Two men. One bold expedition. No planning. David L Williams' astute new comedy Beyond The Pole is as warm-hearted as it is witty, despite the chilly conditions. It's a pseudo-documentary (a 'mockumentary', if you like) which follows environmental crusaders Mark (Stephen Mangan) and Brian (Rhys Thomas) as they aim to be the first ever unsupported, carbon-neutral, organic and vegetarian expedition to reach the North Pole - but what inspired director David L Williams to venture into this unusual territory?
David explains that the film began with a radio programme created by his co-writer Neil Warhurst. "We'd worked together for about ten years and I always found him very funny. But the downfall of this project was that most of what worked on the radio didn't work for the big screen. The radio episodes were 15 minutes long and very silly - for instance, in one of them Mark was found halfway to the pole pulling a champagne bucket full of Marks & Spencers sandwiches! I found that silliness didn't work for us at all on screen because it was important to keep everything much more real. It might be fun initially, but we'd pay the price in the narrative. So this actually made things quite difficult for us as friends because all that stuff that had worked so well on the radio I basically had to turn round and tell him to chuck out. I'd optioned it and then I found that a lot of it just didn't work."
Nevertheless, the friendship survived, and Neil remained a part of the writing team. Both were initially unsure about the fake documentary format, but they were strongly attached to the characters. "I wanted to believe in their uselessness and also, at the same time, that they would really give it a go," David says. "There were some parallels between them going to the pole and us going to Greenland to shoot the film. We stayed in welded together shipping containers. It was the weirdest thing. There were four of them and we called it the posh borstal, because you could walk along the middle and on either side there were plywood walled rooms. If you went into your bedroom and lay down, you'd be able to touch all four walls without moving, that was the size of it. And the walls were only the thickness of, well, thin plywood. I was in with the crew because I wanted to be near them to stop mutinies, as much as anything, and it was... quite intimate." He laughs. "You could hear and smell everything. There was no plumbing because everything was frozen, so we had to use buckets. It was very rudimentary."
Did these experiences feed back into the script and into Mark and Brian's experiences as we see them in the film? David says there was actually very little of this - by the time he got to Greenland the script was mostly finished. "We spent a long time on it. We were determined to make it as tight as possible," he explains. "A lot of companies only make money when they go into production but we didn't need to do that because we were already a going concern - we make films for companies, commercials, that sort of thing. So we could afford to take our time. It was a labour of love for us."
Nevertheless, it's notoriously difficult to work in comedy without actors adding their own ideas.
"We did allow them to go off script," he says. "Neil was there too. We did a lot of improvising around the script. It was a very intense working atmosphere because it was dangerous, it was very cold, and we were only there for 13 days - we shot in just 11 days. Some of the actors were very homesick. It was -20ºC, we were in the Arctic Circle, floating on sea ice, and nobody could go home at the end of the day. It's hard to explain how strongly that influenced things. Conversations were had about what was and was not acceptable, how long people worked for, how cold they got, what was and wasn't safe. We had a brilliant Icelandic safety team - they were the first people we got on board. It was hard work and I wouldn't say we had a nice time, but then I'm always suspicious when people say they had the best time on set making a comedy because those films are usually not funny."
It takes discipline, I suggest, to make a good comedy, and David agrees, noting that the conditions in which they filmed had a sort of inbuilt intensity that contributed to the final product in a positive way. It's clear that there was an intense commitment made by everyone involved, a commitment that didn't end when shooting was complete. Actress and executive producer Helen Baxendale went to the Copenhagen climate change summit with Friends Of the Earth and talked about the film, though both she and David were wary of promoting it as a film about global warming.
"It's a comedy," David says, "and it has to stand or fall on its strength as a comedy. It's a buddy movie about two guys in the Arctic, a sort of road movie. I've seen films like An Inconvenient Truth but I think the people who watched those films are already converts when it comes to global warming. None of my friends watched them. We totally want to support that movement but we don't want to put people off enjoying the film."
Fortunately Beyond The Pole is also likely to attract viewers who are fans of its stars - Stephen Mangan has quite a following and Rhys Thomas is about to star in Bellamy's People. Perhaps the biggest draw is Alexander Skarsgørd, who plays a rival (though very amiable) polar explorer, as he's on the way to the big time thanks to his role in vampire drama True Blood.
"We'll be visiting film festivals and the ICA in London," says David. "I'd really like people to have the chance to see this on the big screen because I think that's the way to see it at its best." It does have some stunning polar scenery. As a result, rather than getting the usual widespread release or going straight to DVD, Beyond The Pole will be touring from city to city over the next six months or so. Look out for it in a cinema near you.
