By Erin Free
Debut feature filmmaker Nathaniel C.T Jackson dives into the extraordinary story of Aussie solo sailor Lisa Blair who bravely circumnavigates Antarctica in the gripping new documentary Ice Maiden.
Very few women – hell, very few people – have battled the elements like solo sailor Lisa Blair. Tough, resilient, ambitious and unstoppable, this feisty and incredibly self-possessed woman bought into a world of hurt when she embarked on a voyage to be the first female to sail solo, non-stop, and unassisted around Antarctica. Despite being prepared and highly accomplished as a seafarer, what Lisa Blair was met with would surely have gotten the better of most sailors. Hit with unexpected and life-threatening weather conditions, Lisa had to dig deep to keep going, never giving up the fight, even when her boat’s mast was ripped apart, leaving her in incredible danger. As her journey got more and more precarious, Lisa Blair had to fight not just to complete her mission, but merely to survive.
“Lisa Blair is one tough cookie,” says director Nathaniel C.T Jackson, who has worked with regular collaborator and co-director James Blannin-Ferguson to bring the courageous solo sailor’s story to the big screen in the new documentary Ice Maiden. Featuring raw, immediate footage captured by Lisa herself, and interviews with famed fellow adventurers Jessica Watson, Dick Smith and Anne Lise Guy, Ice Maiden takes you right into Lisa’s punishing journey around Antarctica.
Nathaniel C.T Jackson is a twenty-year industry veteran with a long history in commercials and corporate content, and here he has teamed with Blannin-Ferguson to create something truly cinematic with Ice Maiden, the duo’s first feature project. Driven by fascinating interviews and punctuated with stark, ingeniously composed recreations of Lisa’s extraordinary journey, Ice Maiden grips, provokes and entertains like the best kind of adventure movie.
How did you first come into contact with Lisa Blair?
“We met Lisa though a chance encounter. We were in the process of insuring one of our work vans, and the insurance lady asked what we did. We said we were filmmakers and she was very interested… she told us about her daughter and asked if she could put us in touch. Her daughter was Lisa Blair. These connections almost never lead to anything, as it is not easy to find a story you have to tell, but Lisa came to our office and told us her incredible story and we knew then that we had to tell her story.”
How did the concept/idea behind the documentary develop?
“We are big fans of great cinematic documentaries like The Imposter and Touching The Void. We wanted to make something truly engrossing like those films, so they became our touchstones. The hardest part was focusing down on the parts of Lisa’s story that we needed to include, and figuring out what we could leave out. She has a huge and amazing story and there is so much we left out. It was a process of cutting away at the story and also figuring out how to bring to life the parts of the story we knew we had to include. It was a long process, and it evolved over time, but we kept coming back to our touchstones and making sure we were making something that was in that vein.”
Lisa is very likeable and engaging… did you know straight away that she’d make a good interview/doco subject?
“Lisa is a compelling person. She’s very impressive, especially in person, but she is also very, very tough. Initially, we had real concerns about getting an emotional performance out of her. She is so tough and so focused on getting things done that she doesn’t spend almost any time on the past, so she tends to be very matter of fact about her survival and what she has been through. We had to work with her to get past her toughness and engage with her in an emotional way to re-live the disaster. Once we got to that emotional core, we knew we had a compelling interview.”
Can you take us through the use of the footage captured by Lisa herself? What sort of camera set-up did she have on the boat, and what sort of footage were you presented with? How did you edit it etc? Was Lisa involved with that?
“We had a lot of footage that Lisa had filmed on her voyage with go-pros and other action cameras. Lisa had set up action cameras around her boat and she also recorded regular video diaries. We had access to footage from some of the people who had helped her in Cape Town, but we didn’t have footage of several key moments such as the major accident Lisa experienced and the huge storms that she went through, so we knew that we would have to do recreations. The biggest difficulty was going through the terabytes of data. Lisa’s voyage was several months long, so we had months and months’ worth of recordings to go through. This process was one of logging everything and tagging it all with metadata and building a comprehensive database as well as converting it all to a consistent codec, resolution and frame rate. Evan Drinkwater was the man behind that, and he did an amazing job of making it usable and organised. A lot of the footage was rough, and there was a lot of artifacting and glitches, especially as Lisa’s equipment got colder and more hammered by the elements. We decided to make creative use of the glitches and artifacting and make it part of the tonal change that happens as things get more dangerous for Lisa in the third act.”
Lisa’s friends and support staff all seem like natural storytellers… did you have to guide them in their interviews, or are they just naturals?
“We did have to guide them, mainly just to keep them on topic and to keep their answers short enough for our needs. But all of them were amazing storytellers and they had so much to say. They all clearly love Lisa and she has an amazing following. It was really about getting the interview subjects into that headspace where they could recount their experiences, and then the emotive story just flowed out of them. The hardest part was just figuring out what to leave out of the final film.”
Did the style of the doco present itself instantly to you, or did you have some different ideas initially?
“We have done a lot of documentary work in the corporate space, including a lot of work around disability sports and we were also very aware of our limited budget, so we knew that the backbone of the production would be sit-down interviews.”
Did you have any cinematic inspirations when making the doco?
“Along with the aforementioned The Imposter and Touching The Void, we also took inspiration from The Crash Reel. We had Lisa look down the lens of the camera for her interviews as she is recounting her personal experience, and we wanted the audience to really connect with her. We did this with a makeshift ‘Eye Direct’ using a teleprompter and a pair of iPads. The rest of the interviews are looking off camera in a more traditional format. This was directly inspired by The Imposter, one of the best documentaries ever made. We loved the visceral closeups and sound design in Touching The Void, and made good use of that style of ‘enhanced reality.’ The sound design is so crucial here, and John Hresc did an amazing job bringing our images to life.”
Can you tell us about your approach to the recreations?
“The recreations were really tricky. We had a very small budget, but a very large need for big, dramatic scenes of huge storms, waves and action. Lisa’s footage covered much of her journey, but you can understand it was not a focus for her while she was fighting for her life, so, many of the journey’s big events were missing from her footage. We had to recreate those to bring the audience with us on Lisa’s journey. Most of these scenes were thankfully at night, so we were able to hide things in the dark. For those scenes, we had Lisa’s boat docked in a marina and we mostly backlit everything, while covering any boats in the background with black cloth. This was mainly because boats are unhelpfully painted white and are covered in reflective shiny metal rails and the like. We then had Lisa re-enact the action while pummelling her with buckets of water and dousing her with home-made rain machines. Due to scheduling issues with our everyday work, we had to film these scenes in winter, so poor Lisa was absolutely freezing. For the final storm, we managed to get an amazing favour from the team at Woolwich Dock in Sydney, and we were able to pull Lisa’s boat on to its side with a crane to simulate the angle her boat was on in that massive storm. We could show the dangers of Lisa getting washed off the boat. Again, there was a lot of backlighting and lightning effects, along with several friends hurling bucket upon bucket of freezing water at Lisa. For these sequences, we were really limited about where we could shoot. Pan the camera too far to the left and you would see the lights of Sydney, too far to the right and you would see the rest of the marina. We had to manage Lisa’s exposure as she was so cold, but she never complained. The recreations were so integral to telling Lisa’s story, and although they were very difficult, we were really happy with how they turned out. This was another area where the sound design really brought it to life, with every wave crash, rope strain, winch clack and even Lisa’s breathing really adding to the experience.”
What was the most difficult aspect of telling Lisa’s story?
“Definitely the most difficult aspect was the scale of her story. There was so much that was amazing and super interesting and powerful, but we just couldn’t fit it all into the one film. Lisa has lived an amazing life, and has faced opposition at every turn. You could make a film just about Lisa’s experience getting into the sailing world and breaking expectations. The other difficulty was the recreations. We had a very low budget and had to come up with a way to shoot Lisa battling these huge storms and surviving the de-masting of her boat in the Southern Ocean.”
What would you like audiences to take away from the film?
“I would like audiences to feel that anything is possible if you set your sights on it. If you work towards your goal, over time, with effort you can achieve amazing things. You have to believe in yourself. Lisa is a small woman, and she had many naysayers telling her she couldn’t do it. She has repeatedly shown them they can keep their mouths shut. Her story and her commitment to climate change communication show us that we can change things.”
You’ve got some solid attention already for the doco… that must be pretty affirming?
“It has been really exciting seeing our film get out to the world. It is really affirming that we have an entertaining and engaging film. When you are making a film and you have watched it a million times in the editing process it can be hard to know how it will be received by a fresh audience. It has been amazing to see audiences react so positively, and the response from the market has also been really positive. After our June 26 premiere at The Doc Edge Film Festival, we are releasing in cinemas around Australia and New Zealand in August, and we’re currently in talks for distribution around the world. So, stay tuned for more information on how you can see the film.”
What’s next for you? Will you be working with Lisa again? I imagine her taste for adventure is far from sated!
“We have several projects we are working on including a documentary series and some narrative features. One of our projects focuses on extreme survival situations and how people cope with the mental aspects of those experiences. We hope to be able to work with Lisa on that project, but we’re very conscious of how difficult it can be to get time out of Lisa as she is always so incredibly busy. Lisa seems to have an insatiable appetite for adventure. She has just recently broken several sailing speed records and has a whole pile of achievements and records in her sights. I am confident that we will continue to hear about her achievements as well as her impact around climate change communication.”
Ice Maiden is streaming now on DocPlay, click here to find out more.
