Erik Skjoldbjaerg shot his 1997 thriller Insomnia in the midnight sun above the Arctic Circle. Now, the Norwegian director has gone deep under water in his thriller Pioneer (sold by TrustNordisk and currently in post-production). The film is set in the early 1980s, at the height of the Norwegian oil boom, when the country began to emerge as a major economic power. Its lead characters are divers (played by Aksel Hennie and US actor Wes Bentley) venturing deep beneath the ocean's surface.
Appropriately enough, Skjoldbjaerg and Hennie were in Cannes on Saturday, the wettest day in the festival's recent history when the Croisette itself was under water.
"This film consists of tiny, claustrophobic spaces and of infinite spaces," Skjoldbjaerg says of his film. "The biggest challenge was the underwater stuff." Much of the underwater shooting was done in Iceland at night-time, close to a glacier where the water is filtered by lava sand and is, the director says, supposedly the clearest in the world.
Pioneer may be fictional but its characters are based on real life. During the boom, top US divers came to Norway to help local divers go more than
400 metres below the surface. The divers were often alpha-male types, who were intensely competitive and desperate to be the first to break new barriers.
"The Americans knew more than the Norwegians at that time. They had a lot of knowledge we didn't have," Hennie states.
The actor (best known for Headhunters and Max Manus) is already an experienced recreational diver. For Pioneer, though, he had to push himself to new limits, wearing huge, unwieldy diving suits and big helmets that made him look like an astronaut. "It was the most challenging shoot I've ever been on," the actor acknowledges. "It was crazy dangerous it's just super scary. If the air stops, it stops! I really hope that comes over. If it does, you have that suspense you need in a movie."
During his preparation for the film, Hennie dived to 60 metres underwater, "both on heliox and air", and spent time in decompression chambers.
Skjoldbjaerg and his team studied underwater films, notably James Cameron's The Abyss. They also drew on sci-fi movies. Their aim was to "achieve something organic" in the camera and then add digital effects. They did not want simply to rely on CGI.
Pioneer (which has been pre-sold to Lumiere for Belgium) should be ready for an autumn release.