“I always wanted the audience to feel, I guess, at sea,” Haigh says. “So they were never quite sure what this was going to become or what it was. I also think that, you know, to put it bluntly, [what sets it apart is] it’s not about a lot of posh people on a ship, or in a big house. Whalers were working-class men.” (And as such, there’s some sly commentary in the show about who gets their hands dirty while rich women wear fancy perfume reaped from the slaughter of sea life.)
The authentically testing shoot
The fact that it was partly filmed in the Arctic Circle – and on a ship where much of the cast and crew lived in cramped quarters together throughout a three-week shoot – inevitably heightened the authenticity for those involved. The frostbitten, harried faces of the cast were true to life: some of The North Water was made in the Northernmost reaches of the world that had ever been home to a film crew. “It was challenging, of course,” Haigh says. “It’s not going to be easy, living on a boat for all that time. But I think, for me, and I think for most of the cast, Jack included, we relished being up there. It felt like we were separate from the world, which is what these men were when they were on the whaling ship.”
And being in such a remote location had its perks. O’Connell and some of his fellow cast members did cold-water dives and spotted polar bears from their ship. In a practical sense, too, Haigh says, he benefited from the remoteness as a director. “There were no execs on the ship, and no one could even see any dailies. There was no internet, and no way to transport anything back because we were on a ship in the middle of the ocean,” he laughs.
“Once you’ve been there, you come back and think: did we do that?”, Haigh says, recalling one morning where “we had to find some ice to work on, and we spent the day floating around in the ship breaking through sea ice and trying to find somewhere to work. It’s an insane environment to be in, and yet you kind of get used to it. You’re like ‘oh, look, a polar bear’.”
