Actor Jude Law & Director Kevin Macdonald Talk New Thriller ‘Black Sea’

Kevin: I had always wanted to make a submarine movie, and I found this wonderful writer, Dennis Kelly and I pitched him an idea of a submarine stuck in the bottom of the ocean and the guys are there, were looking for some sort of a treasure … He came up with a script and then he had written this wonderful character of Robinson and … Jude and I talked about it over a few months. It was a rare experience for me to work with the actor to create the character. The character came out of our discussions, rehearsals, and various versions of the scripts. Jude was involved quite early on in the process.

Jude: A huge amount was already on the page, it was just really interesting, finessing and adding three dimensions and a back story, which was so important in getting the nuance of Robinson’s predicament and also the motivation – you go through quite a complex journey with him I think. And so just putting all of those questions into place was incredibly helpful for me. Interestingly, I had in the back of my mind because I had a little bit of work on it already and I was sort of putting it to one side to embark on this, after this, I went to play Henry V with Michael Grandage directing. Because it was in the back of my mind, there were little echoes of him when I suddenly realized from what was already in front of us that here was a guy leading the few against the many and rallying men in a possibly dire situation to use their skills. There are little echoes of that in the Robinson that we came up with.

Jude: One of the beautiful things that excited me was how so many of the themes are relevant to all of us nowadays. We all sacrifice our time away from family and the place we often want to be to do the job that we need to support the family. That dilemma, you imagine that for a man whose job it is to go abroad for nine months of the year, that can leave you in a really difficult situation and confusing situation. Equally, we all know people that have incredible skill sets that are no longer relevant to a modern society, that have been made redundant. Equally, people feel like they’re not being recognized by the powers that be and they’re being screwed over by the banks or whatever it may be. There are many things to this that layer itself. Just under the fact that it’s also a fantastic thriller and a heist movie. They’re all there as motivations.

Jude: I did a play a few years ago written by Eugene O’Neill called “Anna Christie.” I played an Irish Stoker, who like Robinson, spent his life at sea, there was this wonderful gruff niavety to him like when he meets his woman for the first time. He doesn’t know how to behave, because he’s only spent time with his mother or prostitutes. He’s sure that women are one or the other, and it’s about how he learns to love this woman and love women for the first time. There was this extraordinary kind of innocence to this burly great guy. I supposed there’s a little bit of that that I took from. I keep going back to the fact that it’s very easy when you’re an actor and you’re presented with a really great script and a very great part. There were clearly very wonderful characters in this drama and it’s then filling in the gaps, and you can make those assumed leaps of experience because the piece holds you.

Jude: No, certainly not in a physical sense, but what I think everyone experiences is if we had to spend a day in a room this big, it’s very hard. You have to lose a sense of personal space and you have to bite your tongue. All sorts of things, and the body smells after a while, all of that. But all of that has to be considered. It’s part of the submarine. We were in confined spaces for long periods of time together.

Kevin: We shot initially for ten days on a real submarine and that set the tone and flavor for the whole movie, for the actors to really experience what it was like to be entombed in this metal box all day with no natural light, and the smell of diesel and banging your head on metal pipes and things all day. It also dictated the style of shooting, because you realize when you’re in these tiny, tiny spaces that you just can’t shoot in the way that you normally would, moving the cameras around, moving the actors around.

Normally you would say, “Ok we have a scene here, we’ve got six people in this room, and how are they going to move around, and what’s the dynamic going to be and where are we going to put the camera?” When you’re in a submarine, it’s like, where do you have space to put the camera and where do you have space to put the actors, and that’s where we’re going to shoot. The choices are taken out of your hands in a way and they’re defined by the environment.

That was frustrating initially when I first started watching the scenes in the cutting room, and you can’t do the things that you normally can do. Then I realized slowly, when we moved onto the set, when we did do the camera moves and the more normal filming, they felt wrong, they felt artificial. Actually the claustrophobia, and the lack of choice, really actually works for the submarine movie. It makes you feel like you’re really in there. It accentuates the claustrophobia, and the claustrophobia accentuates the tension. I think submarine movies are all about tension … I think about when is it going to go wrong? Are they going to sink? Are they going to survive?

Jude: I don’t think I gravitate towards one or the other, to be honest, I’m just curious about stuff I haven’t done and types of men I haven’t done or women even! I just felt with him, there was a curiosity. Kevin had reminded me of the play I had done and there was something I really enjoyed about that particular character and I was keen to try and find a film like it. It was a lot of different things to Robinson. I was curious about that gruffness, that sense of intelligence, pride filled working class guy whose done wrong, looking for his dignity and a man finding his leadership skills … there was wonderful complexity to Robinson.