“ICELAND IS BEST is a coming-of-age story told as a modern fairytale: the dark is as important at the light. We need a medium that would allow us to express that in as many ways as possible.” So explains Max Newsom, the film’s director and writer. “Iceland is a very pretty place to film but not every medium can handle the parameters: the cold, the damp, the wind, even needing to pack the camera away at a moment’s notice and run for cover. Some days would start out fine then, five minutes later, the wind would be blowing 60-plus miles an hour, the lights would be waving around on their rigs in very alarming ways and we would have to stop shooting and save ourselves and the kit. With a film camera, it’s one tripod, one cable, one battery and most of the moving parts are mechanical. It’s rugged. It can take it.”
Dankuro Shinma, the film’s cinematographer chips in: “Battery-life is also crucial. The cold halves that. We were frequently shooting in Minus 15 Degrees Centigrade. When you are powering a video village of monitors and all the extra kit that can come with shooting digitally, that would have severely compromised what we were trying to do.”
Max: “We wanted the visual drama of the clouds, the passing from dark to light and back again. Film holds up at both ends: lots of light and no light.” Dankuro explains: “With digital, the highlights are often clipped [the process by which digital signals turn strong light to a blank white on screen] and the blacks can lack solidity. This isn’t the case with film: what you see is usually, with a little extra lighting, what you get.” Max, whose first film, PLUNGE, (with a small role for Kate Winslet) had also been shot on film stock. It had been set in Cornwall, also in bad weather but punctuated by sunlight. “You want to keep shooting, to capture the beauty of the landscape and the humanity of your actors. Film does this superbly. I felt that the best way to capture Iceland was on 35mm film stock, ideally on Anamorphic lenses, which add even more character.” Dankuro Shinma agreed: “When I saw the digital pictures Max had been sending back of the stunning landscapes in Iceland, I immediately knew we needed to go to 35mm film stock and, also to Anamorphic.”
There were other, story-specific, considerations. Max: “The script was inspired by someone I met in Los Angeles. She had told her parents she was leaving Iceland and going to live in California. She was seventeen. The airport was 1.2km away. It took her four years. It seemed to sum up almost every experience of leaving home and trying to find one’s voice I had ever heard, including my own. I wanted the emotion I felt in retelling this story to come through in vivid colours. I knew, from PLUNGE, film stock would do this.”
Will Randall-Coath, the producer, at No Reservations, the film’s production company: “The script had a very strong sense of place which was also just like, in all of its essentials, where I grew up in leafy, suburban Surrey. We felt it was a universal story. We sent Max to Iceland to take a look at the landscapes to see if his script anything like the real place at all.”
Max: “The moment I landed in Iceland, I felt I had come home. I don’t know if it was because it resembled Cumbria, where I had spent some of my teenaged years, but everywhere I looked, I was entranced: an almost endless sequence of light-shade-light, with the weather changing every five minutes from sun to snow, to heavy rain and back to sun again.”
“I needed a village which pointed out to sea. At first, I went south, to Vik, but soon realised for the locations to get really rugged, out on the East coast, the only way we could respond to a medical emergency would be with a helicopter. We were never going to have the budget for that.”
Max headed, instead, to the North West and to the Snaefellsnes National Park. “It was stunning: volcanoes, rippling along the edge of the vast, unseeable interior, lots of bad-to-spectacularly bad weather and some villages huddled up against the shoreline.” Max chose Arnarstapi then returned to Reykjavik to interview actresses. “It all fitted: landscape, people, story. I had had an intuition when writing the script that everyday was Saturday in Iceland. It felt exactly that way: like a mythical landscape in which everything is to be defined and explained. Iceland is a poetical proposition. We needed a medium that is poetry in every pore. That was, of course, going to be film stock.”
Will Randall-Coath was initially, a little less sure, not about the medium but the format: “I thought the cheaper and more portable Super 16mm cameras were the answer”. Max looked into S16mm Anamorphic but it carried its own risks. For Anamorphic, the choice was really only the wider, 35mm, format, with its associated higher cost and larger cameras. Dankuro: “Our plan was to shoot in enough snow to give the images some kick and contrast. We wanted the biggest canvas possible for that.” That turned out to be November. Max laughs: “November and early December are considered eccentric months to be shooting in Iceland. Icelanders are at home, wrapping their Christmas presents, not out shooting movies.” And not on 35mm film stock, either, it turned out.
Dankuro: “Very few people had shot on film in Iceland in recent years. There are no film labs in Iceland and no 35mm film cameras, either.” Fortunately for the production, Dankuro has an excellent relationship with Panavision UK where he took Max to try out some lenses. “Max chose the rarest and most expensive Anamorphic lenses they had: Cooke optics and Japanese engineering. Weird, wonderful and wholly magical.” Max was so sure of his choice that he declined all other (and cheaper) alternatives. A deal was struck and a mood-board shot, in November, in Arnarstapi, with the probable cast. Will: “The results were sensational. I cried. I stopped talking about Super-16mm.”
It took a year for them to raise the budget and get back out to Iceland, by which time it was November, again. Dankuro: “We had to use a magazine-warmer, which kept the film up to the right temperature. But as soon as the stock was out of the camera, the cold turned the filmstock’s edges into razors. Roland, the 2ndCamera Assistant, found that his fingers were cut by the stock and bleeding in the film-changing bag [where the magazines are unloaded back into the original film cans]. Roland couldn’t wear gloves as everything is done only by touch. He had to glue his cuts together to keep blood off the undeveloped film stock.”
This might seem like hard work, especially then the fact that the exposed film stock had to be driven back to Keflavik (four hours away) every night, then delivered into the hands of the film specialist department of DHL who would get the film stock through the airport’s security and onwards to the UK and to The Film Lab in Berkshire. Dankuro corrects any false idea: “The operation was so smooth, I could see a report and a screen-shot from the rushes within 24 hours and the actual shot sequences within 48. It was a seamless process once the film left the location.”
Also, the production didn’t drop a single frame of footage throughout 25 days of shooting. The camera (an Arricam Studio) did not malfunction even once. Dankuro: “If we had been using a digital camera, in that cold, the electronic viewfinder could have given up almost at once. You can’t fix it on location. It has to go back in the box and another be sent out from the UK. We couldn’t have lived with that kind of fragility.” There is also the image quality itself. Dankuro: “Film stock is like oil painting: tones merge into one another. The highlights [areas in strong daylight] aren’t clipped [blown out and rendered white], they come out near-true. The blacks, which some people claim are superior in digital, in my experience, are as good when shot on film. I prefer the slightly unknown quality of film stock over the ‘random’ of digital, in that respect.” Max agrees: “I went to the National Gallery recently and listened in on a lecture of late Mediaeval painting. As I looked at the egg-tempura paint effects, with their sharply defined outlines and solid blocks of colour, I realised that digital cinematography has taken us back to the Middle Ages. Film stock lives in its gradations. It is Leonardo da Vinci: infinitely delicate and subtle but you can also do very bold things with it.”
Max also has strong feelings about the way film stock imposes its own rhythms upon a production: “There is almost a religious, sacrament-like moment, when the film stock is loaded into the magazine and then that is placed on the camera: people just try harder.”
Dankuro: “Flesh tones are also beautiful. We graded the entire 91 mins of our feature in a single day, with a couple of days of tweaks after that. Digital would have taken much, much longer.” Max: “Light dances, tells its own story, has its own poetry. The silver particles of film are in a league of their own in that respect. We’re hoping that everyone who sees our film will get a very strong sense of place, of the inherent drama and changeability of that landscape. I would go back to Iceland tomorrow to make another film and I would take a film camera to do it.”
Max Newsom (director-writer). Max’s first feature, PLUNGE, drew Kate Winslet to play her first role after TITANIC. Since then, he has worked in LA as a Head of Development of a medium-large film fund, written and directed ICELAND IS BEST and written two for-TV dramas. His next project is inspired by MGM musicals of the 1950’s.
