Original subtitles

And we want you to know that this has nothing...

Hi. My name is Kevin Macdonald. I'm the director of Black Sea.

And we're trying to say a few interesting things about it,

to tell you more about what we did in the making of it, and hopefully

give you a deeper understanding of the movie and what we intended.

We don't need a submarine pilot anymore.

We don't even need a sub.

So, this is Jude Law as a Scotsman,

and that's the first surprise that a lot of people have

when they watch this movie,

that this is not the kind of role that they expect to see Jude Law in.

And that's one of the things I love about it, is Jude really playing a character,

really playing somebody very different from himself.

And when I first approached him,

I'd seen him in a play called Anna Christie,

which is done by Eugene O'Neill, an American playwright.

And he played in that a tough, butch stevedore

on a steamship in the 1920s.

And he built himself up a lot for it, and he had an Irish accent,

and I thought, you know,

that's not very far away from the part I wanted him to play in this submarine movie.

And Jude absolutely loved the character, loved the part,

loved the idea of really transforming himself.

Today.

That's how he became an unemployed, working class, Scottish sailor.

And the first idea for making Black Sea actually came from

a famous story of a submarine disaster, called the Kursk disaster,

which happened in the early 2000s.

It was a Russian submarine, the Kursk, went down with all hands

and there was an explosion.

But some of the submariners survived that initial explosion,

and were in a couple of the compartments waiting to be rescued.

But waiting in vain, it turns out.

And I just imagined at the time, "How horrible is that?"

That's got to be one of the worst ways to go.

You're sitting on the bottom of the ocean

and you know you're probably not going to be rescued.

I thought, "That's a great setting for a movie."

I went to Dennis Kelly, who's the writer,

to recruit Charles Steel who he was working with as a producer.

When I went to see Dennis Kelly, you know, who's a playwright,

he'd done many, many different plays, but he'd done one set in a bunker,

and that was the thing that made me think, you know,

he's somebody who's used to doing men in enclosed spaces.

And Dennis and I spoke about lots of things,

but particularly we spoke about a couple of movies

which were pointing in the direction.

One was The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, great John Huston film,

starring Humphrey Bogart, from the 1940s, something like that.

Desperate men, unemployed men looking for treasure,

and that's really what Black Sea is, obviously.

And the other one was a French movie called The Wages of Fear

by Henri-Georges Clouzot.

And that's a movie again about desperate men left on the scrap heap of life,

who take on a really impossibly dangerous job of driving a truck full of gelignite

across some mountains in South America in order to get the money

that they think is gonna get them out of poverty and get them home, actually.

So those are the two movies that we spoke about,

and you can see here in the pub,

that's what we've got here, these are all unemployed men.

Men whose skills are no longer required, you know, been in the navy,

then they've probably worked a few otherjobs, in salvage,

like Jude Law's character has worked in a salvage yard.

But they really feel they've been thrown on the scrap heap of life,

and I think there's a lot of men like that around the world,

in the kind of post-industrial era that we live in.

And obviously... That character there with the watches,

that's Konstantin Khabenskiy playing Blackie.

Konstantin is a very, very well-known actor in Russia

I'd say one of the biggest stars in Russia.

So I think he could relate to this kind of character as well.

People who've been left behind by progress, by deindustrialization, that kind of thing.

And I think Dennis and I liked the idea of having a kind of heist movie

but set in a kind of real world.

A world of real economic problems

and working class people who are struggling,

and that's the reason that they get involved in this very dangerous heist.

She looks good.

We don't have to take this shit.

- We don't have to take this shit. - What the fuck you talk about?

I think I know a way to not be like this.

I know a way to get money. Their fucking money.

Now interestingly, this character Kurston,

only until about a week or two before the shooting of this scene,

we actually didn't have Kurston in this scene.

We just talked about him, he was just a character that was only talked about.

And obviously later on, he's talked about quite a lot.

But at the last minute I thought,

"No, God, we need to see this guy we talk about a lot."

And so we got him in, and I think we get a lovely performance there.

Liverpudlian character.

Konstantin is one of those actors

who's constantly inventing, constantly coming up with little moments,

like that there where he pulls the leaf off the tree and he smells it.

We had a long conversation about his character being someone

who loves the smell of things, who's always sniffing and smelling out stuff.

I love the way Jude does that with his collar there, that discomfort.

There's a man who's never worn a suit,

or not since his wedding day or something like that has he worn a suit.

And here's Scoot McNairy who's an absolutely wonderful American actor

in many, many good films.

Funny enough, I had seen him in quite a lot of stuff,

and Dennis had also seen him,

and he was really the first choice for this character,

this slightly sleazy corporate individual.

Sir, this is Robinson, the man I told you about.

What's your name and how much are you going to invest in this?

So, in 1941, Nazi Germany came close to total financial collapse.

Now a lot of people... This story that's now coming up

about the U-boat

and how this gold ended up on the bottom of the Black Sea,

a lot of people have told me that they think it must be historically true.

Because Dennis has written it so convincingly, I suppose,

and it sounds so convincing, all the detail of it.

A few people are a bit disappointed when they realize that Dennis has just made it up.

But in the '50s there's rumors that started...

The obviously historical context of it is all absolutely correct.

You know, the Hitler-Stalin pact.

Stalin's fear of invasion because he knew he didn't have

the military know-how and might to fight off Hitler.

So it's one of those things that could have actually happened,

you know, and is utterly believable.

...found a series of shallow ridges off the Georgian coast.

I worked for a company called Agora Marine Management.

They search for and salvage wrecks.

They found a U-boat on one of these ridges,

just 90 meters from the surface.

As for Jude here,

he's speaking as he is throughout the whole film in this Aberdeen accent.

It's a very interesting thing when you get an actor to do quite an extreme accent

all the way through a movie.

Now, I'm Scottish, as you might be able to hear slightly in my voice.

But I'm not from Aberdeen and I haven't lived in Scotland for a long time.

But the reason we chose Aberdeen

is because it's a very tough, no-nonsense accent.

And it's also not the normal accent you hear.

The normal Scottish accent you hear on film is a Glasgow accent,

maybe an Edinburgh accent,

maybe a Western lsles accent, but you never really hear

this sort of Aberdeen accent.

The Aberdeen accent is very common amongst sailors and people in the navy

because it's got a long, long sea-faring tradition there.

It's actually called the Granite City, Aberdeen.

And Jude took that to heart.

I think he had a little bit of granite in his trailer every day,

which he'd sort of touch before he would go in to perform.

And I think there's something about

the accent and its no-nonsense quality.

It's a kind of solidity that really does

play a major role in understanding this character Robinson.

Okay.

Kurston, it went well. Give me a call back.

So how many men do we need?

It's a Foxtrot-class sub.

You want boat move, need 12 men minimum.

Okay, well, we've got the two of us.

Really interesting thing that we found while making the movie actually was that

we made it all either on location

in London or Rochester, down in the coast of Kent,

in the east of England.

And we were always looking for a great cafe,

a great old-fashioned working men's caf,

and it was really hard to find.

For some reason, these old cafs just are closing down very rapidly,

the same way as pubs are.

It was hard to find a pub for the scene in the pub.

And we ended up doing quite a lot of this stuff...

Funny enough, up by my house in north London

seemed to be one of the last places

where you can get some real old dive pubs and cafs.

Without anyone seeing.

You need good divers for this.

- Do you know Fraser? - I know Fraser.

Now, Konstantin, if you met him, you would realize

he didn't actually speak very much English, his English is very limited.

So he had to learn a lot of his lines,

not quite phonetically because he knew what he was saying,

but he had to, you know, he had a tape of somebody speaking the lines

and he would listen to them, and listen to them,

and listen to them and imitate them, and that's an amazingly hard thing to do,

and usually results in an actor being,

you know, sounding really stilted and awkward.

It's amazing that he's such a fine actor that you really believe him.

You believe that he is someone who can speak heavily-accented English.

I'll bet you are.

Hi. It's Mark Kurston. Leave me a message. I'll get back to you.

Kurston, where the hell are you? Call me.

And this here is Bobby Schofield.

This is Bobby's first film role.

I met him, along with a lot of other young actors for this part.

It's an ingénue role, I suppose you would call it.

And Bobby came down from Liverpool on the bus.

And I think it was only his first or possibly second visit to London.

You know, he'd hardly left Liverpool in his life.

And he had hardly been to any auditions before.

He'd done a little bit of community theatre and not much before.

I just thought he was... He blew me away.

And then I asked him to come back the next week

and to meet with Jude.

So the two of them read together,

and we were both really struck by his natural abilities.

I think he's going to go on and have a really long and great career.

Say his wife's all right, you know, for the mortgage and stuff.

He asked me to come and see you, though.

Again, this is a location that's literally around the corner from my house.

It's an old bowling club in north London.

It's been abandoned, and we put Jude's flat in there.

That was a spooky thing.

On that table next where he's got the tea, that table was in the flat, the abandoned flat,

and there were six teeth lined up on it,

complete teeth that had fallen out of somebody's mouth.

I don't know how it was lined up,

but that sort of set the atmosphere for this spooky, poverty-stricken flat.

- How old are you? - 19, nearly.

Not yet. I'm 18.

This scene, like a lot of the film, is beautifully lit and shot by Chris Ross.

It's the first time I've worked with him, a young DP here in England.

And on a very sort of tight budget, tight schedule,

he did a greatjob, I think, of making the movie look big and expensive,

which is part of what a DP ought to do.

Now these shots are actually in Sevastopol, but that's not, that's Kent, that's Rochester.

The previous shots are actually in Sevastopol in the Ukraine.

I went there on a reccy with Chris Ross, the DP,

and we hoped to film there.

There was actually a submarine, very much like this one,

a 1960s submarine which was still in active service,

which had been used by the Ukrainian navy and they offered to let us use it.

We were gonna take it actually under the water and shoot on it.

So I went on our reccy and shot a few bits and pieces, but then of course

geopolitics got in the way,

and Russia invaded Ukraine and one thing and another,

and now Crimea, which is where Sevastopol is,

where the naval base is,

is no longer Ukrainian of course, it's now part of Russia.

And we couldn't go back and film there.

We couldn't film with the Ukrainian navy because they don't really exist anymore,

certainly in that port.

And there's a kind of unexpected topicality about this movie in some ways.

You know, it's a period piece already because Crimea is no longer Ukrainian.

So, that was a real submarine you saw, this is a real submarine,

but the shot of Jude with the engine, that's actually a set.

And I think Nick Palmer, who designed the film, did an amazing job of combining,

of blending together what's real submarine and what's actual set.

You work on subs now, Reynolds?

That's set, that's at Pinewood Studios.

The previous shot was on the real submarine.

Now the real submarine, I should say a bit about that.

The submarine that we shot on, that's a 1964 Russian sub.

It was owned by a collector, I suppose you would say.

Somebody collects submarines, if you can imagine that.

There's a guy who bought it in the early '90s from the Russian navy,

and brought it to the UK, and wanted to use it as a tourist attraction.

In fact, he'd bought another one before, and the Russian navy sailed it over.

I think he bought it for $100,000 or something.

And they sailed it over, and they got as far as the Channel and then it sank.

So they phoned him up after they'd been rescued,

the sailors phoned him up from France and said,

"Oh, sorry, there's good news and bad news. The bad news is your sub's sunk.

"The good news is that we've got another 12 back in Russia.

"We're going to get you another one."

So they went back, they sailed him another one,

and he's had it sitting in various parts of the south of England.

Tried to use it as a tourist attraction, itjust doesn't quite work.

It's now been sitting for at least 10 years in the River Medway,

which is in Rochester where it comes out into the estuary,

into the North Sea there.

That's the real submarine, that's the entrance of it.

This is the real submarine.

This is the forward torpedo room.

That's the real submarine.

Off. On.

They were very generous, the people who owned it, letting us do an awful lot.

See those lights there, we re-wired all of that. That's now set.

That's Pinewood, so...

We were able to do a lot of work to the submarine.

A gyro.

But it gave us a huge amount of set

that we couldn't have otherwise afforded to build properly,

certainly not to the level of detail that we'd have like to.

This is obviously the set, the control room is in Pinewood again.

120? It's a little low.

As you can see, Nick did an amazing job

of finding all these old Russian dials and boxes.

Some of them are molded, but some of them are actually real. He went to...

He had another strange military collector in Hungary who had a lot of this stuff,

a lot of old Russian military gear.

And we brought that stuff over,

combined it with some things we found in salvage yards, that kind of stuff.

The main thing with the submarine is that it is incredibly, incredibly complicated.

Everywhere you look, there's pipes and gauges and dials.

You wonder what the hell everything does.

Stow that.

What you got for me?

So the batteries ain't that great.

So, that's David Threlfall there, who's a really wonderful British actor.

Best known for playing Frank in Shameless probably.

He's also in Master and Commander, which I saw the other night.

He plays the cook, Russell Crowe's cook, in Master and Commander.

But he's best known as Frank in Shameless in the UK.

And I know there's an American version of Shameless too, but he's not in that.

Not that you'd ever recognize him. And he's put on this brilliant accent.

Some people find it a little hard to understand,

but that's kind of the point. He's a wheezy old guy.

Got emphysema, shouldn't be on the sub, like the rest of them, they're all...

It's all a last chance, the Hail Mary pass, as they say in America.

- Yes, boss. - Here, Peters.

What is "no escape suits"? What does that mean?

No escape suits means no escape.

If something happens, you've only got that shitty old radio for help.

Don't worry, banker. We'll get you back nice and safe.

Actually, I'm not a banker. Are those not escape suits there?

Diving suits.

But, I mean, if we got into trouble, you could use those...

And there's Michael Smiley. Michael Smiley's a northern Irish actor who...

I only really became aware of him when he was in a Brit movie called Kill List

by Ben Wheatley.

I went to see that, and I thought he was extraordinary.

I just thought, "What a face and what a fine actor."

He's good at being sinister but also very, very funny.

He's a very funny guy, he never stops cracking jokes, in fact, Michael.

It's just such a distinctive face.

I thought, "I have to have that man in my movie."

And funny enough, I went to an award ceremony,

British Independent Film Awards.

He was receiving the award that year for Kill List, for best supporting actor,

and it's the only time I've ever done this, actually, I went up to him after the ceremony

and said, "I have this movie, and I desperately want you to do it."

It didn't actually, the movie didn't happen

for a couple more years after that, but he remembered.

And funny enough, his father had been a submariner.

So he'd long kind of thought about the life of the submariner,

what it's like below decks, under the sea.

So it was something that he really, really enjoyed

and got very intensely involved in.

What 18-year-old do you know nowadays who's a virgin?

This not matter. They call him virgin.

Now he's virgin.

Unlucky.

Well, I'm not giving in to superstition.

Call everyone together. It's time for them to know what's at stake.

How much gold we talking?

At least $40 million, maybe a lot more.

We had a lot of debate as to how much gold it should be.

And of course the price of gold kept going up, and up, and up

while we were shooting it.

And actually since we shot it, it's come plummeting down.

And I think, in the end, the amount of gold that they have is

$186 million worth of gold.

Probably not worth that much anymore, actually.

If they'd got it in there quickly before the exchange rate changed,

they might have had that much.

40% goes to the man who's funding us.

That's Daniels' boss.

The rest...

The rest is ours.

And that's Ben Mendelsohn there, smiling.

Ben is an Australian actor who's been around for a long time.

But in the last few years really has come into his own,

particularly after his performance in Animal Kingdom,

where he played a terrifying, insecure, psychopathic character.

He's so... He's such a livewire.

He's never the same in any two movies. He's never the same in any two scenes.

So full of invention and life.

What he brings to this character, and again playing half-psychopath,

but there is this tremendous vulnerability about him.

And it's got sweetness at the same time.

Easy-going sweetness and vulnerability.

Very unexpected.

So that is a CG sub,

which is brilliantly done by the Union, the VFX company.

The water is actually, that's real water. It's a real helicopter shot

over the estuary, the Thames estuary near where we filmed the rest of the movie.

That's obviously green screen there. Although, again, very well done.

You couldn't really tell.

And these were shots that we were originally going to do in the Ukraine

on this real Ukrainian submarine,

which we couldn't use in the end because of the political situation.

So we ended up shooting this little bit here.

This conning tower's actually in the gardens at Pinewood Studios.

They've got some lovely old 1920s gardens.

Just stuck the conning tower in there. It's always quite surreal, that kind of thing.

That's now the real sub. That's the real sub.

And now we're back in the set at Pinewood.

One of the real challenges with the VFX shots of, you know, submarines,

it's not below water, below water's slightly easier.

It's above water where you've got all that white water, water movement,

water being one of the hardest things to do well in CGI.

30 meters, then bring it back to periscope depth.

I always imagined what this must feel like for these guys

just at the moment they're going down.

They're not even sure if this sub's going to really hold water.

But off they go, nevertheless.

So, there we go. That's obviously a CG sub.

Mostly CG water, little bits and pieces of real water on the lens.

Likewise here, a completely CG shot.

Again, completely CG water. I think that's very convincing there.

Now that is actually in the engine room of a real 1964 Russian submarine.

This is Sergey Puskepalis.

Sergey Puskepalis is a Russian actor, very well-known,

won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival

a few years ago, I believe, together with another actor who's in the film,

who is called Grigory Dobrygin.

And Grigory and Sergey were both together in this movie called

How I Ended Last Summer, which I saw at a festival and it was...

When I went to Russia, I asked if I could see both of them.

I ended up casting both of them again in this movie.

Bad luck.

Tell Zaytsev to work with Tobin or get the fuck off my boat.

And thus begins the kind of friction between the Russian crew and the British crew.

Tobin, come here.

You know, I was very much aware of what that was like every day while filming this.

Because the Russians, apart from Grigory who can speak a bit of English,

and Konstantin here can speak a tiny bit of English,

they really don't speak any English and I couldn't direct them in English,

so I had to have a translator with me at all times.

And the Russian method of acting, I suppose,

is very, very different than the British one.

They want to discuss things at great length. They want to answer every little thing.

And I think they're used to, in Russia,

the actor really contributing in a very, very big way

to who his character is and maybe rewriting the character every day.

I was, in fact, told that a lot of Russian films,

they don't start filming until lunchtime every day

because the actors are discussing so much, you know, what they're going to shoot.

Maybe a reason why a lot of Russian films take a long time to shoot.

So there was definitely an acclimatization for me

in understanding how to get the best out of the Russian actors.

I had to make them feel sort of part of the team with the British actors.

But we had three Russian actors all called Sergey,

which made it quite tricky at times.

Three Sergeys.

That's Grigory.

Now Grigory, of all these actors, all the Russian actors,

he's the one who's appeared already in a couple of western films,

and most notably, probably, A Most Wanted Man,

the le Carré adaptation.

He's excellent in that.

I think he's currently doing some other international movies, as well.

It's so fucking unfair that they get the same as us.

What's funny in a lot of this is when the Brits are talking as though

the Russians don't understand,

when in fact, for the most part, they didn't understand what was going on.

But Grigory did in real life and also his character, we later learn,

does actually speak English.

And he's just, for whatever reason, kept it to himself.

Is that what you did, just shit in the bowl?

I worked for about three months

on one of those American Seawolves in the '90s.

- Did I tell you? - And the food, is the food like...

Fuck me, the food. The food is unbelievable, mate.

I'm talking about beef fillets. I'm talking about broiled hams.

Apparently this is all true.

Submariners are obsessed with food that they get served.

Because, you know, it's a pretty tough life. You're underwater for often months at a time.

And you don't even, sometimes, know where you are.

And the food is one of the constants.

You know, you have to give them good food otherwise there'll be mutiny.

Which reminds me, actually, to talk about some of the research we did

while readying the film.

And went to see, obviously, lots of submarines.

We spoke to lots of submariners.

Tried to get the story to be as realistic, as credible as possible.

I mean, obviously there are things which are probably

scientifically improbable, inaccurate.

Particularly to do with the diving sequences, with the, you know, pressure issues

of going in and out of the submarine would be

much more complicated than we're going to depict them in the movie.

But, nevertheless, we tried, both with the set and with, obviously, the dialogue

and the situations, to be as accurate as possible.

And Jude, in particular, was really interested in finding out about the submariners' life,

and we managed to get him onto a Royal Navy submarine.

I was meant to go as well, but I was too close to shooting

and I didn't have the time to go.

Admittedly, I was also a bit scared to go but Jude went.

He was not scared at all. He went on his own.

Flew down to Gibraltar,

got met at 5:00 in the morning at the port there,

taken out in a boat into the middle of the ocean

where a British nuclear submarine rose up out of the sea

and picked him up, and he had to clamber on board. I mean, an incredible thing.

I remember him saying the first thing impression he had was,

other than the vast size of everything,

he got on board, it was very slippery and difficult to get on,

opened the hatch

and the stench of men that came out, he said, was incredible.

There was...

There's no showers on these things. If there are showers,

you're not really meant to use them except in an emergency.

And everyone wears the same clothes for days, or rather weeks, if not months.

And Jude said that for the first few hours on board he was pretty disturbed by that.

But then, within four hours, you're used to it.

You don't notice that your smell's mixing with their smell.

So Jude was on this submarine for four days, had no idea where they took him.

It was all top secret, he couldn't be told where he was going.

And he slept in a cabin with 18 other men, in bunks.

But they do it in a hot-bedding kind of fashion, so it's like

your bunk isn't your bunk. It's kind of shared by two or three other people.

You do six hours on, six hours off, six hours on, six hours off.

You've got no idea what time of day or night it is.

In the bunk room it's always dark, in the rest of the sub it's always light.

So he really paid his dues, did his research.

I remember him also telling me a sort of striking detail was that

he wanted to go to the gym, and there was a gym on one of these things,

but the gym is actually in the launch silo for the nuclear missiles.

You're sort of exercising on a bike next to these huge nuclear missiles.

But I think all of that research paid off,

and in fact, Grigory did the same thing in Russia.

He went down to Sevastopol in fact, and spent a few days on a submarine there.

A lot of the other actors met with and spoke to people.

We had a submarine advisor with us called Roger Whitby,

who's somebody who's been on British subs for several decades.

So that was how we tried to keep things as accurate as possible.

Revolutions three knots for one hour.

Then proceed as normal.

Jeez. That was tense.

Tense.

Tense.

I love the little bits of comedy that Dennis puts in the writing.

You know, it's a very tense thriller,

but there's some great moments of unexpected dark humor thrown in there.

How can you stand it in here?

Give it a couple of days

and you'll be wondering how they stand it out there.

No, it's mad down here.

That, obviously, is a real sub. That's the boat in...

Because they call them boats, of course. They don't call them subs.

We got into real trouble for calling them subs.

No real submariner would ever call it a sub. They're called boats.

And that's the boat in Rochester.

That's the forward torpedo room.

Incredible number of pipes and everything absolutely everywhere.

You could never build something like that. That would be a monumental task.

Very tricky filming in there though, as you could imagine, in that submarine.

It was sitting in the middle of the river. We had to build a pontoon all around it,

so that we could have a toilet, a couple of offices and whatever next to the submarine.

And then, that's where the generator was and all that kind of stuff.

And then, on the actual submarine, there are two entrances, one at either end,

where there were very steep steps at one end, going in the other end we just had a ladder.

And you had to really be prepared when you went in there,

you had to stay there till lunchtime or from lunchtime until the end of the day,

because it was such a kerfuffle going in and out

and getting up and down this ladder.

And actually the hatch is just above there where he's going out now,

just up in the ceiling there.

And it was hot, and it was stuffy,

and stank of diesel, and impossible to pass anyone

because basically, a submarine is a corridor, it's like a long tube.

And there's nowhere to be out of the way really,

so you have to have the minimal crew. We often had a very tiny crew,

just five, six people, if we could get away with it.

No hair, makeup and art department. All those people, they had to stay elsewhere

because there was no way we could have them down there without getting in the way.

Also, very difficult for Chris to light because,

you know, we had some practical lights,

the original lights we'd wired up, they were there.

But there's almost nowhere where you can hide lights in there.

And changing anything was very, very, very difficult.

We're right on top of the U-boat.

Blackie.

Zaytsev has found the leak.

Needs to drain fuel line...

One of the things about making a submarine movie

is that you've got this very contained environment, obviously,

which is difficult to film on.

You know, there's not... There's no sunsets, there's nothing that you get for free like that.

There's no wind in the trees, there's no landscapes, obviously.

You're inside this machine, effectively.

So finding ways to keep it visually interesting is always a challenge,

but the flip-side of that is that submarines

make for claustrophobic, tense environments.

So you don't need to do very much in order to keep the whole thing tense.

And I think that's what Dennis and I were really after in this film,

was to create a slow-build thriller

where the environment, the place, plays a crucial role.

I bought this one fair and square.

Actually this scene here,

some of you might have noticed when you watched the film the first time,

that actually you can tell there's been a scene cut out.

Earlier on, prior to them leaving port,

there was a scene with all the sailors in a bar together,

and we saw the beginning of the tension between the Russians and the Brits.

But itjust seemed to slow things down an awful lot, we wanted to get going,

get on the sub, get underwater quicker, and we cut it out.

But in that scene there was a setup to this moment of the lottery ticket.

It's one of those things where it sort of, you know, you balance off.

Is it going to bother people that they don't know about the lottery ticket?

That it comes out of the blue?

Or is it better to get into the story a couple of minutes earlier?

And hopefully we made the right decision there. I don't know.

We are under the fucking...

That's the radio. You killed the fucking radio.

- Give me the ticket. - How we gonna...

So, now they're really in trouble because he's destroyed the radio.

Of course, it's all part of the setup.

Now they may end up at the bottom of the ocean,

no radio, no means of communicating with anyone.

But also, see, the central theme of the movie is really about greed,

and about the power of money to destroy people's lives.

That comes from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,

which is really one of the great books and then films about that subject.

There's a tragedy, Dennis and I felt,

in these characters who have so little, have been given so little by society,

but who are warped to its values, I suppose.

They want the money, even if they know it's going to destroy them.

It's going to kill them, but they want money

'cause that's what's going to make them feel like real men again.

Look, just listen to me.

In fact, I think Dennis and I spoke many times about the idea,

the sort of politics of this film, I suppose.

We both saw it as being about two different approaches to life.

One is a kind of communist one or a socialist one,

which is embodied by Robinson in the film, who believes that everyone should share.

And he's got this attitude through the movie,

"We're going to give an equal share to everybody, all crew members."

And then, the other political opinion

is obviously embodied by Scoot McNairy's character,

who is an individualist.

He believes in the value of every man for himself,

every man getting his own share.

So these two world views clash in the movie, I think.

The socialist one and the individualistic one.

And of course, slight depressingly,

I think the individualist's one turns out to be accurate.

The men are incapable of sharing, they're incapable of getting on,

which is what Robinson thinks they should be able to. They should all be able to...

Despite their language differences, the cultural differences, whatever,

they're all just men who've been screwed over by the system.

And...

And for him, they should be able to just get on with it.

How Scoot McNairy's character says,

"These men are going to tear each other apart for this money."

And it's true. So I suppose the more cynical point of view on humanity wins the day.

Zaytsev.

So, this actually here, this scene here in the control room,

this was one of the few times when we had the set put onto a big moving platform

so that it could buck around and shift.

It would get up to 45 degrees

so you could have stuff flying all over the place.

Of course, one of the interesting things is that people said,

"Why don't you put the whole set of the sub constantly on a platform

"so you can move it around, and so when the sub goes down,

"you can see the nose going down and you're..."

But actually the truth is, when you're inside a submarine,

like you're inside a spaceship or a helicopter or anything like that,

the camera is moving at the same time as the environment that it's in

because the camera man's feet are, obviously, on the floor.

So you don't really register that movement. And so it's a strange thing.

There's actually very little point in having that movement in the set

when you're inside it.

It's always better to replicate the movement by moving the camera on its own.

But the reason that we decided to shift the set around in that sequence

and a couple of others is just so that things can fly around.

So you get bits of paper, tins, stuff hanging from the ceilings,

you get all of that moving.

Chrissy.

So, the sub's sitting on the bottom of the ocean.

Everything's over. That's the engine. A bit dark there, that shot, isn't it?

But, you know, it's the engine destroyed.

Those previous shots were a combination of real submarine,

and this is the real submarine, real submarine and set.

So this is, again, by a torpedo room. At the end there, those are the torpedo tubes.

Here's Jude covered in blood, thinking about his wife.

And Jodie Whittaker, wonderful Jodie Whittaker,

who came and did a couple of days for us, very sweetly, a very small part.

She's obviously been great in many things, Venus, particularly.

It was one of her first roles, I think.

Recently, big star in Broadchurch, the TV show.

And here we're gonna see...

We're gonna see a couple of really good bits of prosthetic, burn makeup.

So, here's Konstantin here,

wearing kind of a rubber mask covered in burn makeup.

And he had to lie there for several hours, I remember, wearing that,

and he absolutely hated it.

This shot, I suppose, encapsulates what we wanted the film to be about.

You know, you're stuck on the bottom,

the submarine's sitting on the bottom of the sea,

and you're thinking, "How the hell am I gonna get out of here?

"I shouldn't be here. Human beings shouldn't be down in the ocean like this.

"But how am I going to use my human ingenuity to get out of here?"

Main drive shaft's fucked, shattered in the explosion.

Ballast tanks are ruptured.

And I reckon we've got about 36 hours left in the batteries

before we go dark.

Looks like the Russians have got almost all the water

up the other end of the boat.

We've got the food. They're gonna want that.

- And they're gonna want us gone. - Quiet, you.

- Fucking animal. - You've killed us all, Fraser.

You've killed the fucking lot of us. Fuck.

It's interesting, Ben Mendelsohn's character here.

I was saying, he's a sort of psychopath,

but he's someone who's also enormously vulnerable.

And I think what we were trying to do is to find a balance between those two,

those two character aspects,

and I think Ben does a very, very good job of it.

You need to feel that through the course of the movie

he becomes sorry for what he's done

and reallyjust wants to live, like everybody else.

But ironically, in wanting to live, he's got to cause the destruction of everybody.

So, this is the electric engine room of the real Russian submarine,

all these beautiful, shimmering surfaces here.

I'm not armed.

What are you saying?

You speak English?

Why didn't you say anything before?

As I said, Grigory, he's a well-known actor in Russia,

he's a bit of a heartthrob I think, very good-looking young man,

and, you know, in some big hit commercial movies there.

I asked him to grow the beard so he looked more like a submariner

'cause he's a little too fresh-faced without it.

But he still looks pretty good.

And he spoke pretty good English,

although he struggled with some of the technical terminology.

Some of the words, especially in this scene,

a lot of them are pretty tricky things to say.

Talking about ridges and depth and all that kind of stuff.

No decay.

Pressure.

There's perfectly preserved Roman galleons out there.

Look, when we get in there, we'll get the drive shaft,

we'll machine it and then we'll put it into the engine.

And we get this boat off the seabed.

This boat is dead. We not sail it or get back.

We're not gonna sail it.

We can really underestimate how difficult it is to perform in a foreign language.

We've all seen films where the director doesn't understand the language

of the actors he's working with or the other way around.

There's something usually very peculiar about that,

something thatjust doesn't work.

Sonar's broken. We don't even know which way she's lying.

I think these guys all pulled it off, to my mind anyway.

The Russians who have seen the movie seem to agree,

from the other way around it still works.

They wanna kill everyone. They go crazy now.

We have to have Baba and Zaytsev.

And Fraser.

What he did is not forgotten.

But we have to have everyone to get this boat up.

What's amazing about Jude's performance here

is that there's such strength and masculinity and solidity to it.

And it's not the Jude Law we're used to seeing, you know,

who is often somebody who plays light, comedic roles

or romantic roles and those kind of things.

One of the things Jude did was he lowered the pitch of his voice.

And changed his physique, you can see the size of his back there.

He built up his back particularly, so that he had a kind of sailor's physique,

the big forearms, the big back.

Had a little bit of aging makeup on, as well.

Just to accentuate the lines around his eyes.

Add a few years onto him,

make him sit better in amongst all these other working men.

I've got him.

That's the real torpedo tube, one of the real torpedo tubes on the Russian sub.

That's a pretty horrible thing, nobody wanted to go in there and be locked in.

Just in case somebody pushed the wrong button and it flooded with sea water,

or we couldn't open it up again. You can imagine, quite terrifying.

Here comes Ben. You know, he's full of shame, he's great at doing that.

That sense of being a kicked dog, ashamed of what he's done.

Not able to almost look anyone in the eye, kind of whimpering in the corner, almost.

- Ready? - Ready.

Now, this sequence

is an invention of Dennis'.

We did look in to see whether or not it was actually possible.

Could you do this kind of homemade sonar?

Would it really work?

Could you bang against the side of something and then hear the echoes?

I think most people we spoke to said it was pretty farfetched.

I think there is some basis in truth.

You could probably get a little bit

of a sense of any big features in the landscape around you,

but really, it's a writer's invention.

But a good one.

Go.

- Stop. - Stop.

This other Sergy here, this is another Russian Sergy,

he came up with this drawing, which was his imagination,

his imagining of what he would be listening to and what he would be...

How he would map it out.

And in this scene here, there's another bit of Russian invention.

Sergey Puskepalis here.

He came up with this line here about,

"When I get out, I'm going to eat your liver."

He came up with it in rehearsal, we thought it was great, the idea that

he's going to say, "I'm going to kill you when we get out of here.

"I'm going to eat your liver."

But that Ben Mendelsohn's character Fraser thinks that actually he's being friendly

'cause the line's been delivered with a smile.

And, I suppose, it encapsulates the misunderstandings between the characters.

Yeah, but, you know, years ago. I mean, fucking hell, look at me.

Peters, I'll look after you.

I promise I'll look after you.

So, what's he saying?

Baba thinks there is something rising up from the seabed

about 100 meters away, maybe 40 meters wide.

The rise could be the U-boat, putting us here.

100 meters from the U-boat.

That's close enough. We can reach that.

Or what he's seen is a small hill, which means we are here,

on the other ridge.

So, obviously the idea of the Black Sea

being anoxic is truthful.

The Black Sea is actually anoxic below, I think it's, 200 meters.

That means that there's no oxygen,

and because there's no oxygen there's no decay,

which means that there are "perfectly preserved Roman galleons down there, "

as Jude's character says.

Can't do it with two.

It's also true that the Black Sea is enormously deep.

And so there are many, many wrecks, including wrecks that are 2,000 years old.

There's a famous Phoenician wreck, I think,

which has still got its mast to about six or seven meters.

And it's... The mast is still standing there because there's nothing rotting it,

and it's just sitting there on the bottom of the ocean.

So I think it was the knowledge of that

which gave Dennis the initial idea of setting this in the Black Sea.

Stick with Fraser.

Out there...

But as I said before,

the diving sequence is probably the least credible part of the movie,

in that in reality they would have been able to get out probably,

but they wouldn't have been able to then come straight back into the boat

because they would have got the bends.

Because inside, the boat is still at surface pressure.

And they're going into much, much, much greater pressure

when they go outside the sub.

If they're down, it's like 190 meters or something.

So, this is all filmed at the Pinewood Studios.

This big sequence underwater,

it's filmed in the tank there, which is a tank where many, many

great films, commercials and photo-shoots and things are done,

but it's surprisingly small.

It is only 30 meters long, I think about 15 meters wide,

and I think maybe 8 meters deep.

So all of the sequences are kind of pieced together from...

So, that shot there, for instance,

the background is obviously CGI the foreground is real.

This here is a real jump.

You know they're just below the surface of the water,

they're jumping off a model. That is a combination of CGI and a real jump.

So, we had little composite bits of sets, we had a bit of U-boat set,

we had a bit of the Russian sub set, and we had a little bit of ridge set.

Just jump.

And then, in between, we had lots of flat, sandy surface,

muddy surface with a few rocks and that kind of thing.

Really the idea was if we kept it nice and dark,

you're not going to know that you're in quite a small environment.

And with the use of CG in a few shots, you get the sense of space.

Take breaths.

Now, you're safe with me. I've never lost a man out here.

All right? Good. Let's go.

And automatically, as you're filming in any of these tanks,

the water very quickly, during the course of the day, gets murky

because of all the air bubbles the divers give off.

Because sometimes we used, you can see the little particles there.

Sometimes we put little particles into the water to just murky it up a little bit.

If you do that at the beginning of the day, very soon

you end up with murky water.

So all of this, for instance, this is very murky here.

This was probably filmed at the end of the day.

And you really can't see more than about 10 feet.

Right, that's the light on.

That there on the left would be a bit of real sub set, that's real sub set.

Stop fucking wheezing...

And it's probably not really had to be expanded very much in the film.

Might be a little bit of CGI off to the left there, but not actually very much.

None of the three actors who are playing the divers had ever dived before.

Good luck, lads.

Particularly not wearing these very weighty, uncomfortable, professional diving kits.

The helmets weigh an absolute ton. When you put them on on dry land

it's enormously uncomfortable.

But when you get into the water, I understand, I didn't actually do it myself,

they obviously feel a lot lighter and it's relatively comfortable.

What's the seabed like?

It took a long time to get into them, and once you're in it

you're not really getting out for a few hours.

So the actors would go down there for a couple of hours, maybe, at a time.

It was pretty tough for them.

And they all did brilliantly.

It was particularly tough for Ben who likes a cigarette, and he couldn't.

Obviously, once you're in that helmet,

you're not going to get out and have a cigarette anytime soon.

So required quite a lot of patience.

And very difficult to direct because you can't really talk to them.

You can talk to them a little, little bit when you're...

So, that's the set there, by the way. That's the little bit of ridge set

extended the background with CGI.

You can't really talk to them much

because you're talking through a kind of microphone

thatjust echoes around the whole...

It's not individually to the divers, it echoes around the whole pool.

So other people are talking, other noises, they're breathing, they can't hear,

and you can only see what they're doing, obviously, through the camera.

So it's surprisingly slow and...

I mean, not surprisingly, but it is very slow and very tricky.

Now, a lot of these shots are a combination, a lot of these sequences are a combination

of the actors and doubles,

who were some of the professional divers

who work at the diving services up at Pinewood Studios.

So within one little sequence, you'll see shots which are

the real actor. So this I think is the real actor. Yes, this is David Threlfall. There he is.

Although the wide shot may not have been him,

mayjust be close-ups of him. I can't actually remember.

So this here, for instance, this shot here would be doubles.

And the doubles tended to do things first,

and then the real actors would have to copy that.

It meant that they could watch what was going on and then copy it.

So this, now that's an interesting shot.

That's one of the last shots in the film that's left from the terrible disaster we had

while making this movie actually, was that we made the bottom a little bit...

The bottom of the tank a little bit soft

'cause we wanted to have the feeling of them sinking into the mud.

But we made it soft by putting foam down,

like a memory foam down on the bottom and then put sand on top of it.

Now, little did we know that the memory foam had bromine in it.

Bromine is very closely related to chlorine, which is in a pool,

and in fact, in a chemical reaction, replaces it,

and so what we ended up with was a swimming pool with no chlorine in it,

or a tank rather with no chlorine in it, but with bromine in it, and the bromine was

a kind of bright, soda-colored green,

like a limeade green.

And so we came in one day after we'd been shooting for a week.

We'd shot for two weeks down in the tank, and we came in

and all the tank was bright green.

And nobody could believe it. We were all stunned.

I've found it. It's here.

- What? - It's fucking here!

I've found it, Robinson.

I think it's about 1.2 million liters of water. So we tried all sorts of stuff.

We tried to clean it up by adding different chemicals.

We got the swimming pool experts in, all sorts of people in.

And this is a great CG shot here,

when you first see the U-boat sitting on the ridge.

But anyway, so what we ended up having to do

was actually close the film down for a couple of weeks.

We had to empty the entire tank.

In fact, we emptied it into the outdoor tank, which at that moment was being filmed on

by Ridley Scott who was shooting Exodus there,

and he was filming the Nile turning red.

And little did he know that we were pouring green water into his supposedly red Nile.

But we then had to refill the tank, clean it, refill it and start again.

So, for us on the production,

that was probably our biggest headache of the whole time.

Gives you a new respect for chemistry.

So, here we are inside the U-boat. This was an amazing set that Nick built.

Shot in it for one day, amazingly.

It was quite a tight schedule on this whole film,

and we had one day to shoot in here.

We did a couple of little pick-ups on tiny bits of the set or that kind of thing.

The rest of this was all filmed on a day.

And I think it's incredibly spooky down here.

And, of course, you imagine that our characters are looking at these skeletons

and thinking, "God, what happened to them might happen to us, too.

"We may end up eating each other.

"We may end up having the same fate as these people had."

- What? - Cannibalism.

Jesus.

Hey, let's get what we came here for. Come on.

It is actually true that the design of the Russian subs, up until the mid-'60s or so,

was based on the U-boat design, and actually at the end of the war,

Stalin ordered the Russian military

to take the bits and box up and send back to Russia all sorts of German Nazi technology,

including submarines.

So it is actually... What we have here in the script,

they're getting a piece of machinery out of this old U-boat,

and going to try and put it into their own boat to fix it,

is not without the bounds of credibility.

Oh, my fucking fuck.

There's the gold.

We had a lot of debate about the gold.

How heavy it should be and what it should look like.

There's...

It turns out there's no absolute regulation size of gold bar.

- Are you there? - Fraser.

Obviously, we wanted them to feel as heavy as possible

so we did make a certain number out of lead.

So that when you see the actors lifting the gold bars,

it's always the lead ones they're lifting, so they are pretty damn heavy.

Although, from memory, I think that

a lead bar of that size would weigh about 9 kilograms,

but a gold bar of that size would weigh almost 13,

so it's a third more.

So it really makes you realize how incredibly heavy gold is,

and how difficult it is to move.

Although, of course, once they get it into the water,

like they do here, it becomes an awful lot easier.

It's not moving.

Come on.

It won't budge.

We spent so long in that tank with that trolley,

pushing things backwards and forwards.

Getting it stuck in the sand, pushing it for real.

It was at least two or three days,

sometimes with the doubles, sometimes with the real actors for the close-ups.

This pulley, obviously, is being operated just by hand,

somebody behind there pulling it.

And then here, it's on a winch.

What's going on? Why is it so heavy?

They've got the gold.

It's too heavy.

- It's what we came here for. - I'm serious.

We have to at least try and bring it in.

Robinson. Robinson.

So, this is the big moment of decision for Robinson here.

Whether to do the sensible thing and just get the engine part

or whether to get the gold.

And in a way, I suppose, it's about

is life going to be worth living if he goes back poor?

You know, he gives a couple of these speeches in the movie, doesn't he,

about how exploited he feels,

how exploited they all are

by the powers that be, by the bankers.

And I suppose he's speaking about sentiments that a lot of people feel,

particularly since the 2008 crash.

The working people have been exploited, have been given a short straw.

Live in a world where the only value that's important to a lot of people is money.

So if you don't have money, you're nobody.

And he doesn't want to go home as nobody, he doesn't feel he wants to be...

Doesn't want to face up to his son,

obviously, until he's somebody, until he's got some money.

And, I guess, that's Robinson's tragedy.

He doesn't realize until the very end of the movie

that it probably didn't matter for his son if his father wasn't rich.

It didn't matter very much anyway, not compared with not having a father.

Look, it's getting around. Stay with me.

Drag it this way. Come on, harder, harder. Come on.

It's hard to recognize in the film here,

but actually that cliff there is only about, I think, eight or nine feet high.

But because there's just black cloth spread out below,

it sort of disappears into darkness, and you buy it, you buy it as a cliff.

There's only a couple of shots where we've extended it digitally,

so it looks like it's much longer.

Obviously, the one that's coming up now, which is where

the character Peters falls over the cliff.

Get this under here. Roll it on there.

Keep it steady. Steady.

Peters, be careful.

In reality, of course, what's about to happen here

with the air pipe, the oxygen pipe being severed,

is actually very hard to do 'cause those pipes are pretty tough.

It's possible, but it's very hard to do.

Of course, the terrible thing is he's falling down there, disappearing.

There's CG cliff, you can see it disappearing off down there.

But actually, he would go on living probably for about half an hour down there

'cause they have these little bail-out bottles, they have bottles of oxygen

which they can switch on in an emergency.

So we did think of making something of that in the movie,

this idea that he's still down there, they still see bubbles coming up,

but it was a bit too confusing for people.

So it's just sitting out there.

Poor Fraser now, he's been responsible for the second death,

and he really feels bad about it.

And it's going to kind of change who he is, I suppose,

because he now thinks he's jinxed, I think, doesn't he?

He thinks he's jinxed, he thinks he's a Jonah.

It's millions of dollars in gold.

So what?

What are you gonna do, take it up and explain it to the Russian navy?

You want to just leave it in the mud?

Yes, that's exactly what I want.

So, Chris Ross here, who's the DP,

has very colorful lighting that's going on.

Obviously there's an excuse given to that by a submarine.

Submarines do have these red lights everywhere.

And it's often a mix.

Most of the corridors are often a mix of red lights and white lights.

White lights are all switched off and the red lights are all switched on

when there's an emergency or when everyone's got to be silent.

Often also, in a lot of submarines, the red lights are switched on at night

so that when...

If, for instance, you had to suddenly go up at nighttime,

that you wouldn't get such a shock, supposedly.

Wouldn't get such a shock with the daylight.

No, no. Look, I am not...

I need to talk to you alone.

Now.

Right, okay.

This is actually a set and you can see at the back there,

it was actually one of the few times where there's just a painted backdrop.

Looks like there's a door there at the back.

If you look carefully, you can see in that corridor shot

that it's actuallyjust a painted backdrop, there's nothing else there.

That was because this corridor on set,

we had to move it and shoot it somewhere else

for various logistical reasons in another studio.

So we didn't have the remainder of the set, all we had was the corridor.

So we just had to have this painted backdrop.

Hopefully nobody notices that.

Lewis is just some actor

who thought the whole thing was a team-building exercise.

Look, there is no Lewis, okay? Agora set you up.

Why do you think they fired you?

The moment you surface, they'll perform an arrest under maritime law.

They've already done a deal with the Georgians.

They just needed...

And, of course, this whole back story about the Georgians and the Abkhazia

and the annexation by Russia, that's all actually historical.

Again, Dennis has done a very craftyjob.

The Russians did actually annex Abkhazia, which is part of Georgia, northern Georgia.

It did change the boundaries of ownership of parts of the Black Sea.

Our fictional story kind of fits in well with actually

the reality, the geopolitical reality of what's going on.

He's a boy.

Okay.

I always think here that Jude's character, that Robinson...

I feel so sorry for him at this moment.

He's given everything, he's risked everybody's lives,

men have died,

and it turns out he's just been tricked.

And I think one of the motivators for Robinson is that he's somebody who,

his whole life feels like he's been given the short straw.

He's been tricked, he's been fooled, he's been screwed over,

and now, just when he thought that he was gonna get the better of everyone,

just when he thought that he could

exercise his own will and be a leader himself,

it turns out that he's just been tricked.

He's just been fooled, so you can imagine what that must feel like.

And that's what drives him from now, I think, until the end of the movie,

is this sense that he's not going to be fooled again.

He's not going to be tricked again. He's not going to be anybody's patsy again.

Baba, calm him down.

Get the fuck out of our way, Robinson.

He needs to die and he needs to fucking die now.

And then what?

We go up? We hand the gold over?

They're waiting for us.

This is also where I think he,

Robinson's character, kind of tips over into the beginnings of madness here.

He's just coming up with another plan.

He's refusing to admit defeat. He can't be defeated.

He really is willing to get everybody killed rather than admitting defeat.

So, slowly from this moment onwards, I think you can kind of see him

become more and more and more crazy.

More and more irrational.

We can't surface 'cause the fucking navy's probably up there.

We won't make it.

- How long? How long to take us round? - 12 or 14 hours.

- 12 or 14 hours. Tell them. - They'll track us.

They're waiting. They're not just gonna let us go.

The Turks have a naval base in Trabzon, 20 miles up the coast.

They're not gonna sail into the Turkish navy, are they?

Fuck this.

Fuck this shit.

Now, I'm gonna fucking kill him and I'm gonna do it now.

All right, you can do that. You can kill him, you can do that.

And we can go up.

So, here's Jude's second big speech about injustice,

about being dogshit on the banker's shoes.

And now it's become a really unhealthy kind of obsession, I think.

People who get filth like us to do their work.

We spoke to Jude about, it sounds a bit pretentious,

the kind of Shakespearean element to this character.

Jude was preparing a performance of Henry V, Shakespeare's Henry V

at the same time as we were shooting,

and a couple of months after we finished shooting,

he put it on in the West End to great reviews.

But there are definitely character similarities, I think. You know, Henry V is about

a young prince becoming a king, about somebody growing up

and having to be taken seriously.

And I think that's so similar really to what Robinson's going through.

Robinson is somebody who's never been the leader in his life before,

and now he's having to be the leader,

convince the men around him that he can do it,

that he can lead them to victory, as it were.

And I think those speeches of Jude's have got a little bit of that quality in them,

that he's inspiring the men

in the same way as Henry Vjust before they go into battle against the French.

He's inspiring the men to go onwards and to do their best.

There's a kind of rhetoric to it.

I like this moment.

That was actually Grigory who came up with that little idea. He wanted to...

People think he kisses the gold, but actually what he's doing is he's tasting it.

He was obsessed with that. "What does it taste like?

"What does gold taste like?"

He almost wanted to ingest it.

This precious way that he treats the gold is a little bit like it's a baby.

4.3 tons.

This is 4.3 tons.

This is when we kept having to change our calculations

because the gold price was constantly fluctuating.

Normally going up.

Strange thing for Robinson, of course, is that it's about the money

but it's not about the money for him.

For everyone else, you get the sense that it is about the money,

or certainly about self-respect, but I think for Robinson it's all about

this mistaken idea that that's what's going to get his wife and his kid back, I think, isn't it?

That's what he's seeing there when he sees the money.

I love this expression that he does here, this kind of emptying out of himself there.

What he does at that moment, there's a kind of relief

and a love for the gold that's all tied up with love for his family.

I think that's a beautiful bit of performance there.

Time to go to work, banker.

Fraser, here's your glamorous assistant.

Now, when he tells you, pour this into here.

You understand?

Fraser, listen to me.

We had a lot of discussion about the kind of reality

of what's gone wrong with the engine?

What is he doing when he's pouring that in there?

It's obviously meant to be some kind of lubricant

because the driveshaft is not quite fitting correctly.

It's rubbing, it's heating up.

It needs the lubricant all the time and the coolant to stop anything going wrong.

It wasn't your fault.

We shouldn't have brought that gold on board.

I think it's affecting your judgment, skipper.

And that's the moment there

when Scoot's character realizes that he can exploit

Ben Mendelsohn's character.

Stop looking at me.

Look, you know he's not right.

And they've realized that Jude's character Robinson

has kind of gone off the deep end a little bit.

Keep your eye on me and do exactly as I do.

I should say something about the music.

There's this lovely theme coming in now,

this really powerful piece of music that's about to happen

as they lift off in the submarine.

The music's done by Ilan Eshkeri,

who's done many, many films.

Some films with Matthew Vaughn, films with Ralph Fiennes.

Some animated films even. He's currently doing an animated movie.

He's got a great sense of storytelling and drama.

I think that's one of his great qualities as a composer.

He really understands what a scene is trying to say,

and he tries to either support that or play against it or whatever the intention is.

But it's a rare thing to find, in my opinion, a composer who really

understands the structure of the scenes

and knows what the music ought to be doing,

how it ought to be contributing.

He really has that.

Revs for five knots.

Midships to rudder.

Ten up.

Ten up.

That CG shot there was probably the hardest shot to get right.

I'm not sure we even got it right in the end.

It's a very hard shot with the subtlety of looking down the side of the submarine,

but seeing the sand vibrating.

Very, very tricky to get that correct.

In fact, one of the big debates we had throughout about these CG shots

was how to get...

How to see enough of the submarine but have the water murky enough

so it seemed believable.

And it's always a combination of playing off between the murkiness

and seeing enough to make the film feel big and epic

and as though you weren't being completely cheated.

- 80. - Is the engine holding?

In reality, of course, the Black Sea would be pretty murky.

- Batteries good. - 70.

- 65. - Check all vents and closures.

I want to know if the rudder's holding.

Rudder's holding, boss.

- 60. - Hold her there.

At 60 meters.

Holding.

And at this moment, you really do believe they're gonna get away with it, don't you?

You really do think that they've done it.

And there they are leaving the U-boat behind.

But have they taken something with them other than the gold?

I guess what they've taken with them is

the kind of evil inherent in Scott McNairy's character.

He can't help butjust think about himself. He can't help butjust think,

"I need to save my own skin. We need to go up. We need to go up.

"I don't care about anything else. I need to go up."

Everybody else is trying to work together as a team,

trying to be a unit, and he's going to disrupt that unity

by what he does with Ben Mendelsohn's character Fraser.

Sergy Veksler, that's him there, he's the sonar operator.

Wonderful face.

Very few lines of dialogue, but makes a huge impression in the film

with what he's doing. It really feels like he knows what he's doing,

even though in reality, he probably had a half-hour lesson

in how to be a sonar operator.

We, of course, all watched a lot of movies while we were preparing for this.

We watched a lot of submarine movies.

My particular favorites, the ones that I guess influenced the way that I did the film,

was Das Boot, the famous German film from the early '80s

about a U-boat crew, which is a miraculously good movie.

Very realistic portrayal of what life is like on board a U-boat.

There's another movie called Run Silent Run Deep

that's got Clark Gable in one of his last performances in it, actually.

Which like this film, in a way,

although it's set during the Second World War,

it's a story of obsession and of destructive obsession.

So there were certain similarities I saw there.

The captain in that movie, played by Clark Gable,

becomes obsessed with destroying a Japanese destroyer

which has blown up his previous submarine, and now he's on the hunt for it.

Again, it's a bit like Moby Dick.

A lot of submarine films are really quite like Moby Dick.

They're all about, you know, somebody goes a bit crazy on them.

Somebody goes a bit Captain Ahab and there's an obsession.

Why that is, I don't know.

That story seems to come up time and time again in sub movies.

There's definitely a little bit of Captain Ahab in Jude, I think.

Particularly here, in these scenes around here.

What's that?

Canyon.

Can Baba get us through that?

Robinson, it's 100 meters wide, maybe less.

- How long to go through it? - Forty minutes, one hour.

But we cannot go through that.

Another movie we looked at,

I showed to all the crew, actually, and all the cast,

we sat down together and watched it,

is a movie by William Friedkin which is called Sorcerer,

which is a remake from 1974 or 1975, I believe,

of The Wages of Fear, the Clouzot film I mentioned earlier on in the commentary.

At the time, it was not a big success.

Friedkin made itjust after he'd made The Exorcist and The French Connection,

so he was the biggest director in the world at that time.

He was huge and this was his passion project.

What he wanted to do was to make an American remake of The Wages of Fear.

And he had Roy Scheider in it, later on obviously seen in Jaws.

And it doesn't really work as a movie.

The first half of the movie doesn't work, it has to be said,

but the second half is absolutely brilliant.

The texture of it, the feel of these desperate working men

in that movie was something I wanted to capture.

So I showed it to the actors, showed it to the crew.

And that was probably the biggest single influence on the texture

of the movie.

What happened?

Are we going up?

And I love this point here in the film where everybody is,

having followed Jude so far, they've followed Robinson so far,

trusted him, relied on him, they're now thinking...

Look at that face. That's a great face there from Bobby Schofield.

But having got this far, they're suddenly beginning to think,

"Oh, my God. He's a lunatic.

"He's a lunatic. We shouldn't be following him."

Mass 110 meters starboard.

And he's taking them right into this canyon, he's taking them into somewhere which...

You're going blind in a submarine.

That's the extraordinary thing. You never really know where you are.

You can't see outside.

All you have is your charts and your sonar.

And in this case, they don't even have sonar.

They're actually relying on the echo from the engine.

Again, a little bit of a fiction. I don't think that's actually feasible.

But we're saying that he's the best sonar operator in the world,

so maybe it is feasible.

We're in.

I just think all these faces now are just wonderful, so expressive.

Just hold her steady.

And I suppose, I think in my mind, I think they probably would get through this

if it weren't for Scoot's character here

being the little worm in the apple.

I think they might actually get through the canyon.

They might actually succeed.

But again, it's the individualist,

it's the guy who's got the different point of view,

the cynical point of view of human nature that's going to do them all down.

A lot of debate. You see there the little bits of flotsam and jetsam

floating in the water there.

Little bits of seaweed and stuff, we had a lot...

Making the CG, one of the biggest debates we had was,

"How much of that kind of, notjust murk,

"but seaweed bits and pieces do you want to have in there?"

Too much and it's distracting, but too little and it feels just too clean.

A surprisingly difficult thing to get right, to get the feel of.

60 meters port.

Rising slightly below.

Trim 80 gallons aft to forward.

80 gallons.

Come on.

Come on.

Fraser, he has lost his mind. We need to go up.

Think about Peters.

It doesn't need to happen to anyone else.

Ben's just got such an interesting face, isn't it?

There's always something going on in there.

There's a lot going on in his head,

so I guess there's a lot going on in his face as well.

And you can kind of read it in any way you like.

It's very ambiguous.

Fuck that!

Fuck you, you fucker!

- Reynolds. - We're okay. We're in one piece.

- But, Jesus Christ, Robinson. - How long before we're through?

- We're not gonna fucking make this. - Not you.

- Morozov, how long? - 20, 30 minutes.

We need to come starboard two degrees.

And I love, again, Ben here.

He doesn't want to kill.

It's kind of like it's his fate somehow. He knows it's his fate.

He's killed these other two people.

One in a fit of anger, a fit of pique, and the next one by accident.

But he feels responsible, and now it's like he can't help himself.

He can't help but kill this other person. He doesn't want to,

but he somehow knows it's his fate.

And I think that's...

I love the way that Ben does that in this character. It's very subtle. It's very...

In some ways, quite psychologically hard to follow, I suppose,

but, for me, it's a great performance.

Here. It's started going up.

See? See that?

And immediately he regrets it, and immediately he's

looking at Scoot and blaming him.

It's tragic.

Shit.

Zaytsev.

And whatever they've done,

whatever buttons they've pushed,

they've done something that's going to terminally destroy the sub.

He smashed his head on the engine when we hit something and he went flying.

And they don't even know it.

- What have you done? - What do you mean? We didn't do anything.

- What the fuck have you done? - We didn't do anything.

- It was an accident. - Fraser, you killed Zaytsev?

What are you talking about? It was a fucking accident.

Sweet Jesus, we're fucked. You killed fucking Zaytsev?

These scenes are actually some of the harder scenes in the movie to direct

because there's so much shouting.

And you're trying to create a sense of fear and of panic,

but shouting on its own is, you know, very boring very quickly.

You very quickly lose patience with people who are just shouting at each other.

Trying to modulate the tone, trying to make it feel convincingly panicked,

but without overdoing the yelling and Sturm und Drang is one of the harder things.

- Back to your posts, everyone. - Robinson, it's over.

I'll tell you when it's fucking over!

I think Jude there is incredible. You know, it's really like

the top's come off. It's all just flooding out.

- Three... - We need him, Robinson.

We lose another man, we can't even go up.

- Two... - He's right. He's right, Robinson. Yeah.

And, of course, it's the boy, again, who's the surrogate for his son...

Can we just live?

... who speaks the truth to him.

- Robinson, what's happening? - We're going down.

And here, again, we've got the set on the gimbal, the moveable platform.

So you actually have to have the...

In order to get the sense of the movement, you have to have the camera itself

on a different system so that it's always automatically righting to the horizon.

Otherwise, of course, if the camera's just being handheld or on a tripod,

it goes at the same time as the set and it looks like you're not moving.

And it's the most extraordinary thing, so, again, the thing that's making you

feel like this has really tipped over is their body movement,

whatever they're clutching on, like that, and the paper flying,

and the fact that the camera is being held in a horizontal position.

That's hull crush depth.

God damn, my ears.

And down goes the sub for the second time.

So this...

We had to do this scene here, the flooding,

we had to do in the real set.

We obviously couldn't build a second set of the engine room,

so we had to tilt it over.

And after we'd done all the other scenes in it,

because we didn't want to destroy it too early, we started flooding it.

And the special effects team did an amazing job, I think, here of

having a sense of the water flooding in from everywhere,

behind these panels, et cetera.

And then, in a moment you'll see, when big blasts come in, like that,

it's a huge quantity of water coming in at the same time.

Enough, literally, to knock you off your feet.

Tobin.

Tobin!

Fraser! Hold it.

There's something quite moving, I think, about this scene in a way,

that all the men, they've all been arguing and shouting and whatever,

but when it comes to the crisis, they're all again working as a team,

they're all trying to save the vessel.

They're all kind of unified and a family again in a way.

I've got him.

Now we're back on board the real submarine,

which actually, because it was punctured on one side,

during most of the shoot we were on...

The couple of weeks we were on this real submarine we had to pump water

constantly out of one side, out of the buoyancy tank,

in order to keep it upright.

And so when we did those scenes there, where the sub's on its side,

it's meant to be over on its side, somewhat off-center,

we just stopped the pumps, actually, and let the sub, over a few hours,

go over onto its side like that.

No, Daniels, don't close that fucking door.

This has got to be one of the worst nightmares, isn't it?

You're trapped. You're trapped in a compartment as it floods.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

One, two, three, four, five, six...

Come on!

I thought I'd lost you, boy. I thought I'd lost you.

So, that shot there is a combination of things done actually as a little pick-up

in the Pinewood tank.

Ben Mendelsohn against green screen and then these other guys,

Sergey and Michael, both in the tank.

And I love that shot there, the bubbles coming out of his mouth.

He knows he's dead. I mean horrible, horrible moment.

He survived the explosion but he knows he's dead.

No. No. No. No.

Shit. No!

So, this is a composite of different bits of set.

You know, these close-ups here are done on a little bit of set

which we could submerge into a tank.

The wider shots are done on our real control room set at Pinewood

just with water spraying in.

Morozov.

So that's the real set, then when you go in tighter,

it's just a tiny little section that we built that we could lower into the water on a crane.

Are we still down here?

Aye.

Jude, again, is really wonderful here. His moment of realization of what he's done.

That kind of madness has worn off,

and he knows that he's brought these guys to their death.

So, yeah. This is the little bit of set that's been lowered on a crane

into the water.

Oh, and he's gone.

The sub has gone.

All men dead.

Interestingly, all the doors on the submarine, all the hatches,

I don't think you ever see a close-up of it,

but I just saw a flash of it there in the wider shot,

they've all got written on them a code, which is a kind of Morse code,

which is what you are meant

to tap out on the door if you are a Russian sailor

and you're trapped in one of these compartments

and the water's flooded in.

And it says at the top, the first part of the code is something like,

you know, "I've contained the water and everything's okay."

It's like three tap, tap, tap, or something.

And then, as it goes down to, "We are flooded and all dying."

You know? Whatever that is. It's quite stark.

It's quite a stark reminder of how amazingly dangerous it is to be a submariner

and obviously many... It's notjust the Kursk accident I spoke about earlier,

but many, many submarine disasters.

There's, I think, two or three

in the British navy just since the Second World War

where submarines have gone down with all hands on board.

Things can just go wrong, and they head towards the bottom,

and if you're in very deep water,

the submarine just cracks up under the pressure and that's it.

Now these escape suits,

these are actually real escape suits which we borrowed from the

manufacturer who makes them.

And they are, in fact, the best means...

They look very flimsy, don't they? They look like something you'd wear to go

for a bike ride almost, in the wet or something like that.

They are actually useful up to, I believe,

four or five hundred meters deep.

You put one of those things on, and you breathe out as you're going up,

and you will survive.

So it's quite an extraordinary thing.

How much does one of these weigh?

12 kilos. Half a million dollars.

Can we put one in our suits?

Not if you wanna get off the bottom, no.

It's a difficult, difficult thing that they're actually...

They look pretty stupid in them.

That's one of those things in films you don't think about, you know.

'Cause you think, "Oh, they're going to be wearing the submarine suits,

"and they're a real thing." But actually the color is so awful and those

black things they have to wear over their heads.

It's very hard to somehow take an actor seriously when he's dressed like that.

So, you know, we did quite a lot of fiddling around to make them

look as good as we could.

Your boy.

It's all that matters.

Go. Go.

Water.

Of course the actors get absolutely freezing doing these kind of scenes.

Particularly this one here, which is on board the submarine,

because there's nowhere to go and warm up, whereas at least when they're...

Looks like a space man, doesn't he? Looks like he's going off into space.

At least when they're on the set, you know,

they could get very cold when there was a wet scene,

and then they could go sit in a big Jacuzzi or something.

But, yeah. They had to get very, very cold.

Now this is actually the open sea here. This is done in the south of England.

But, as with the shot that we did on the submarine,

when the submarine leaves the harbor in Sevastopol, which is also at sea,

we got these incredibly calm flat days, so it looks a bit like a tank.

Slightly disappointing there. I was hoping for big waves, you know.

For them to be not almost able to see each other in the big waves.

But sometimes you just have to accept what the gods send you.

And in this case, they sent us not very stormy weather, not very big waves.

In the background in some of these shots, you can see land that is

a kind of CG adaptation of the land that is actually there.

It's the south of England. We didn't want it to look in any way recognizable.

There were some white cliffs there, I think, so we got rid of them.

It was one of the big debates that we had there

about whether or not, at the end of the movie,

we should be able to see land or not.

And there was, you know, debate about whether...

Was it better that we abandoned our characters on the top of the water

with no land in sight?

So although they had all this gold, they were never going to be able to spend it.

They were probably never going to survive.

But we felt, in the end, that that was a bit too bleak.

Although there was something poetic about it,

we felt it was a little too bleak,

and we wanted to leave the sense of Robinson passing on, I guess,

to his surrogate son,

and possibly also to his actual son,

some of the gold that he'd got.

There's something about this moment here which I think is very potent.

I think the idea of this character sitting on all these tons of gold,

but he can't do anything with it, and it's become worthless to him.

You know, this is what he's killed all these people for, in a way,

and he's suffered all this stuff, and he's sitting there thinking,

smiling to himself thinking, "Well, that wasn't really worth it, was it?

"I should have just stayed with the family. That's what's really important in life."

And, yeah. I like that idea that some of the gold

just becomes a seat, just becomes a chair to sit on.

It's of no more use than a wooden chair would be.

Robinson.

Robinson!

And there's that photo.

That was the first thing we shot on the film actually.

We went down to the southwest of Cornwall and we shot that on a beautiful beach.

We were very lucky, it was a gorgeous couple of days.

And that became pretty much the last image of the movie

and the first thing we shot.

Anyway, thanks very much for listening.

I hope you've learned a little bit about the movie that's helped you

see it in a different way, hopefully enjoy it in a different way,

and it's been nice to keep you company. Bye-bye.