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A few years ago I was approached by my very good friend and director Árni Ólafur Ásgeirsson. He told me about a play and his desire to make it into a film. Soon after that,
“he showed me the first draft of the script. What I read terrified me. The first paragraph described how a small trawler is fighting a storm in the North Atlantic, battered by gigantic waves and barely keeping afloat. He asked me if I got seasick easily and laughed. I thought he was making a joke. After reading the script, I knew in the back of my mind, that if we were to go ahead with this film, we had to do everything in camera. We knew it wouldn’t be possible to retreat to a greenscreen solution on the boat and in extreme weather conditions on such a meagre budget.
The story of the film is of a young woman who’s hired as a crewmember on a fishing vessel, where a tight knit group of men is already in place.
Slowly it is revealed that the job she got was only va- cant due to a tragic incident, and her being on board doesn’t go down well with the crew. With conflict happening within the group, as well as with nature, this motley crew has to stick together and face its destiny on a sea voyage that then takes an unex- pected turn.
When we began to discuss how to shoot the film, there was no question in our mind other than that to shoot it on 35mm film with spherical lenses. We felt it would enhance the roughness of the sea and deal with the extremities of light and weather out in the North Atlantic.
Filming in late winter in Iceland is often difficult due to harsh weather conditions. Sometimes the weather changes so rapidly that during the soft cover of the clouds and rain-sleet the strong sunlight will suddenly appear and then disappear all within a take so there is barely time to react and change the stop on the lens.
When we went for a trial run on the trawler in ‘prep’, our suspicions and our ideas were confirmed. We saw what would be plausible, unworkable, insane, and also what would be right for the story.
We soon found out that to get the most out of the ocean, we’d need to go out to sea in stormy weather, otherwise we wouldn’t really feel how the boat and the sea actually interacted in the world of the story we were trying to show on film. To really grasp how harsh it was out at sea we would have to film in the extremes of weather conditions, which are very easy to find in and around Iceland.
We were very lucky with the trawler we got be- cause the fishing company that owned it was going to scrap it after filming. This gave us the freedom to redesign and adapt both the interior and deck to suit the filming, as inside the trawler it was incredibly cramped and space was tight.
My gaffer Ingvar Stefánsson, the Production Designer Börkur Jónsson, and I had to redesign the interior lighting of the trawler as space was so limited there wouldn’t be any room for cine lights. We had to light the areas with practicals and make that work for the scenes.
With the idea of using a lot of practicals and quite often mixed colour temperature sources, I would need a rather really good stock that would give me latitude and freedom, and that would be for- giving due to lack of light in dark situations. I did ex- tensive stock tests in ‘prep’ and really pushed it to its limits, to the point where the stock would not hold up in the darkness.
After testing the full range of Fujifilm stocks, and with my experience of shooting other feature films on Fujifilm, I took on the ETERNA 500T as my main and only stock. From both my own previous experience and via the tests, I knew it would perform best with the range of different situations that can be found in the film. These consisted of interior and exterior scenes, both in day-
light and at night. The last third of the film takes place in complete darkness and would only be lit with flashlights and the trawler’s emergency lights.
As I didn’t have the option of cherrypickers full of lights for the exterior scenes, and as we would film scenes under the cover of darkness in the middle of the ocean, I needed a robust and high latitude stock.
I soon discovered that I could put all my trust in the ETERNA 500T. After the first few weeks of shoot- ing and getting the rushes back, I didn’t need to worry about the material not holding the details in the blacks as the stock performed fantastically.
With the restriction of tight spaces, practical lights and lack of time, I was often effectively at the mercy of just my focus puller, Goði Már Guðbjörns- son, and ETERNA 500T. More often than I would have liked, I found myself in the position where my meter
FIRST PERSON
FORTHOSEINPERIL
G. MAGNI ÁGÚSTSSON IKS ON THE EXTRAORDINARY CHALLENGES OF SHOOTING THE OCEANGOING DRAMA
UNDERCURRENT, WHICH RECENTLY WON SIX OF ICELAND’S MOST PRESTIGIOUS FILM AWARDS, THE EDDAS, INCLUDING BEST FILM AND
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
6 • EXPOSURE • THE MAGAZINE • FUJIFILM MOTION PICTURE