Reykjavík Grapevine - 21.09.2012, Qupperneq 20

Special thanks to Air Iceland for flying our photographer
to Akureyri to meet up with Baltasar.
20
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 15 — 2012
Feature | Film
The film was previewed last night, and it
has been met with great praise. It must
be a relief for you that it has found such
a positive reaction, given that this was
not an easy subject to cover.
No, it was not an easy subject, and the condi-
tions for making the film were not really easy ei-
ther, as it turned out. But I took my time with it. I
decided from the get go that I would not give into
commercial pressure. I wanted to take all the
time I needed. I was working on other projects
in the meantime. Two-three weeks ago, I was
shooting [the upcoming] ‘2 Guns’ in the New
Mexico desert, and I was still using downtime to
edit this movie. I made some substantial chang-
es towards the end, and I think the distance
and the time I spent away from the film gave
me a better perspective of the story. I felt it was
very important to make the film with a certain
humbleness towards the subject and I am very
pleased that this feeling seems to come across
to the audience. I did not want to dramatise the
story, or create an antagonist, some bad guy for
the main character to go up against. The nature
is the antagonist. The enemy he must overcome.
You have said the film is also a reflec-
tion on the economic turbulence Iceland
has been through.
I see it as ref lection on who we are, essential-
ly. Where do we come from? What is the fabric
we are made of? I wanted to return to the basics.
American heroes wear capes, Icelandic heroes
wear sea gear. That is why this is such a power-
ful story; the narrative drive stands so close the
Sagas. Someone performs an inexplicable hu-
man feat, does not really want to talk about it and
downplays the whole thing. This is so close the
national character and I believe it is what makes
the story fascinating. It comes from within us.
This is really a story of a nation.
Films and theatre are not toys; they are seri-
ous art forms. This is the first time in Icelandic
film history that someone deals with a tragedy at
sea. This is the biggest scar we bear as a nation.
Everyone knows someone who has lost someone
at sea in Iceland. This is something that stands
so close to us. And we have never dealt with this.
It is as if we just consider this the cost of doing
business.
Small Towns Are A Microcosm Of
Society As A Whole
This is your second film that deals with
life in a small fishing village. The first
one (‘The Sea,’ 2002) was a reflection
on a time that might be described as the
beginning of an era that eventually led
the Icelandic economy into a tailspin.
That is an interesting analogy. Whatever peo-
ple want to say about that film, it was a warning
of things to come. The film was based on a play
that was written in 1993, and it was a warning of
what would happen when we made the fishing
quota individually transferable. We turned fish
that had not yet been caught into a transferable
asset. You can’t base a transaction on a greater
bubble than uncaught fish in the sea. Eventually,
the market value of the uncaught fish became
higher than the market value of the actual fish.
This created enormous wealth for some people,
and all this wealth, that was really based on noth-
ing, had to be put to some use, and that was the
foundation of the bubble that eventually burst in
2008. We can point fingers at people and events
along the way, but this is the system that created
the soil for the crash. But now, I am trying to
approach this from a completely different direc-
tion. I am not saying that people should not be
held responsible for their actions, but I don’t be-
lieve that we can recover as society by shouting
and pointing fingers. We will only recover when
we move on.
What happened in Iceland is that we went
from being a very simple society to a very mod-
ern society in only a few years. When I was a kid
growing up in Kópavogur, I could never have
dreamed of the success that I have enjoyed, mak-
ing movies in Hollywood with someone like
Denzel Washington. It simply did not seem pos-
sible. Björk was really the first Icelander to break
The Impossible Feat
Baltasar Kormákur makes movies and loves the journey
Director Baltasar Kormákur is to Icelandic film what Sigur Rós is to
Icelandic music. After successfully making the Hollywood box-office
hit 'Contraband,' starring Mark Wahlberg and Giovanni Ribisi, Baltasar
has returned to Iceland with the docudrama ‘The Deep,’ the story of
Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, the lone survivor from the five man crew of
the fishing boat Hellisey VE 503 that went down three nautical miles
East of Heimaey in March of 1984. Guðlaugur spent five hours in the
frigid sea (5°c) before reaching Heimaey island. He then walked bare-
foot across a lava field for three hours before finding help. Guðlau-
gur's extraordinary feat is considered nearly impossible.
“
The only way to do the
film properly was to give it
everything. I could not bear
the thought of cheating. We
sank the boat and filmed
inside while it was sinking.
And we swam through the
surf and into the cliffs to
film the footage when he
reached land.„
Words by Sveinn Birkir Björnsson • Photo by Baldur Kristjáns