sent.
He struggled to keep up the pretence, while his wife Clare (played by Rachel Weisz) tried to make everything shipshape with their four children, on dry land.
When the film was shooting in the West Country, several onlookers said they had been present when Crowhurst set sail for real.
‘People would come up and say: “Here’s a picture! This is me, as a babe in arms”,’ Czernin recalled.
The film-makers at Blueprint Pictures and BBC Films had a replica of the Teignmouth Electron built in the UK; then transported to Malta, where it was ‘weathered’ for several weeks (it’s still there, in bits and pieces).
Sailing scenes were shot off the island, with director James Marsh and cinematographer Eric Gautier crouched out of sight as they filmed Firth at the helm.
‘Colin handled the boat brilliantly, but there was always someone there, helping him, because you don’t want your lead actor floating off into nowhere. That would be bad,’ Czernin said. ‘Also, the boat wasn’t cheap.’
The Mercy will be released early in 2017 by StudioCanal in time for the next awards season.