“We wanted to get to know Thor a little better.” Not a line one hears often, even in the inflated-ego world that is the Toronto International Film Festival. “Because he’s probably the most professional PR man Norway has ever seen.”
Not the Norse god, then, but Thor Heyerdahl, the scientist-adventurer who in 1947 set out to prove that the mid-Pacific Polynesian islands had been colonized 1,500 years earlier by Peruvians who drifted 8,000 westward on balsa-wood rafts. His method, simple and possibly suicidal: Construct a balsa-wood raft, place it off the coast of Peru, climb aboard — and wait.
Not the Norse god, then, but Thor Heyerdahl, the scientist-adventurer who in 1947 set out to prove that the mid-Pacific Polynesian islands had been colonized 1,500 years earlier by Peruvians who drifted 8,000 westward on balsa-wood rafts. His method, simple and possibly suicidal: Construct a balsa-wood raft, place it off the coast of Peru, climb aboard — and wait.
The voyage, documented by Heyerdahl himself, begat a 1948 bestseller and a 1950 Oscar-winning documentary, both named after the raft: Kon-Tiki.
The newest Kon-Tiki, having its out-of-Norway premiere at the festival, is a biopic directed by Joachim Roenning and Espen Sandberg, the men behind the 2008 war movie Max Manus.
As Norwegians, they had grown up with tales of Heyerdahl, whose raft is preserved in a museum in Oslo, compete with a model of a whale shark passing underneath, as described by Heyerdahl and memorably recreated in the new film.
“It’s a place that you don’t forget, because all of us went there as kids,”Sandberg says. “The adventure opens up to you. It was very important to us to capture the adventure and the size of it.”
Not only is their raft in the film a perfect replica of the original Kon-Tiki; it actually made the same trip in 2006, when another group, including Olav Heyerdahl, grandson of Thor, retraced the 1947 voyage.
Recreating not just the journey but the man was an important consideration for Pal Sverre Hagen, who plays Heyerdahl in the film. The real Heyerdahl died in 2002.
“He is a legendary figure in Norway,” Hagen says. “The interesting thing about Thor is that … many people feel that they know him. They tell me: ‘I knew who he was.’ And yet they have very different opinions. I had to dig and find the core.”
Part of that meant reading between the lines of Heyerdahl’s carefully constructed life story.
“The people who lived at that time, they didn’t show feelings, they didn’t talk about feelings,” Sandberg says. “They presented themselves in a certain way: ‘Oh, well we did that.’ They talk everything down. They don’t want to brag.” The almost jaunty British-inflected narration on the English dub of the original documentary only adds to this feeling. So, too, does the fact that when storms or other travails struck, the crew of six was too busy surviving to use their 16 mm, black and white movie camera. “We’ve captured some of the moments where they had to put that camera away,” Sandberg says.
Coincidentally (if you can use that term at a festival that features close to 300 films), another of TIFF’s premieres, The Deep, tells a true story of Nordic maritime survival, this time in the frigid waters off the coast of Iceland.
In 1984, a fishing boat foundered a few miles from shore, and all hands quickly succumbed to the almost-freezing water. All, that is, except for Gulli, a somewhat overweight and unprepossessing man, who managed to swim all the way to shore, then scaled bleak volcanic rocks before stumbling into a town. It’s The Perfect Storm meets 127 Hours.
Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur, who made his English-language debut this year with the Mark Wahlberg crime thriller Contraband, has been thinking of this story ever since he met the real Gulli in a bar not long after the events in the film. “He told me some things and it just stayed with me,” he says. “I knew that this story had to be told.”
Kormakur got in touch with the man, who gave his tacit blessing. “He wasn’t going to fight against the movie, but he didn’t want to be a part of it,” says the director. However, as with the Kon-Tiki story, “all the information was out there that I needed.”
Kormakur was determined not to embellish. The ship’s sinking is presented as no one’s fault; Gulli, like the other sailors, was never in a position to do more than try to save himself. To this day, no one understands how he was able to survive so long in such cold water.
“I didn’t want to be accusatory,” Kormakur says. “I wanted to tell a story, rather than make a conflict that didn’t exist.” Too many directors, he says, “create antagonists, just to make the movie more of a movie. The antagonist here is nature.”
Arts.NationalPost
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