The Friends and Cold Feet actress has produced a film about a duo, starring Stephen Mangan, on mission to the North Pole
Stephen Armstrong
Perhaps inevitably, climate change has been slow to creep into the creative arts, despite its 30 years at the heart of the environmental debate. One or two disaster movies have given a careful nod towards the more apocalyptic scenarios, having exhausted aliens from space, tidal waves, asteroids and sea monsters in their bid to destroy New York on camera — but it’s kind of hard to deliver a narrative arc based on the interaction of greenhouse gases with fluid dynamics and radiative transfer, although Thom Yorke has obviously had a go.
Since the fudge of last year’s Copenhagen summit, however, it’s as if exasperated artists have decided to wedge climate change into their work by any means necessary. Banksy, of course, was the cutest. A few weeks ago, the Bristol graffiti artist scrawled I Don’t Believe in Global Warming along the side of a canal, with the words half submerged, as if by rising water. Not his subtlest work, but points for the retro use of the original 1970s term. Ian McEwan, meanwhile, has based his next novel, Solar — out on March 18 — on a devious, woman-chasing physicist called Michael Beard, who discovers a way to derive power from a form of artificial photosynthesis, but seems happier lurching around ice-bound ships while wildly drunk. Beard faces violent attacks from the media as he staggers across the planet.
This month, however, it’s Helen Baxendale’s turn, with an altogether more cheerful Britcom called Beyond the Pole. The Friends and Cold Feet actress has produced — and really produced, not just taken an executive producer’s credit — this offbeat script based on a Radio 4 comedy about two hapless Brits trying to reach the North Pole. The film weaves their faltering bromance with a whiteout road movie, competitive Norwegians, a collapsing home life and a vague but heartfelt desire to raise awareness about climate change.
Stephen Mangan plays Mark, a neurotic, self-obsessed failure who devises the first carbon-neutral, vegetarian, organic expedition ever to attempt the North Pole as his marriage crumbles and his job disappears, while Rhys Thomas plays his mate Brian, who quite fancies getting into the Guinness Book of Records.
“Mark’s an idealist,” Mangan explains. “He’s a bit of a fanatic, I guess, but that’s because he’s so angry at his marriage collapsing, and he channels it all into this trip. Him trudging across the frozen ice in silence makes him more and more unstable. He’s probably going through one long nervous breakdown. But funny.”
Mark and Brian’s trip is, of course, Sellotaped together. They borrow stuff, get a local camping shop to sponsor them with a couple of skis and a hat or two, and avoid high-tech communications in favour of occasional CB radio contact with their mate Graham (Mark Benton) — a man who likes his chips, has little interest in personal hygiene and lives in a caravan. When they finally meet their Norwegian rivals, played by Lars-Arentz Hansen and the True Blood/Generation Kill heart-throb Alexander Skarsgard — the paucity of their preparation is manifest. The two blond Ubermenschen tower before them, with sport sleds and ski suits, looking like Arctic Terminators, making failure all but inevitable. It’s about as apt a national self-image as our cinema has created recently.
“It’s about something very British — the underdog striving for something, with lots of self-deprecation and humour,” Baxendale explains when we meet, leaning earnestly forward and running her hands across the table in front of her. Her husband — the film’s director, David Williams — is waiting downstairs. “We want to make films that mean something to us and have some basis in the life we understand. I don’t think the story of most people in Britain gets told very often — in film, anyway. We mainly seem to make gangster and zombie films. I think this film is a representation of a part of British life that we both come from. It’s average. It’s not gangsters or sink estates or posh weddings. We’re just average people who try things and fail.” She stops, grimaces, giggles and collects herself. “Who try to achieve things and fail and succeed.”
She explains why she fumbled — this film very nearly didn’t get made. The couple — who set up their own production company, Shooting Pictures, 10 years ago, at the height of Baxendale’s Friends fame — optioned the script in 2003, rewrote and rewrote, then took it out for funding and found almost no interest at all.
“Everyone said maybe, but nobody said yes,” she shrugs. “We were in a hurry. We wanted to get it out last year, because green issues were so relevant at that point, and at the time it seemed that something might happen. We thought, ‘They’ll sort it out in Copenhagen, so we’ve got to get the film out in case it’s like the ozone layer and they sort it out.’” She laughs drily. “Which, of course, they didn’t.”
With private backing and much of their own money, they finally shot the film — stumping up for locations on the Arctic ice off Greenland, which adds an immense and un-British scale to the polar shots. “We may not have sets at Pinewood, but we’ve got the North Pole,” she says proudly. “We had our friends and a local amateur-dramatics group as extras, we had to borrow a friend’s house and 4WDs.” She laughs. “It’s about that British tradition of taking the Heath Robinson approach to life, and it’s appropriate it’s made that way itself.”
There’s an equally appropriate irony in the reason this low-budget flick with a tiny distributor and zero marketing budget is on the verge of becoming a hit in America — the pecs and abs of Alex Skarsgard. Between filming Pole and its release, the then unknown Swede stormed the screens in Generation Kill, but most particularly as the sensual, dark vampire Eric in True Blood.
“A lot of the way this is getting out is through the internet, and through Facebook,” Baxendale says. “Alex has this incredible, really loyal fan base — they are amazing. It’s this huge group of women who are so into him, they’re pushing for the film to be shown in every cinema in America. They’ve made little videos about it off their own back and posted them online, saying, ‘Come on, we need 10,000 fans, let’s do it for Alex and the film.’” She shakes her head. “There’s a certain amount of people power gone into this.”
So it’s the Scandinavians who are helping out the Brits — just as Mark and Brian’s cobbled-together quest ultimately relies on their rivals’ expedition to make it through. It’s in the spirit of the film’s other great reference, Scott of the Antarctic and the wily Amundsen, where we find the myth of the gentleman amateur incarnate: plucky Captain Scott, noble Captain Oates and the slightly naughty foreigner who spoiled their fun.
In fact, of course, it was Scott’s expedition that was state-of-the-art, with the latest windproof clothing, a complex theodolite navigation device and three motorised sledges (he spent seven times more on the motorised sledges than on dogs and horses combined, but they broke down early on, as Scott wouldn’t let the engineer who built them join the expedition because of his inferior rank). Amundsen, on the other hand, was trying to make a mark for his newborn nation with no budget, so learnt from the Inuit, using skis, fur clothing and a simple sextant.
It’s curious how the humble, self-deprecating Brit of myth has found a way into the heart of our modern story — we bumble, fail, stagger on and somehow win Julia Roberts, or invent lying, or beat the bully. Then again, with the UK’s leading climate-change scientist on the rack for fumbling data, and the University of East Anglia’s computers open to any casual hacker, perhaps that is the best we can hope for. Perhaps we’ve realised we will never save the world.
Beyond the Pole is showing at the ICA, SW1, from Friday until February 28, and at selected independent cinemas nationwide; beyondthepole.com
SOURCE: TimesOnline
Feb 06 2010
