A storm of Crowhursts
Director Simon Rumley and star Justin Salinger on the year’s other Donald Crowhurst movie
WHEN THE MERCY sailed into cinemas in February it caused only a little ripple. Starring Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz, and directed by James Marsh (The Theory Of Everything), it was a perfectly fine telling of the story of Donald Crowhurst, an amateur sailor who died mysteriously during the Golden Globe boat race in 1969. It received solid reviews and did modest box office, before disappearing over the horizon.
Six weeks later, another, smaller, much more striking take on Crowhurst’s story appeared in cinemas, but was perhaps consumed in The Mercy’s wake. Now, as it hits DVD, it’s time for Simon Rumley’s Crowhurst to get its deserved moment.
Rumley has been quietly making a name for himself over the past 18 years, mostly as a horror director (Red, White & Blue; Fashionista; the segment ‘P Is For Pressure’ in ABCS Of Death). His take on Crowhurst isn’t horror, but finds horrors in the story of a man who drove himself mad trying to avoid embarrassment. When Crowhurst entered the Golden Globe, a race to be the fastest person to traverse the planet in a boat, he was doing so to win the £5,000 prize and save his failing business. A not particularly good sailor, he quickly learned he was going to get nowhere near the podium and, shamed and frightened of heading home to bankruptcy, started to cheat, giving false locations that suggested he was doing rather well. He hoped he might go unnoticed. Unfortunately, as other competitors dropped out, Crowhurst slipped (falsely) into the lead. The stress of being found out, and the isolation of his journey, started to have a severe effect on his mental state. Crowhurst is a study of a man driving himself insane.
“A lot of my films have dealt with people on the edge of madness,” says Rumley. “I felt like I could add something unique to this story. It was the tragedy of the situation that was interesting.” When Rumley was brought on to the project in the summer of 2014, by producer Michael Riley, he knew there was a ‘rival’ film in production. “Mike told me there was another film in the works,” says Rumley.
“I didn’t really care. I basically read the script [by Andy Briggs] and liked it.”
Rumley had no interest in directly competing, so tried to make something that would be the absolute opposite of what he thought The Mercy would be. “We knew the BBC was [part] financing it and James Marsh was directing, so through guesswork, with that type of budget [estimated at around £20 million], we knew that even with the strange subject matter, it would probably start with a man cycling through a village on a bicycle.”
Rumley’s version, which cost under a million, takes place almost entirely inside Crowhurst’s pokey boat, the Teignmouth Electron, with nary a look at the water around him. It’s not a man-versus-nature battle, but man-versus-same-man. For the man playing Crowhurst, Justin Salinger, this near-one man show was a daunting prospect. “My history [in film] is usually coming in and doing a few days for a small, interesting cameo,” he says. His credits include Everest, and on TV,
Humans. “I had to convince Simon I could do this, even though I didn’t know if I could myself. The idea of being on camera on my own was terrifying, to be honest.” He endured a fast, intense shoot, sometimes filming in perilous seagoing weather that “made even something as basic as changing your jumper incredibly terrifying”.
Crowhurst has Nicolas Roeg, Rumley’s “favourite director of all time” as an executive producer, brought on by Riley. “It turned out he’d tried to get a Crowhurst film off the ground at the time he made The Man Who Fell To Earth, so it’s always been close to his heart,” explains Rumley. The director is not shy about acknowledging the influence of Roeg on his work.
“Castaway has overtones of what we’re doing,” he says. “It’s a man in self-imposed exile, and a relationship that descends into a quagmire of almost madness.”
By a curious quirk, Crowhurst, like The Mercy, was distributed by Studiocanal. Imagine Armageddon being distributed by the same company as Deep Impact to get an idea of how unusual that is. “It was a very strange situation,” says Rumley. Rather than keeping the duelling Crowhursts apart, he wanted to sail into the storm. “We were hoping to come out the same week as
The Mercy, so we could go against them!”
But he calls the actual result “the second best thing that could’ve happened. The first two reviews we saw threw praise at us and particularly Justin. I thought, ‘Yes, we did it!’” For a film this small and offbeat to be holding its own with a bigger-budget cousin is rare indeed.
CROWHURST IS OUT ON 16 JULY ON DVD AND DOWNLOAD