Page 22 - Fujifilm Exposure_18 Shackleton_ok

“I personally felt very close to Shackleton because there are great similarities between structuring an expedition and making a film.”
continued from page 18
locations for a little something called Pearl Harbour, Sturridge then cast Matt Day, Lorcan Cranitch, Kevin McNally, Mark McGann, Nicholas Rowe, Phoebe Nicholls (the real-life Mrs Sturridge) and Embeth Davidtz.
Having researched extensively, first through books and diaries but then, even more fruitfully, via contact with 17 different families connected to relatives of expedition members, Sturridge knew exactly the focus of his film.
“Our story starts with a 40-year- old Shackleton lecturing an audience in Berlin on his earlier Antarctic achieve-
similarities between structuring an expedition and making a film.”
All the time he was writing the script, a key deadline was looming large: “If we were going to go on to the ice, there was only a very narrow win- dow of time when we could shoot. It had to be between April and the beginning of June. If C4 delayed it, it would mean a whole year’s delay.”
When it came eventually to recre- ating the icy bits, Sturridge and Shackleton were quite literally poles apart. Logistics precluded filming due south, so the production team headed
ments and being accused of failure. That first leads us into the story.
“Well over a third of the film is about the preparatory stage of the Endurance expedition which took place against the extraordinary back- ground of his own and contemporary history. His private life was complex and in chaos, there was the indictment and then imprisonment of his brother for fraud in the same year he was try- ing to raise £90,000, the Great War was about to begin, and he was exhausted.
“Actually,” smiled Sturridge, “ I personally felt very close to Shackleton because there are great
north instead for the Denmark Strait and Eastern Greenland where it took up residence on a Norwegian icebreak- er for over five weeks.
Would polar buffs spot the differ- ence? “Visually there are two basic dif- ferences,” Sturridge explained. “The geographical construction on the Weddell Sea in the Antarctic often results in huge amounts of pressure forcing the ice into extraordinary shapes. As it happened, the ice we were working on had come from way up in the north and was very contort- ed. We were lucky to have some very fluky conditions.
“Harder for us was the situation with wildlife. There were no penguins and we weren’t, as you can imagine, allowed to take any in with us. So you can say they will have to come into our story artificially. On the other hand, we had to keep polar bears out,” said Sturridge.
Although they didn’t have real penguins, the production could at least happily boast the presence of an authentic looking replica of the Endurance. This was the ever versa- tile, if insurance-heavy, Cornish-based
Photos previous page: Kenneth Branagh as Sir Ernest Shackleton leads his men across the South Pole;
this page: DP Henry Braham BSC sets up shots on location; Branagh as Shackleton; writer and director Charles Sturridge; the Endurance Of The Crew
EXPOSURE • 20 & 21