Asif Kapadia made his feature debut in 2001 with the stunningly confident The Warrior, an epic, mystical tale of redemption set in the Indian desert, which received a rapturous response from the critics. Six years later, his second feature Far North is showing at the London Film Festival (October 30-31). Based on a short story by Sara Maitland, it focuses on two women living in the Arctic Circle, isolated from all until one day they rescue a stranger. Harsh and beautiful in equal measure, Far North confirms Kapadia’s unique talent and is one of the unmissable films of the festival. In the following interview, Kapadia tells Virginie Sélavy about living on a Russian ice-breaker for four weeks, old-fashioned filmmaking and seeing things with two different brains.

Virginie Sélavy: Just like The Warrior, Far North is set in an inhospitable, spectacular wilderness. It seems that for you the location is just as important as the story or the characters.

Asif Kapadia: What happens is that I find a story that I like and with both films, The Warrior and Far North, the stories were linked to a place. The Warrior was always a type of Western for me, that means shooting in the desert, with horses and all that, and it led to shooting in India. This one came from reading a short story that my co-writer Tim Miller had given me, by an English feminist writer called Sara Maitland. It’s a very short short story, only six pages long, and the idea was two women, an older woman and a younger woman, live on ice in the middle of nowhere, so they have to survive off whatever they can kill – it’s a pretty extreme location. On the ice they meet a man, they take him in and this sort of triangle forms between the three of them. So all of the essential elements were already there in the short story and the inhospitable place was part of the narrative from the beginning. For me, the difficulty was, how are we going to do this? I had no idea where we could shoot this. In 2003, I went to the northernmost film festival with The Warrior and it screened at a city called Tromsø in the north of Norway, up in the Arctic Circle. It was during the dark period, there was no daylight at that time, and I saw the Northern Lights and I went on a husky ride and I just thought, this is it, somehow fate has brought me here with The Warrior and this is where we’re going to do the next film.

VS: The conditions of shooting must have been very difficult.

AK: It was very tough. I did a lot of research; normally when I’m writing I spend a lot of time going to the location to try and research the story, the characters that live there, and how they live, just to get as much detail as possible. Also, when I’m trying to pitch and get the money together and I’m talking to the producers and the actors, I feel like I know what I’m talking about, I’m not taking people somewhere impossible without having done the background. In that particular location, the temperatures touch minus 40 in spring. When it’s that cold the sea freezes over so we were travelling on snowmobiles over the frozen sea and with the wind it was minus 60, it was unbelievably cold. Bits of you will fall off as they’re exposed to the cold in that kind of weather. I thought, we can’t do this, it’s impossible, I can’t communicate to someone two feet away. So it was a process of elimination. We couldn’t shoot in the summer because there’s no snow, you can’t shoot in the winter because there’s no daylight, which only left autumn. In the autumn there are no roads in this place and the sea is not frozen so you can’t drive over there, you have to travel everywhere by boat. So the only way we could do the shoot was by living on a boat. The whole crew and the cast lived on a Russian ice-breaker. The ship would be parked next to the location, we’d get off the ship, go by dinghy to land, shoot, and at the end of the day get back to the big ship and as we were eating and sleeping the boat would be going to the next location. So it was quite strange, every morning you’d wake up and open your porthole and look out the window of the ship to see where you were. It was quite amazing, you never forget that way of working. It’s very difficult and draining, cold weather is unbelievably hard to deal with, your brain starts to seize up.

VS: How did the cast cope with that?

AK: I spent a lot of time looking for the right cast. You have those peculiar meetings where you spend half of the time trying to talk them into doing the film and the other half trying to talk them out because you don’t want anyone turning up saying, you didn’t tell me it was going to be like this. So you have to say very clearly, look, there are no five-star hotels, we’re going to give you the best bunk (laughs), the best room on the ship, but they’re not very big, there are no restaurants, we’re all going to eat together, you can’t escape when you’re on a boat. So I spent a long time looking and Michelle Yeoh was recommended to me by one of my casting directors who had worked with her on Crouching Tiger. She said, Michelle is a wonderful person, very hard-working, but also a very strong person who would be able to do it. She read the script, she was interested in it and she really wanted to meet the filmmaker so I flew to Sundance to meet with her and I showed her some footage I’d shot on location. She said afterwards that the reason she decided to do the film was because she trusted the director. She was amazing because she had a lot of other, much bigger movies that were queuing up for her to do and she kept telling them no, I’m going to do this little independent film, and because of where we were shooting we couldn’t have shifted the dates to fit around a big film. In the end, one of the big films moved a little bit to fit around our tiny film because we only had four weeks when we could shoot before we ran out of daylight. Sean (Bean)… I met quite a few actors but Sean has a very powerful face and presence and I liked him a lot. I thought I could believe that he would appear out of the mist and somehow have survived. And you weren’t quite sure whether you could trust him or not, which I liked as well. And once I had Michelle Yeoh I had to find someone who fitted with her visually, who looked similar enough but was young and innocent and also could grow up. I met Michelle (Krusiec) in the States. She’s actually Taiwanese but was adopted and grew up in the Midwest.

VS: Do you think that filming in such extreme conditions brought something to the film?

AK: I don’t know. I suppose that’s something for the critics and the audience to say. I’m hoping it feels real. I’m not a big fan of visual effects, I’m kind of old-school, if you want something to look quite extreme then you go somewhere extreme. I like the experience, being dumped somewhere and having to react to what happens. It doesn’t necessarily go according to plan and often it goes totally wrong but part of the fun for me (laughs), maybe I’ll get tired of that, but at this point is to think on your feet and make it work because something amazing and spectacular can happen accidentally. The opening image of the film when we’re travelling across the water and the ice is cracking, that was something that we shot on a recce a year before we shot the main film. As we were travelling along the sea became very still, it was very cold and it just froze in front of our eyes. And it was an amazing thing to see the sea actually becoming solid while you’re looking at it. We shot some footage as a test and it ended up being the opening of the film. There are a lot of things that happen purely by chance and you just hope that it all comes together.

VS: The images of the landscape are breathtaking but what I liked especially was that it wasn’t just about how beautiful nature is, it was as much about how hostile and awe-inspiring it is and about how small man is in the middle of it all.

AK: Absolutely. That was a very important part of the story. It was an important point for me, it was to show how dark and extreme and dangerous this place is, and it’s what drives Saiva (Michelle Yeoh’s character) to do what she does. It’s out of desperation that people do desperate things. In a place like that any food you get is so vital. If they find a seal and they kill it, they’ve got food, they get clothing, you use all the bones to make all of your tools – survival is everything. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to go somewhere where you really believe that it’s all about survival. Inherently that was what the short story was about.

VS: There seems to have been a shift in how you see nature from The Warrior to Far North. In The Warrior, nature is calm, majestic, it’s some sort of an antidote to the violence of men whereas here the violence of men is very much integrated into the violence of nature.

AK: In a way, this is like a yin and yang, an inverse to the story of The Warrior. The Warrior is this journey of redemption where, no matter where you come from, there is the hope that you can always change. And in this story, the journey of the character is a very dark one. The Warrior was an Eastern, more spiritual film, it was warmer, and there was a different kind of tone. And that’s inherent in the images because of where you’re shooting, and the faces of the kid, of the people, of the blind woman. In Far North it’s the opposite. It’s hard, it’s dangerous. I found that on one of the recces. I got left behind by one of the guys I was following in the middle of the darkness and anywhere on this island there could be a polar bear. Those polar bears are so fast and so dangerous, no one would ever find your body. And you feel that when you’re there. When you’re looking up at one of these huge glaciers, it’s beautiful but you know that any minute now a huge chunk of ice could collapse and if it collapses and you’re on a boat in front of it it’ll form a huge tidal wave, so you can’t get too close to anything like that. I wanted to get this element of tension that’s in the air in a place like that. And the tension is also about who you can you trust and who you cannot trust. Generally, over there you can’t trust anyone, whether they’re there trying to sell you animals, or whether they’re going to try and kill you or steal your food or your clothing, that is something that is inherent in this world. That was something that was important to get across. So in my mind the two films work together. What we’d like to do with my co-writer is to try to do a quartet of films, a film in the East, that’s The Warrior, this is the film in the North, and next we’ll do a film in the South, maybe in Latin America, and then maybe a Western. It’s four different kinds of morality tales dealing with people within the landscape.

VS:Far North is essentially a story of basic human needs: food, shelter, and ultimately love, which appears to be as basic a need as the others in the film. Saiva is a great survivor, and it seems to me that the end is explained as another kind of survival. It’s emotional survival, but it’s no less important to her.

AK: It’s survival but it’s also self-destruction in a way. It’s the act of a desperate person. It’s something that felt inevitable, it was all building up to this ending. When I read the short story I thought of it as a tragic story of someone who does a hideous thing, but in a peculiar way I had sympathy for her and I weirdly understood how she could be capable of doing such a thing. And part of that was the challenge, to try and get into the character’s head, to understand how people can do that to the people that they love and care for, and to show the building blocks that lead this person to do what she does.

VS: I think that’s one of the great things about the film, you really manage to make us feel what she feels. Is the character of Saiva as central to the short story as she is to the film?

AK: Yeah. I suppose what we’ve invented is Saiva’s past: the flashbacks are new elements that we’ve created to show where she came from. But the rest of the story, the two women arriving on the island – in the short story they already live there – the older one, the younger one, and what happens in the film when they find the man is pretty close to what was in the short story. And it had this ending, that’s what really shocked me when I read it. I thought the challenge would be to try and retain the power of the ending. That was one of the things when we were developing the film, there wasn’t a nice kind of coda that simplified it. So yeah, I wanted to try and keep close to the short story and the relationship between the three of them.

VS: What’s interesting as well is that Saiva is cursed by a shaman when she’s born and she ends up fulfilling that prophecy in way, precisely because she’s been outcast.

AK: Exactly. It’s that thing, you tell someone they’re bad, they might become bad. I think part of it is almost like brain-washing people, someone’s got to be a scapegoat and if you pick on them enough eventually they’re going to react in a way that fulfils what people have said about them. That was something that the co-writer and I were interested in. Is it something that was destined to happen, that the shaman saw? Or by putting her in those circumstances where she’s suffered at the hands of other people and she’s always been on her own, has it led her to do this kind of act? And in a peculiar way the story is about a woman who saved the lives of two people and those two people end up leaving her. So she’s destined to be mistreated and to suffer.

VS: Loki (Sean Bean) is a very interesting character too. In some ways he reminded me of the warrior in your first feature because he’s a soldier running away from a life of violence.

AK: Yeah, absolutely, I suppose there is that similarity. This is someone who comes from that world, and he seems to be a reluctant person but you’re never really sure about him. We didn’t really want to go into his back story so it was just this inkling of, is Saiva in a perverse way protecting Anja from something, if she did leave with him were they genuinely going to have a happy life together, or is that something that Anja has created in her mind. So he is coming from a similar world but he is a slightly different type of character.

VS: The two women live in a very precarious situation and that situation is thrown out of balance by the intrusion of Loki, and it’s really fascinating to see how the relationship between the three characters develop, how feelings and allegiances shift within that confined space while at the same time they are surrounded by very hostile nature and they need each other for their survival. Is that what interested you in the original story, the potential in that situation?

AK: That was the challenge and that was what scared me in a way. When we read the short story I genuinely thought that this would be a really simple film. I thought, we’ve never done an adaptation before, the story is all there, you’ve got a beginning, a middle and an end, you’ve got all the characters, it’s only one location, three people, this is going to be really easy. There’s one big wide location, but the rest of the story takes place in this confined space so it should be fairly cheap to do. In a really naïve way I thought this would be a simple, quick film to make. I was nervous about it because it was going to be how these three people deal with each other in this enclosed space. I’m a big fan of early Polanski films and that was about how you can create the tension, about this subtle power shift from one character to another. My co-writer had the idea of calling the character Loki because Loki is the god of mischief and he’s causing trouble by arriving. There was this idea that at the beginning he desperately needs them but then bit by bit he becomes more useful. And then there’s the journey of the girl who’s like a child, she desperately needs cuddles and a mother figure, but gradually she takes over. I don’t know if this comes across but in the short story you were never sure about the relationship between the two women. Are they mother and daughter, are they sisters, are they lovers? You don’t know, it’s not really explained in the story. So I wanted to play a little bit with that where you weren’t really sure until the flashback at the end. You weren’t absolutely sure what the relationship was between the two women and therefore how the dynamic was going to play out when the man arrives.

VS:It’s interesting that you mentioned Polanski because I actually did think of Knife in the Water when I was watching the film.

AK:Oh, that’s great. You’re the first person to say that. It wasn’t a direct reference but three people on a boat – maybe that’s what was happening behind the camera more than anything else! But yeah, his early films, the simplicity and the amazing tension he creates with very little dialogue. That’s a big thing for me, that type of Polish cinema, and other directors who tell a story that is not dialogue-related, where it’s the subtle shifts of balance and the symbolism and the looks between people that the story is revealed through.

VS:It’s funny that you said you thought it was going to be a simple film to make because both your films look very ambitious, The Warrior even more so because it was your first feature.

AK:It’s something that’s always fascinated me, I suppose I’m old-fashioned in a way, I like the idea of those directors who used to go off somewhere with a crew. I get a bit bored by shooting in a studio. I don’t think I could do that stuff or visual effects on a computer against the backdrop of a blue or green screen, I get really bored by things like that. I guess part of me is a bit of an adventurer and I like the idea of going somewhere and learning about a place and about the people. I like fairy tales, slightly magical stories, stories that have an element of magical realism about them, something that is slightly out of the ordinary. And I need to find the place where you can believe the story. I haven’t yet found the right story yet that we could do in Ireland or in Wales or in the Lake District. I don’t want to spend time hiding things or paint them or get permission to turn the radio off. Whereas if you go off in the middle of nowhere in the desert in India you can shoot in every single direction and anyone that goes past is in the style of the film. I like playing around with when the stories are set, you think it’s set in one time and then you can reveal something that tells you that maybe it wasn’t. So that’s part of the world that I enjoy creating for each film.

VS:In the film there is a contrast between two ethnic groups, Saiva and Anja who appear to be Inuit or Asian, and Loki and the soldiers who seem to be Russian. But the film is not anchored in any specific time or space or nationality. Is it important for you that the story should have a universal significance rather than be linked to any specific issue?

AK:In this case that was the way I decided to go. There are loads of issues that I wanted to try and get in there and they’re under the surface. When I did my research I found out that there are groups of indigenous herders in Russia called the Nenets, who look very Asian. That was the reference in the film in terms of the costumes, the way the tents are built, the way the sledges are. In Norway where we shot the film there are indigenous people still but Norway is such a rich country, the indigenous people are very much integrated with the Norwegians and they look very blond and blue-eyed with slightly mixed features whereas the Russians still have Asian/Mongolian features. I wanted to allude to what’s happening to indigenous people, they’re being forced from their land or they’re being killed off. No one wants to live there but often the land is being taken because under the ground there’s something valuable like oil and coal. So that was something that was in the story but at its heart the film is about this triangle of these three people.

VS:The mix of fairy-tale elements and realism in the film is very interesting. It’s almost like a documentary at some points in what we see of their lifestyle, the way they kill animals, cut them up and skin them, the tent, the clothing, all those things. At the same time you have this magical element, especially at the end.

AK:I think that’s something that was easy to do in India because India is this kind of magical place. Maybe it’s linked to religion, people are very religious and spiritual there. You have the harsh realities of life, people are very poor, they have nothing to eat, but there’s this amazing quality of belief, of spiritualism, it feels that there’s this thing above your head that you can’t see. I grew up with a Muslim background but I grew up in London so when I see something I have the reality of what I’m seeing, which is a more European way of looking at things, and then I have this kind of Indian/Asian/Muslim superstitious thing that’s kind of built into what I think. So I always have those two ways of looking at things. Anyone who comes from an immigrant background, or mixed background, you feel this way, you see things with two different brains. I’ve always tried to get that across in my films. I like documentary realism but playing with a bit of magic opens up the doors of what you can do with stories.

VS:Your films are totally unlike anything that is being made in the UK at the moment. Does that make things easier or more difficult for you in terms of getting them released and seen?

AK:I think it’s a bit of both. In a way it’d be easier if I could come up with stories that are nice romantic comedies, it’s a lot easier to get them financed and out there, but they’re not really the stories that I want to tell. So I suppose you have two choices. You can make films about stories that are doing well right now, or you can be a filmmaker with his own style and an original fingerprint. Each film is very hard to put together, there’s no denying it, but it’s nice to get known for a certain type of filmmaking. I haven’t come across too many people doing what I do, and I think that’s nice because I can’t do what other people do and maybe they can’t or don’t want to do what I do, which means I can just carry on doing my own thing. The Warrior was not in English, had no well-known actors in it, it was a first film, quite an epic kind of film with a low-budget, shooting in India and yet it was harder to get this film together than it was to get The Warrior together.

VS:Why is that?

AK:It’s becoming more and more difficult to make films that have this type of story and are trying to be different, or original, or challenging. There are fewer cinemas that can show this type of film, it’s just becoming more and more complex.

VS:Is Far North going to be distributed in the UK?

AK:We finished the film in the summer. It premiered at Venice and then it showed at a couple of festivals. We haven’t got a deal yet but our production company is working on it. Hopefully people will go and see it and someone will think, OK this is challenging but this is something that we want to get out there.

VS:I was surprised to see that Far North didn’t have a distributor yet because The Warrior was very successful, you had a lot of very good reviews.

AK:The harsh reality is that it’s the pound and dollar signs. The Warrior did very well critically and won awards but the industry is squeezing and squeezing. The Warrior took a while to come out in the cinema. You get used to the fact that each one is going to be a struggle but you’ve got to make the film that you really want to make because it’s really hard to take on the battle for something that you don’t feel for.

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