Whether it be acclaimed dramas such as The Last King of Scotland and Touching the Void or documentaries like Life in a Day and Marley, Kevin Macdonald is one of our most quietly prolific directors. His latest film, Black Sea, is a gripping submarine drama that features the likes of Jude Law, Ben Mendelsohn, and Scoot McNairy, following a group of down-and-out men who attempt to retrieve buried Nazi treasure from the depths of the ocean.
We got a chance to sit down with the director discuss jumping from narrative to documentary, the range of influences on his latest film, where he first saw Mendelsohn and McNairy, his relationship with his grandfather, the legendary Emeric Pressburger, and much more. Check out the full conversation below.
The Film Stage: I’ve enjoyed following your career over the years. You’re a director where it’s kind of hard to predict what you might do next. Do you enjoy that?
Kevin Macdonald: I try to be hard to predict. [Both laugh]
Even though they might be across different genres or even different forms of storytelling, is there something that you see is related?
I think the only thing that probably relates them all together is just there is deep curiosity that makes me feel excited and passionate and want to get out of bed in the morning. I guess I’m the kind of person that gets easily bored. I don’t want to repeat myself, and I feel you only live once and I would like to try everything. And sometimes things work out well and sometimes they don’t work out so well, but you learn something. I do like to deliberately kind of move from documentary to fiction in the last few years. I’ve done that every year, alternating, and documentary, keeps you engaged with the real world in a way. And you satisfy your curiosity in a way that fiction film you don’t, or the pleasures of making fiction films is very different.
There’s so many fascinating stories that you’ve captured, but when you’re on the set shooting, do you ever perhaps take something from a documentary that you would then implement in the feature film? It could be a style, a feeling, or just an emotion.
Well, yeah. I mean, I think documentaries have taught me a lot about performance, especially when you look at the way someone in real life responds to an emotional situation — something very upsetting or something where they are feeling very joyful or whatever the strong emotion is. And having sat in a cutting room and watch those kind of emotions happen in real life and then you go to the fiction film, and you see what the actors do, you very quickly begin to feel things really real — usually too much. I think that influences the way that I’ll work with the actors and try to get them to be as naturalistic as possible. There are incidences, like in The Last King of Scotland, where there’s a documentary made about Idi Amin by Barbet Schroeder called Idi Amin Dada and I watched that a lot. That definitely influenced a whole host of things about design, about character, and all sorts of ways.
That’s great. Getting to the characters of your new film, Jude Law is great, but also the supporting cast. When did Ben Mendelsohn and Scoot McNairy pop up on your radar? It’s been great to see their careers kind of take off in the last few years.
Yeah, they’re fantastic. I think that I saw Ben first in Animal Kingdom. I had probably seen him in Australian movies without really knowing who he was, but that was the movie where he sort of came into focus again. And then of course I saw him and Scoot together in Killing Them Softly. Is it Killing Them Softly or Killing Me Softly? I can’t remember what it’s called.
Killing Them Softly, yeah.
Yeah, and they were so great. I wasn’t the hugest fan of the movie as a whole, but I thought that they brought such life and Ben’s so interesting in it. I was aware of Scoot for having seen him in Monsters as well. So when I was looking for an American actor, he was one of the first people that came to my head and fortunately he was interested. He’s seen a couple of my movies that he’d liked and he came over and he was a bit shocked to find that Ben was there too. [Both laugh]
That’s a nice surprise. Getting into the production of the movie, we’ve seen a lot of great submarine movies before and I’m always interested how they actually captured that environment. Can you discuss if you filmed partially in a real submarine?
The main thing I like about submarine films it’s this man vs. nature kind of situation where man are somewhere they shouldn’t be. They are in an environment that is not conducive to human life. They can only exist because of this machine and if there’s a thing wrong with the machine, the submarine, then they’re caput. And so there’s a tension inherent in that in the same way that films in space, you know, Interstellar or whatever. I wanted it to be claustrophobic because that’s what gives you the sense of really being there and the sense of you can’t get out of this machine that you’re inside. As a character says it’s only cold dark death out there. I felt like if we could retain that sense of claustrophobia by never going outside the confines of our set, keeping the set the right size of a real submarine, that would be great. But also of course we did film partially on a real submarine. We filmed for a couple of weeks in a real submarine right at the beginning, a Russian diesel sub that we found and coincidentally and bizarrely was owned by a private individual who bought it in the early 90’s and was floating in a river outside London. So that was the submarine we see the exterior in the movie. And we shot also interior for a couple of weeks, but it was just so amazingly detailed and wonderful, the set, the interior. I mean, it was beautiful. Russian writing, the paint work, the numerous pipes and wires, the gauges and valves and it just goes all over; the detail is so authentic. There’s no way we could have done that at all for a whole set. So, because we filmed on there for a couple of weeks we were then able just to do the stuff in the central rooms, the control room and the main engine room, and the corridor. That was then built on a set. The actors experienced the real submarine first so they brought some sense of what it was really like on a metal and underwater object with them when they came onto the stage.
You’ve mentioned Jude Law did some intense research. What exactly did he do?
Well, he did all sorts of stuff. He obviously did a lot of work on his character in terms of adopting a Scottish accent, a very difficult, specific Scottish accent – the Aberdeen accent. He wanted to go on a real submarine and we managed to get in touch with the Royal Navy and send him off on a real diesel submarine. He spent a few days sleeping in a room with 18 other men and being a part of a work party doing odd jobs for the submarine, cleaning up, so he really learned what it was like to be on a submarine and I think he learned an awful lot about the psychology of submariners, as well. How the submarine is like their family and how they find it hard to adjust when they get on to dry land again. That’s the idea that we really adopted in the script.
There’s obviously touchstones like Das Boot and Treasure of Sierra Madre mixed in there. Is there any other inspirations you had when making the film?
Well, I think it was also influenced by space films like Alien. The idea of being in an alien world, being in a world where you can’t tell what’s in front of you and the beginning of Alien where it’s all kind of murky and smoky and windy. I think it’s a little bit like that, at the bottom of the ocean, and that same feeling of dread. But a specific film that was influential was William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, which is a remake of a French film called The Wages of Fear. That film is about a bunch of desperate men in South America who’ve been given this mission to drive some trucks full of gelignite across some mountains. Sort of similar in a way, it’s the psychology of the men, who kind of feel like they’ve been put on the scrap heap, that they feel like they don’t have any future, and they take on this impossibly dangerous mission.
Yeah, those are fantastic movies. My last question, today would’ve been Emeric Pressburger’s birthday, actually, and…
That’s very astute of you. Yeah, it’s true.
I know you’re related to him, and you wrote a book about him. Can you briefly talk about what you learned from him and how he’s inspired you?
Well, I don’t think learned anything as a filmmaker at all. I think they made very different kind of films. My films are often based in reality and naturalistic in a way. But they made films that were full of fantasy and magic. I love those films. I think they’re some of the greatest ever made, but they’re very different from what I’m doing. When my grandfather died I was only twenty-one or something, so I didn’t really get a chance to sort of be directly involved in films with him or anything. But I think I was inspired by his storytelling ability. I think he was just a great storyteller and he told great stories and he wrote great stories. And I suppose he inspired you to think that that’s something you can do as well. Then I wrote a book about him and that in a way is the thing that got me interested in movies. Prior to that I wanted to be a writer and be a journalist and I started writing this book about him and watching lots of movies and learning about movie history. And in a way, weirdly, indirectly, that’s what lead me to creating these movies. So in a way I have to thank him for it, but not in a direct way.
Black Sea opens in limited release on Friday, January 23rd.