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FROM POLE TO POLE
FROM POLE TO POLE
Award-winning writer-director Charles Sturridge charts the epic Endurance journey of explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton for C4
F ilming on constantly shifting ice concen- trates the mind starkly. If you fall into the
freezing water, for example, experience decrees you have about a minute and a half to survive. But like the remarkable polar expedition led by Sir Ernest Shackleton 87 years earlier, which
embraced disaster before eventual triumph, its recent £10 million recreation could also proudly boast no fatalities.
Shackleton set off from England just after World War One was declared, intending to lead the first expe- dition to complete a land crossing of the South Pole.
When his ship the Endurance became first trapped in the ice then sank beneath it, the maverick explorer and his 28-man crew embarked on a terrifying but ultimately successful two year battle for survival.
After his justly acclaimed epic, Longitude, C4’s Millennium blockbuster, which would go on to win five BAFTA awards including Best Drama Serial, you’d think that writer-director Charles Sturridge would have probably wanted to steer away for a long while from all matters maritime.
But little voices – from C4’s head of drama to a casual phone call from Jeremy Irons, one of Longitude’s stars – began to give Sturridge the Shackleton bug.
And when he met American author Caroline Alexander, who’d written a book about the expedi- tion following a New York exhibition of photographs by one of the survivors, Frank Hurley, that, Sturridge explained, “kind of fixed it for me.”
As the 50-year-old filmmaker then dived head- first into the research knowing he had a transmis- sion deadline just over a year away for his two-part, four hour film, simply titled Shackleton, he must also have been fully aware that the subject matter was nothing if not ‘hot.’
There was, on the stocks, a lavish Hollywood studio project to be directed by Wolfgang Petersen (apparently Russell Crowe has now signed up), Working Title reportedly had a script, and the BBC, which had previously done its own four-hour version in 1983, was also keen to reprise the tale.
Sturridge: “From the beginning, I said to the financiers [C4 and the Arts & Entertainment Network] that they should expect a film to come out. And did they mind, because I certainly didn’t. It meant we just had to concentrate on making ours better than any- one else’s. The competition was, if you like, a sign of interest in the story. It should be taken as a positive and as something not to frighten us off.”
Even before he began to write, Sturridge had clearly fixed in his mind the actor he wanted to play the lead role: Kenneth Branagh, like Shackleton, Irish-born, and at 40, exactly the same age as the explorer when he set out for the South Pole in 1914.
Sturridge: “I didn’t know Ken at all when I rang him up to take him to lunch. I also didn’t tell him beforehand what it was all about. When we met at a Chinese restaurant, I told him that although I hadn’t started writing yet, he was the person I wanted to play Shackleton. Now, if it had been me I would prob- ably have said ‘Very interesting let me know how you get on with the script and, of course, I’d like to read it.’ With terrific grace, he said straightaway, ‘What a great idea, I’d like to do it.’
“His first question to me was, ‘Are you going to go out on the ice?’ When I said ‘yes’ he said, ‘Thank God for that.’ So we’d somehow managed to cover the two main points even before the spring rolls had arrived. From that day, Ken never ever wavered in his commitment to the project.”
Reunited with his Longitude producer Selwyn Roberts, who had filled in the time between projects working on Jez Butterworth’s Birthday Girl and UK
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EXPOSURE • 18 & 19