Page 15 - Fujifilm Exposure_30 Archangel_ok

pulsating climax, takes place in and around the eponymous seaside port. Over a thousand kilometres to the north-east of Moscow, remote, regular- ly snowbound and so often inaccessi- ble, the actual city of Archangel wasn’t, logistically, a goer.
Instead, Hall with, at various times, Jones, Seager and Pickwoad, embarked on a series of recces around Eastern Europe to try and find suit- able, and less expensive, ‘lookalikes’ for the key Russian locations, both indoor and outdoor, especially the Russian taiga (the pine forests).
After considering Lithuania, Belarus and Poland, they finally set- tled on Latvia, especially its capital, Riga. “It just pushed all the right but- tons,” said Hall. Especially financial, he added. Part of the Soviet Empire
until the break-up of the Union at the turn of the 90s, Latvia once boasted a very potent film industry, which duly collapsed along with Communism.
Headquartered in Riga, birthplace of the great Sergei Eisenstein, the pro- duction was able to re-create much of the book’s ‘look’ in and around the city. Said Pickwoad: “Not that Riga is exactly massive, but it has buildings that are quite chunky, that have a good Soviet feel to them. Riga was big enough for the back streets to look rather like Moscow. I’d not been in Latvia before but after three visits, I definitely felt we’d found the right place.”
The production, with a crew com- prising no fewer than six nationalities, also needed snow, tons of it, particu- larly for the story’s climactic shoot-up in the forest. But in order to guarantee
snow, it would have had to go so far north there wouldn’t have been enough daylight.
The local meteorology suggested that there’s usually just seven days of snow in November, so the crucial scenes were filmed using the interven- tion of Snow Business, the fake snow people. Then, as if on cue, some gen- uine, and very heavy, white stuff did arrive ahead of forecast to add authen- ticity to wide shots.
In terms of scale, Archangel is by far the biggest assignment yet for Jon Jones, whose CV also includes the hit teleseries, Cold Feet. “In terms of scale, yes,” he agreed. “I suppose that’s what appealed to me about doing this. Mind you, sometimes I found it frustrating because it’s almost as if you get to have less acting with all the time it
takes for the camera to get through, say, the forest and the snow.
“This was a big antidote to the kind of chamber stuff I’d been doing so I must have sounded very excited when I got the script. Doing action is all very technical like so much of film- making, but nevertheless interesting and challenging.
“We have film aspirations despite a TV budget and TV screen-size. In that sense we have been somewhat under- resourced. We just have to make sure that the explosions are big enough to pull it off.”
What has become clear is that Archangel is helping to kick-start the film industry in Latvia, which has lain pretty much dormant for more than a decade. Even as the famous old Riga studios were being pressed back into
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