For These Filmmakers, a Scary Deja Vu

Two minutes in the water and you’re dead.

The safety mantra had been drilled into the cast and crew of the miniseries “Shackleton” over and over before they started filming late last year in the arctic waters off the coast of Greenland, a northern seascape that would stand in for Antarctica.

But it wasn’t until actor Kenneth Branagh stepped into a small wooden boat at the edge of the icy ocean--and the safety boats retreated so the helicopter could get a wide shot--that dark thoughts suddenly surfaced.

“That’s when we started to think, ‘What are we going to do if anything goes wrong?’ They’ll be awhile getting to us, possibly more than the two minutes we have,” Branagh recalled by phone from England. “It was a bit nerve-racking, at which point the walkie-talkie, our contact with the helicopter, fell in the water. And we certainly did feel cut off.”

Director Charles Sturridge had a keen appreciation of what he was putting his actors and crew through, particularly because it was only the second day of shooting the story of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton and his ill-fated expedition aboard the Endurance.

“After all the conversations about safety ... suddenly you find yourself with nobody else in sight and these huge great chunks of ice whooshing up and down, like being in the top of somebody else’s gin and tonic,” he said. “There’s a kind of roar in the background, which is the helicopter [filming from above], and they started to row. And they rowed as if their lives depended on it and, frankly, they did.”

Sturridge didn’t intend to shoot the boat scenes, which re-create the perilous journey Shackleton’s men made to Elephant Island in 1916, in such dangerous waters. The plan was to film that segment back in England’s calmer seas.

But their ship was temporarily stuck in the ice--just like Shackleton’s, about eight decades earlier--and the Endurance replica was two days behind them.

“We learned the hard way, what Shackleton learned the hard way: There is no way to be prepared for sea ice other than recognizing that it’s going to be different every half-hour,” he said. “It is completely unpredictable and you have to adapt to what it does.”

Although the story of the 1914 expedition is being retold in many projects, Branagh is the only one to portray the charismatic Shackleton in a dramatic telling of the explorer’s effort to save the lives of his 27 crew members after their boat became frozen in icy Antarctic waters and sank. The miniseries, a $50-million collaboration between A&E; and Britain’s Channel Four International, is scheduled to air on A&E; April 7-8. In the miniseries, Branagh deftly captures the charisma of this larger-than-life leader, from his flaws--he was an unfaithful husband, an errant father and a woeful businessman--to his triumphs, the deft and cheerful leader who saved the lives of his men.

“Despite in many ways having caused some of the problems he was faced with ... [it’s] his determination to preserve the lives of those men that seems equally or perhaps more heroic than the race for the prize that often seemed to guide other expeditions,” Branagh said.

--Mary Forgione