By Gill Pringle
“The first week of shooting, the sea was six or eight feet! It was brutal,” Chris Hemsworth tells FilmInk, laughing now that the tumultuous experience is behind him. “Half the crew were just throwing up at the edge of the boat. We all had seasick pills so thankfully it was alright, but yeah, it was intense.” If there’s one way to describe the shoot for Ron Howard’s latest film, In The Heart Of The Sea, it would be intense. The film tells the 19th century story of the New England whaling ship, the Essex, which was besieged by a mammoth whale. The crew on board the Essex included a fictional Herman Melville (Ben Whishaw), who would later be inspired by the incident to pen the classic tome, Moby Dick.
The film’s screenplay had done the rounds in Hollywood for years, but Hemsworth – who was given the script years ago by producer Joe Roth – was actually instrumental in finally bringing the story to the big screen. It was the actor who reintroduced director Ron Howard to the story following the pair’s dynamite collaboration on the racing drama Rush. “Ron said, ‘Oh yeah I remember the script; it’s fantastic’. Everyone had that response but it’s a mountain of a film to try and pull off. It’s just one of those films that people are a little afraid of. I talked to Ron about how it shouldn’t be a dusty period film, and wouldn’t it be great to have a contemporary version utilising all the technology available now? So Ron re-read it, and I think he was just in a different point in his life too. He had just done Rush and we had a relationship and he thought, ‘Wow this could be fun.’”
Hemsworth tackles the role of the tough real-life sea-farer Owen Chase, the first mate of the Essex, but when asked whether his character falls on the villain or hero side of the spectrum, the actor is hesitant to offer a definitive answer. “At one point, all of us are all of those things, even the whale,” the actor offers. “We’re all pushed in the right or the wrong way and have quite a transformation. At the beginning of the film, we are all the villains hunting these beautiful creatures, but at the same time that was the industry at that time. That’s what they had to do to survive. But this is more King Kong than it is Jaws. It’s an animal that is pushed to a point and then snaps, and you know the whale wins. Everyone knows the story of Moby Dick. There’s a big lesson of man versus nature, and man versus himself. It’s a story of survival under extreme circumstances. It’s about how we all react to that and why we send ourselves to the edges of the earth.”
Lensed on the stunning Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, the cast and crew would sail six hours from the shore each day to shoot, and the vastness of that landscape proved a humbling experience for Hemsworth. “I’ve surfed my whole life and certainly have a great respect for the ocean,” the actor says, “but I’d never been out as far as we went to shoot this film. At that distance, you realise how small and vulnerable you are, and you go, ‘Oh my god, if this sinks, there will be no swimming to shore quickly’. So it became far more apparent what [the real-life crew] would’ve gone through and how they would climb Everest every time they stepped on the ship and went out to sea for two years. It was a pretty special kind of experience because a lot of films are in studios now. We did two months in the studio and two months at sea. It was one of the best things I’ve worked on.”
As well as enduring rough seas for the shoot, Hemsworth and his cast mates also had to shed considerable weight for the film given they were portraying a crew who were stranded at sea for 90 days. It was a particularly tough ask of the buffed up Hemsworth who came straight to this film on the back of shooting Thor: The Dark World and Michael Mann’s Blackhat, but the actor was grateful for the insight it gave him into his character’s psyche. “If we hadn’t have gone through that kind of struggle on that very small scale, it wouldn’t have felt right,” says Hemsworth of the insane hunger pangs he suffered throughout the shoot. “It brought us closer together as a team and you understood the psychology behind it, and the insanity! You become so irrational. My wife could tell you all about my attitude while on this diet! Food became all we spoke about in the cast. There’s so much B-roll and so many in-between takes of us comparing sandwiches and stories about pizza!”
In The Heart Of The Sea is released in cinemas December 3.
