THE DEEP directed by Baltasar Kormakur, written by Jon Atli Jonasson and Kormakur, with Olafur Darri Olafsson, Johann G. Johannsson and orbjorg Helga orgilsdottir. A D Films release. 95 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (August 9). For venues and times, see listings.
Not every director would put his Hollywood career on hold, but Baltasar Kormakur has priorities.
Having made a breakthrough in America as the director of Mark Wahlberg’s Contraband – a remake of Reykjavik To Rotterdam, in which Kormakur played the Wahlberg role – the Icelandic filmmaker found himself suddenly marketable in America.
He signed onto 2 Guns, with Wahlberg and Denzel Washington, but before that he went home to shoot The Deep, a true survival story about Gulli Fridthorsson, a fisherman who survived six hours in the frigid North Atlantic after a shipwreck.
“It doesn’t look like the most commercial film, about a guy swimming in the sea,” Kormakur says, grabbing a quick lunch at the restaurant in the Intercontinental Hotel during TIFF 2012 while his son plays with an iPad in the next seat. “I financed a lot of it with my own money, which I got out of Contraband and my other work.”
He says he was motivated to make The Deep because Iceland, having weathered an economic meltdown comparable to America’s, is in need of heroic stories right now.
“I think we were a lost nation for a while,” he says. “We didn’t know who we were, why this happened to us, what had happened. Instead of going for the obvious and make a film about the collapse, I wanted to look at a broader perspective – to remind us who we are, where we come from, who are our real heroes, what this country’s built on. That was my metaphor, how this person goes through the most horrific experience possible but comes out alive and rebuilds his life.”
Of course, that metaphor becomes irrelevant once you’re shooting on the open sea, and it turns out the best way to shoot a swimming man in choppy waters is to use your own body as a counterweight to hold him in place for the camera.
“I tried to get a grip to do it, but he was, like, I can’t do it,'” the director says. “So for three days I was just in there backstroking, with the actor and a rope.”
Not that he’s complaining.
“When you’re making a movie about someone like [Fridthorsson], you can’t whine. Because it’s never anything close to what the other guy went through. But I had this urge to experience part of it – to be on the boat, to understand, to get the experience of how really powerful the water is. I can tell you, the more I tried, the more like a miracle his survival became.”
Having established a beachhead in Hollywood with Contraband and 2 Guns, Kormakur says he’s happy to do more American projects, but he’ll continue to live in Iceland.
“I have a farm up north and breed horses, and I’ve invested in four companies now in Iceland, all related to film,” he says. “I’m doing everything I can to build up that industry. It made me who I am, that’s the reason for doing this. And I’m producing movies for all the young filmmakers coming up – to kind of pave a road, hopefully.”
normw@nowtoronto.com | @wilnervision
