London Film Festival: ARCTIC Director Joe Penna Talks Working With Mads Mikkelsen, Shooting In Iceland & His Transition From YouTube

After directing shorts on YouTube and music videos for Avicii – Joe Penna has burst onto the scene this year with his directorial debut Arctic, starring Mads Mikkelsen. Recepted with a 10 minute standing ovation earlier this year at Cannes Film Festival, Arctic was nominated for the Golden Camera award. Just a few days before I would see the film myself at London Film Festival, I got to speak to Penna about shooting in Iceland, working with Mads Mikkelsen and what it’s like becoming a filmmaker in the 21st century.

Levi for Film Inquiry: Let’s get straight into it, first of all, It’s called Arctic. How was that? Shooting in that region, in those conditions?

Joe Penna: It’s especially difficult for a guy from Brazil. I’ll tell you that. The logistics of shooting a film like that, it eats up your budget like this [clicks his fingers]. Ginormous trucks, super jeeps they were called, with these huge wheels that deflate and inflate, just to carry equipment through snow, up and over crevasses. You end up with so much behind the camera, what you end up with in front is aesthetic, not bland but disparate.

I know you made a few short films on YouTube, it’s funny they were on my watch later before I heard about Arctic and Mads (Mikkelsen), what was it like jumping from that to this?

Joe Penna: It felt like a natural progression, for some people it’s like’ What? This YouTube guy is making a feature film that got into Cannes? How does that work?’ For me, it was YouTube, music videos, commercials, then music videos with narratives, then short films, then a 40 minute long short film, then a feature film. To be blessed by having someone like Mads, it’s amazing for me. He’s someone I’ve always admired, my producer said ‘What do you think of Mads Mikkelsen?’, I said ‘What does he think of us?’.

How did that chat go down? With Mads?

Joe Penna: It went down on Skype, the very first thing he said to me, ‘I’m very amazed you created a survival film that doesn’t show the crash, doesn’t show the learning to fish, yet he’s enduring I can feel him through the page, he’s a silhouette, a shadow of a man.’

I love that, that’s the thing about directing though, how did you direct such a simple script? Assuming it’s just Mads and a background in front of the camera, do you direct him first or do you let him do his thing, and you play off that?

Joe Penna: We had a week of rehearsals, then two hours into it we were like, oh wait, this is a film without dialogue. What are we rehearsing? So instead, we went through every single line in the script, the action lines, the dialogue, talked about every comma, every period. Then did some blocking and it’s great, because you get there – to the Arctic, it’s the same with mountains in the background. So, we went through the entire film we knew how he was gonna move. It’s incredibly helpful to almost, shoot the film in your head before you shoot it. When we got to set we knew we would only have one take.

Wow. There must have been a lot of takes that didn’t work, what’s it like editing a film in that way?

Joe Penna: I had two things going for me, I had my editor on set with me, he’s also the co-writer. He was editing as we went along and sometimes would run up with a little post it note and say ‘we need to get this.’ Whether it was for continuity or for weather, it was helpful to get our pickups as we went along. He’s wearing the same clothes too, so you can steal, move stuff around, move entire chunks. I find I’m a director who discovers the film as it goes, you have your vision, we had meticulous storyboards. But when you get to set, you’re like ‘Oh, do that thing again. Let’s get that.’

What would your advice be to filmmakers? Obviously, the landscape is so different now, even the last 10, even the last 5 years. What’s your advice for getting to that first feature?

Joe Penna: I heard Anna Kendrick speak one time, she said ‘The best advice I can give to actors and filmmakers, is some of the worst advice I can give as a person. Which is, don’t have a backup plan.’ It’s so difficult, the amount of coincidences that needed to take place even for this film to get made is just staggering. It’s going to take a while, it’s going to take a long time, a lot of pushing. It’s people’s money on the line, people’s reputations. You have to defend yourself, so find a story you actually care about. It’s a little cheesy, but it’s what it is.

I forgot my question, or did I? Oh yeah, it was a tweet you made, that you can say much more without words. Something like that, is that how you’ll always approach films from now? With the silent approach?

Joe Penna: Good question, urm. [He thinks on this…] What I’m always gonna do is… I’m always going to audition every single line. That’s what we did for Arctic. There’s only so many times you can write, Mads looks at this, Mads looks at that. Instead you add dialogue, sometimes too explicative, maybe too on the nose but it gets the idea across. I know eventually I want it to be visual. So for every film I make I’m gonna say, ‘Is this line of dialogue important.’ If a look can say just as much, a look can say something that’s different. Arctic was realised so much with montage, I’m always going for that approach. Eventually, I want to tackle films that are reliant on dialogue. Figuring out the best way to say as much as possible, with as little words as possible.

We would like to thank Joe Penna for talking with us.