Glasgow-born director Kevin Macdonald is a man in search of a great story, whether that takes the form of one of his many feature films, like THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND (which earned star Forrest Whitaker an Oscar), STATE OF PLAY, THE EAGLE, or HOW I LIVE NOW; or his impressive array of documentaries, including the Oscar-winning ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER, TOUCHING THE VOID, or his 2012 profile of Bob Marley, MARLEY, a film that I saw at the SXSW Film Festival that year, where I first interviewed Macdonald.
Macdonald has always struck me as a chameleon filmmaker, one who doesn’t impose a style upon each of his works, but instead alters the way he makes each one to suit the material. That becomes fairly evident when you see his latest work, BLACK SEA, a treasure hunt story set almost entirely aboard a rickety submarine, run by a skeleton crew of Russians and a host of English-speaking naves, all of whom are after a long-sunk Nazi sub said to be loaded with Russian gold. Jude Law heads up the great cast, and the film carries with it a subtext about the way that the rise of big corporations and banks have pushed the working class down and out in the world. BLACK SEA is as much a tale of taking something back as it is a heist film. However you look at it, it’s an effective, tense experience—all of the cool things you’d expect from a submarine movie made by a director who strives for authenticity.
I had a chance to sit down with Macdonald in Chicago recently, the morning after a truly enlightening Q&A screening we did together the night before. He’s a true film lover, who does a tremendous amount of research of both history and movies before entering into a new project. I had a great time talking to him, so please enjoy my chat with Kevin Macdonald…
Capone: We talked last night about where the inspiration for this came from, but what I’m curious about is, when you decide you were making this submarine movie, there are a few choice films in the past that have done it very well. What do you want to do with with a sub film that is different than what you’ve seen before?
Kevin Macdonald: I suppose what I was trying to go for, originally anyway—and sometime the original idea ends up being now what you were not interested in. But what I was interested in to begin with was that feeling that I got interested in when I made TOUCHING THE VOID—the idea of being so close to humanity but you’re totally cut off and you’re alone. It’s an existential aloneness, I suppose. And it’s the same feeling I got in GRAVITY when someone floats off into space.
Capone: Isolation.
KM: Isolation, exactly. And that was the thing about the Kursk [Russian submarine] disaster was that feeling, because they were so close. They were less than 100 meters from the surface, yet un-rescuable. And you think about how 100 meters is nothing. You can run it in 10 seconds…or 20 if it’s you or me. But still it’s not very far, yet you’re cut off from humanity. You’re cut off from life. And it was lead to that feeling of isolation, and then that lead to more interesting questions of what does that pressure do to a group of characters being in that situation. And the positive side of that for them as characters, particularly for Jude, is the human ingenuity that comes out of that—the ingenuity particularly of these working men, blue-collar guys who have these particular set of skills, the know-how, and they bring that to bear in this situation.
You could have a bunch of high-tech guys in this situation, but they wouldn’t know how the ship was stuck or what to do. “Our computers are down.” But this crew is actually going to make it with their hands and figure out how to get out of there, and they come up with this ingenious idea of how to make a homemade sonar by banging on the sub. It was that feeling of using human ingenuity to get yourself out of this situation, but also, the darker side of that is the more animal side of what happens when people have to survive. They can either collaborate or they can turn on one another like animals. So both of those things are there.
So the initial idea was I wanted to get the feeling of what it would be like if you were suck on the bottom of the sea—psychologically, emotionally. And that hasn’t been done in other submarine movies. It’s usually about the threat of maybe being hit by a depth charge and going down. But that doesn’t happen.
Capone: There’s no human enemy in this film, outside of the sub.
KM: No there isn’t, and that was where Dennis being a playwright came in. We tried to keep it all there, and even the notion of the company who are setting them up. Agora, this evil corporation. We very deliberately didn’t want to identify them, because it’s really about who the company is inside their head, the paranoia of that. They’ve built up this resentment, this anger against something. But it’s about them, their resentment and their anger rather than “There’s an evil company out there.”
Capone: Well they keep referring to “bankers,” although bankers aren’t really a part of this at all. But bankers represent something to them.
KM: Bankers represent something to them, and I guess to all of us. To me, that’s become a dirty word. “You’re a wanker, you’re a banker.”
Capone: Actually, you mentioned the ingenuity aspect of it, which reminded me a lot of APOLLO 13, where they basically have to cull together something from whatever’s available.
KM: And it’s a very Russian thing, isn’t it? There’s a famous story that Dennis or somebody said to me when we were working on a film which is when they had to figure out a way of getting astronauts to write in space, because a normal pen doesn’t work, NASA spent $10 million coming up with the roller ball, and the Russians just used a pencil.
[Both laugh]
Capone: We joked about it last night, about how this is about the manliest I think we’ve ever seen Jude Law in a film. Initially, what made you think he was the right guy?
KM: I’ve learned in my career that you can often misjudge actors, and you can often think that this person can only do that, and you stereotype them. And I learned it during the very first fiction movie I made, THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND. I learned it with Forest Whitaker, because I met lots of actors for that part, and Forest was on the list to come in one day in LA, and I was like, “He’s obviously not right, but I guess we should see him. It would be impolite to strike him off the list.” And because he seemed so sweet and gentle in all the parts he’d played at that time, and he came in. He was slightly floundering around, but you can tell he connects to the darkness of this character. He does connect, and that was so unexpected.
Ever since then, if somebody really wants to be on a job, if somebody feels like they have something to offer, you should always see them, because you really never know. It’s very hard to judge until you get somebody in a room, and they talk about the character, or they perform a few lines from the script. And so the problem with Jude was, I didn’t know who would be the part. It needed to be a British actor, and so there aren’t a lot of stars who can bring enough money. Jude and I share the same agency in LA, and he read the script, and his agent got in touch and said, “Jude read the script and really liked it. Do you want to meet him?” And I was like, “Oh, I guess so, but I can’t imagine that he is right. But given my rule now, if somebody’s interested, I’ll meet them.”
We just started talking and got along really well. I had met him socially once before, but didn’t really know him at all. I loved the way that he talked about it, and I love that he’s at the point in his career where he really wants to commit to doing good things—pushing himself and learning and getting away from being the matinee idol. It didn’t happen instantly. We met a few times, we talked about it, and it just became a thing where I thought, “You know what? He’s prepared to immerse himself and give me everything to do this. And whoever else I’m going to get to do that is not going to do that, and I believe in him. And I think he pulls it off. I think he does a great, masculine, gritty performance.
He did this accent thing, which is a very bold, a very difficult accent. It’s not a generic Scottish accent. It’s very specifically belongs to this Aberdeen area, which is a maritime part of the county, and it’s a very hard accent to do. He got an Aberdonian to record all the lines. He had an Aberdeen voice coach that he found. And then he put on weight in a very specific way, and it looked like a sailor and changed his posture and aged himself. He spent several months on it. The funny thing was, he was doing at that time on the West End a short run of Henry V, and he definitely brought some of that sense of importance to the role. Because Henry V is all about Prince Hal, who is a frivolous, party animal who nobody thinks will be a good king, and Henry V needs to prove he’s become a man, a leader, and get people to follow him, and that was definitely feeding into Jude’s sense of, “Now I’ve got to be a leader. How do I turn myself into a leader for this film? How do I become a man and get everyone’s respect?” And so there was an interesting thing going on there with two things in his mind at the same time.
Capone: You mentioned about his posture. It’s hard to recognize posture in a submarine, but in the scene early on when he’s with the kid in his house, and he’s strutting around his apartment, and I did notice his shoulders are a little further back and they look wider, because he’s a pretty scrawny guy.
KM: When you see him in the end, in the flashbacks, and he’s got the kids, and you see this physique, and he’s quite impressive.
Capone: We talked a little bit last night about working on a submarine set. I know you filmed some of it on a real sub, but the parts you had on a set, what did you do to keep the illusion of claustrophobia?
KM: Basically, I had a really good production designer. It’s not a big-budget film, and he did I think an amazing job at continuity, because I think most people probably can’t tell which bits were real submarine and which bits were not, and the way he did that was really to his credit. He bought a load of old Soviet military junk that he found in Hungary. He went there and found bits and pieces of Soviet things that he stuck around the place—bits of piping here and there, fuse boxes that he found in China that he had sent over in bulk. And the painting, I always think the set is so much about the painting and texturing and how you make wood feel like metal, or make it feel like layers of paint. That’s one of the things about the submarine: after over 20 years of service in the Soviet Navy, they painted it and it’s all slopped on, and it builds up this kind of layering.
I think he did an absolutely brilliant job. And he was also the one who figured out how we were going to do that big underwater sequence with bits of set. You want the actors against a bit of set in a tiny tank, but you want the set to extend a little bit with CGI. And so he worked out the technique of being able to do that. And then there’s the lighting. By the way, that was the first film that guy designed. He’s a very experienced art director. He’s done a lot of big movies as an art director, but he got fed up with it and wanted to become his own boss.
Capone: What’s his name?
KM: His name is Nick Palmer. And then I got a young DP [Christopher Ross]. I had to get somebody cheap, who was prepared to work very quickly. The main part of the movie was shot in six weeks, and then two weeks for the underwater sequence. It was very quick. I think he did a great job of stylizing the lighting in the submarine enough so it didn’t become too boring visually but felt realistic. A lot of use of color, a lot of changes of light through different parts of the story, which is a very delicate balance, not to look like it’s a sci-fi movie, and yet to take it a little bit that way. So we looked at ALIEN from a lighting perspective.
Capone: At the beginning, Jude Law’s character is down sized, which is a very modern thing. But the whole rest of the movie is fueled by that and his anger at being let go. Part of it has to do with this family that he doesn’t have anymore, but really it’s about just being stepped on his whole life.
KM: You get the feeling that all of them are similar in a certain way, and it’s partly that they’ve been shoved aside and thrown on the scrap heap of life. They’re in their 40s or early 50s, and yet society has said you’re now surplus to requirements. That challenges your masculinity in a way to feel like all the time you’re identity comes through your job and your sense of success in life. And so that sense of success moves on to the gold. If we can get that, we can be somebody. We can regain our masculinity. Maybe it’s underwritten, but it’s also there with a sense of these character’s are all…one of them cleans offices, one is in and out of prison.
And that wonderful speech that Dennis wrote about the men being penguins [in the water they are skilled and graceful; out of they water they are awkward]. Like a lot of people in the military or people who have been in prison. Once you’ve been in there for a long time, you’re indoctrinated, you’re part of the system. Basically they spend so long away at sea with their friends, with their crew, that they can’t ever really relate to ordinary people. That’s what that penguin speech is about. We’re useless above water. We waddle around and look out of place. We don’t know how things work. When we get down here, we know how this works. So there’s that sense of coming home to what works.
Capone: You hear that same thing about people getting out of prison, living a very regimented, scheduled life. And when you get out, you have choices and you don’t know what to do with yourself.
KM: Exactly. I’m sure it’s the same in America with the military. A lot of people have a choice between going to prison or going down a path that’s going to lead them to trouble, or they join the military and that sorts them out, and they get discipline, and I think that that’s who these character are. When they went into civilian life, they couldn’t really cope, and they probably lost their wives, they’re all divorced.
Capone: The gold storyline at times in this story is really secondary. It’s a treasure movie where the treasure goes out of their minds for great periods of the film. It almost becomes more about the treasure becomes symbolic. It’s not about the money, it’s about getting it and beating the system.
KM: There’s that lovely moment when the young kid asks Michel Smiley, the Irish guy,“What are you going to do with yours?” And he goes, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll give some to the misses.”
Capone: But what he says before that is “It’s bad luck to spend money you don’t have.” That’s a great working man’s line.
KM: They actually haven’t really thought about what they’re going to do. Like you say, it’s not really about the money. And probably if they got it, they’d all lose it in a few months.
Capone: Did you learn something as a filmmaker from these guys about working on the fly, being spontaneous and not necessarily coming in with a set schedule or shot list.
KM: That’s how I like to work, and I know sometimes it works for you and sometimes it works against you. I often debate in my own head: Is it better to be the kind of filmmaker who’s got everything mapped out and organized? “I need to do this shot and that shot and this closeup, and this is the effect I want to get,” and I’m just not that person because I come from documentaries. I like to come into the scene—and there are certain things I know, like I want this shot and that shot—but mostly I come in and see what the actors give me, and then I figure out “Okay, that’s what they’re going to do,” and there will be surprises, or they’ll do something I’m not expecting, or they’ll change a line, or we’ll debate it and we’ll change the scene completely. Out of that spontaneity, out of what the actors are doing, I try and capture that.
I always think there are two approaches to filmmaking broadly. One is that approach, where you’re trying to film what’s in front of you in the world, which is this documentarian’s approach. And then there’s this Hitchcock approach, which is “I’m going to make a world that’s completely as it is in my head and I’m going to make it out there.” The spontaneity to me is interesting. Particularly with the Russian actors, they have a different approach. You could see how the three different approaches to acting—the American, the British, and the Russian—work. The American approach is methody, emerge myself in this. That feeling of, I’m going to try something different in every take and try to find some sort of truth. The British approach comes from much more theater, and training, and they’re like, “Oh, these are the lines? Okay, I’ll just say the lines and this will be good.” And actually to get them to be psychologically truthful is harder sometimes, not with Jude, but with some others. And with the Russians, they wanted to argue and discuss the character forever, and it drove me crazy. They would argue and talk. “But I would never do this, and I can’t do this.”
There’s a particular moment in the film where this big Russian guy, Sergey Puskepalis, the big guy in the engine room, he has to be hit on the head. He’s going for Jude when they learn Scoot McNairy’s character has double crossed them. “I’m going to kill him.” The other guy, the sonar operator, hits him on the head, and he goes down. And that came out of the fact that originally in the script it was like Jude holding him and explaining to him what happened, and he’s like, “No. There’s no way my character would do this. I’m a mad crazed man now! Jude’s tiny compared to me. I’d push him out of the way. The only way this is going to work is I have to be knocked out.” [laughs]
Capone: Do you have anymore documentaries in the works?
KM: I’m doing a documentary at the moment which is about a Chinese artist called Cai Guo-Qiang, who is best known for doing the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics—the fireworks, the footsteps, and all that. But he actually lives in New York, although he doesn't speak any English. He’s lived there for 20 years, and he uses fireworks, explosions, smoke to make this work. It’s all this temporary thing, and it’s usually quite conceptual. The Beijing Olympics were different from that, but he’s usually quite conceptual.
So we’re trying to make a film about being an artist in China and going back there with him, and the idea of can you have great art come out of a country where there’s such restriction of the imagination in a way, restriction of free speech. So that’s the subtext. It’s about him making a couple of particular works in China. We’ll see at the beginning and end of the movie is this thing he’s doing called Sky Ladder, which is this thing he’s been trying to do for 20 years, and it never works. So we’re going to a 1,000-year-old bridge. It’s one of the oldest things in China, they didn’t destroy it in the Cultural Revolution; it’s near his hometown. He’s going to make a ladder that’s like three-quarters of a kilometer long that goes up into the sky flaming. Like a ladder to heaven. So yeah, we’ll do that. But it lasts for like 30 seconds.
Capone: That reminds me of some of the themes from those Ai Weiwei documentaries that came out in the last couple of years. Although, he is more of a provocateur.
KM: Yeah. This is a companion piece to that in a way, because he is a provocateur, someone who’s work is very obviously political, whereas this guy’s work is not. It’s more imagination, more conceptual, more intellectual in a way.
Capone: How was your first water tank experience?
KM: One of the things that’s really hard with a water tank, which I hadn’t really figured out, is that you can’t communicate. You have to explain to people before. And we had doubles, and of course the doubles then would go first because they were divers. They would do their own stuff, and then the actors would have to copy what they had done. And you’re trying to communicate with them, and they can’t hear you because every time they breathe they can’t hear what you say, and they’re getting really annoyed with you because they’re stuck in the bottom of the tank for two hours. It’s really difficult. But there’s something magic about underwater, how it makes everything slightly surreal, and that slowness of movement.
Capone: That’s your sci-fi aspect in a nutshell.
KM: [laughs] Yeah. That looks like the beginning of ALIEN, doesn’t it? That’s what I was thinking, when they go into the cave.
Capone: Kevin, it was really good to see you again.
KM: Yeah, really nice to see you again. Thank you.
