In an industry where so much can be faked with the help of computer wizardry, it’s almost mind-boggling to discover what the cast and crew undertook for the new Netflix movie Against the Ice.
“We shot in a hurricane. We were evacuated from a glacier. We were filming in Greenland 25-30 below [zero],” notes Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.
“For me, it was a tough experience. But it was also one of the most fun shoots I’ve ever had.”
Best known to audiences as Jaime Lannister from HBO series Game of Thrones, Coster-Waldau stars in Against the Ice as real-life explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen, and co-wrote the script.
It is adapted from Mikkelsen’s book Two Against the Ice, a harrowing account of his expedition to the Arctic, which began in 1910.
For much of the journey, his only companion was Iver Iverson, a mechanic (played by British actor Joe Cole) who joined the trip in Iceland.
Coster-Waldau was sent the book by director Peter Flinth and was immediately hooked.
“There’s something about it that moved me,” he says. “I like these stories about going to the unknown. That is always interesting.
"All of us have this curiosity: what’s around the next corner? But it was really when he dived into the inner life that I thought was interesting.”
By that, he means the way Mikkelsen and Iversen fought to keep their sanity during their arduous trek.
When Coster-Waldau teamed up with his writer friend Joe Derrick, they cranked out a script for Flinth, who was determined to film it for real.
“I just thought that expedition films, or wildlife films, that I’ve seen that really worked were the ones that were actually shot in the elements,” he says.
Such was the case with Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s “mind-blowing” survival drama The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, which was partly shot in the snowy realms of Canada — and bears some similarities to Against the Ice.
In this case, Flinth and his team shot in Iceland and Greenland, a country with little in the way of infrastructure to accommodate film crews.
Roads were built specially so the actors could shoot on glaciers and — perhaps echoing the madness inherent in the story — Coster-Waldau even filmed scenes where he hops from one perilous-looking iceberg to the next.
“That was insane. I mean, I don’t know how we got away with that,” he grins, “but I think it’s an incredible shot.”
In fact, the only thing that wasn’t done for real was the scene where Mikkelsen is attacked by a polar bear — although Flinth initially had other ideas.
Year earlier, he’d seen The Flight of the Eagle, the 1982 movie with Max von Sydow about an ill-fated balloon expedition to the Arctic.
“They’re struggling with a real polar bear,” says Flinth, who even found a man on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard who trained the creatures.
Eventually, he was persuaded otherwise.
“We couldn’t, for safety reasons, work with that,” Flinth says.
Instead, they created a computer-generated polar bear, while using an Olympic heavyweight judo champion to stand in for the creature on set.
Coster-Waldau was thrown around like a ragdoll by this stuntman.
“I wanted it to look good so I let my head go, which kind of caused a little bit of a concussion."
Perhaps it takes a certain insanity to get a film like this in the can — and to understand the mentality of a character like Ejnar Mikkelsen.
“He’s driven in a way that is hard to imagine,” says Coster-Waldau.
Not even frostbite or losing valuable food supplies is enough to make him turn back.
“Which, of course, is an incredible strength. It’s also his weakness because he’s so single-minded. And he has so little respect for the idea that someone would know better.”
Following in the footsteps of a failed expedition, Mikkelsen’s mission was more than just vanity. It was designed to find evidence that Greenland was not split in two, thereby disputing the US claim to the region.
Huge mistakes were made along the way — leaving Mikkelsen and Iversen stranded. Yet they were a perfect team, says Flinth.
“And to me, this is the most important message in the film — you need to keep up hope, you need to work together as companions. You need each other," he says.
As Coster-Waldau notes:“ A lot of these expeditions that ended in disaster was because … you had these alpha males suddenly under extreme pressure, and disagreeing, and getting into fights.
"Here it was very clear. One guy was making all the good decisions and the bad decisions.
"But for some reason, Iver had this incredible inner strength to not lash out. Even when all of us are watching and going, ‘This is insane,’”
Married to the singer Nukaka, from Greenland, Coster-Waldau has been visiting the country on and off for the past 25 years. “It’s a magical place,” he says.
And yet, sadly, it was all too clear when filming just what a catastrophe this unique land is now facing, with global warming causing the polar ice caps to melt at an alarming rate.
“We spent a couple of years researching, going on location trips,” Flinth says. “Each year, when we got back to a glacier it had melted.”
While Against the Ice is not an environmental movie as such, it’s impossible to watch it and not think about such issues — and how different it was just 100 years ago when men risked their lives to venture into the unknown.
“The rest of the world that we are polluting [means] the melting process is unstoppable now in Greenland,” sighs Flinth. “It’s kind of depressing.”
Survival, it seems, now means a very different thing indeed.
Against the Ice is available on Netflix from March 2
