Two and a half years ago, the world marvelled at the news of the discovery of the wreck of the Endurance, the ship that was centre stage for the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s greatest Antarctic triumph and tragedy. Organised and funded by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, the Endurance22 expedition found the ship more than 9800 feet (3000 metres) below the ice of the Weddell Sea, exactly 100 years to the day after Shackleton himself was buried on the remote Subantarctic island of South Georgia.
Now, the story of the expedition is being told on screen for the first time in Endurance, a feature length production from National Geographic Films. We sat down with one of its directors, Natalie Hewit, to learn more about the challenge of filming this extraordinary story.
The search begins
How did you get involved with the Endurance22 project?
I got involved right at the beginning when they were planning the Endurance22 expedition, and they wanted someone to make a documentary about it. I had previously made a film in Antarctica, spending three months solo at the British Antarctic Survey research station, where I made a film for the BBC. Some of the Endurance22 team approached me, saying we love your work and know you’ve got Antarctic experience, so would you consider coming to be the documentary director for this expedition? I had become obsessed with Antarctica from my first trip there, so I didn’t even have to think about it for a second – I just said yes immediately.
Did you think you’d find Endurance?
It felt like a shot in the dark, but I had also seen the incredible leadership from John Shears (expedition leader), Mensun Bound (director of exploration) and Nico Vincent (expedition subsea manager) and the amazing teamwork from the expedition team. Their ability to collaborate, creatively problem-solve and keep going no matter how many challenges came their way really made me think, ‘This is going to be really hard, but if anyone’s going to do it, it’s going to be these guys.’
Filming challenges
How challenging was the expedition shoot?
My Antarctic film in 2016-17 was a baptism by fire. If you’re doing an Antarctic expedition, there’s standard clothing that you wear, but when you’re filming it’s very different because you’re not constantly moving – you can’t wear the big gloves that everyone wears in Antarctica, because you need to be able to focus the camera and have manual dexterity, so you end up using lots of layers of thin gloves stuffed full of hand warmers.
It’s also very important to have a team ethic. On the back deck [of the ship] you’ve got heavy machinery whirring around all the time and it’s a really dangerous environment, so it was really important that we were constantly watching each other’s backs. If something goes wrong down there, you’re at least two days away from any kind of hospital. Even a minor injury can become very serious very quickly.
We had to do underwater survival training and ship survival training before we left the UK and had guides with us if we got off the ship and walked on the ice, because there could be crevasses or you could fall through the ice. You could never quite tell how thick the ice is.
It was just myself and my two cinematographers, Paul Morris and James Blake, trying to film the expedition team of a hundred people working 24/7, so I didn’t really get any sleep for about a month, working from dawn until very late into the night. When they were moving a ship, it was like trying to sleep through an earthquake because they’re breaking ice – you could almost get bounced out of your bed because the whole ship is vibrating so much. By the end I was a complete zombie.
Famous footsteps
As a film-maker, what was it like to follow in the footsteps of Frank Hurley, the cameraman who sailed on Endurance with Shackleton?
South [Frank Hurley’s film of the expedition] is an absolute marvel. It was made in the toughest place on Earth during the toughest survival story ever known. Just to be able to bring that footage back blows my mind. With the technology he was using, it’s an incredible achievement.
Obviously the footage stops when the ship sinks, so we were really keen to try and find a way to make everything we were using to tell the story like it was part of South – an extension of Hurley’s work, filling in where he couldn’t because he had to leave his camera behind. It was important that we framed things as Hurley did, paying careful attention to his style and techniques.
Shackleton and Hurley were visionaries and so far ahead of their time. What they understood – and what everyone who’s on social media now understands – is that if you want people to believe that you’ve done something, you have to be there taking pictures. If it’s not on film, it didn’t happen. There are shots by Hurley which I absolutely love – he would put his camera on the ice and get the ship to ram towards him and jump out of the way at the last minute. We would never be allowed to do that now!
You have drones that can do the job – Hurley would have loved that
I really wanted to capture the modern day equivalent. My cinematographer James Blake is one of the best drone pilots I’ve ever worked with, and he got the most beautiful drone shots of the ship moving through the ice. We had those Hurley images with us as inspiration.
What I also love about Hurley is that he caught action like when they’re playing with the dogs, those intimate moments of life as well as the overarching story. That was something that we thought a lot about as well: it’s hard to capture all of life on a boat with a hundred people, but we were always looking for a personal side of things.
Into the archives
The film blends together your footage with archive material and some clever reconstructions. How was it all pieced together?
After the expedition, the directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi came on board and we began collaborating on how to put the film together. The biggest challenge was that there’s so much story. You could make an entire film just about Shackleton or just the modern expedition. We had a lot of conversations about how we tell both stories side by side and where are the synergies?
I read thousands of pages of diaries, letters, and transcripts. Between myself and the associate producer, we read every single diary that every man had written on the Endurance. We were contacting descendants of the original Endurance crew to find out what was in their attics.
We worked with the British Film Institute very early on about how we would make use of South. Through that process I came across the radio interviews with some of the original men. When I heard these audio recordings I thought ‘I wonder if we could get them to tell their stories in their own voices?’
We started having conversations about whether we could use AI [to recreate their voices instead of using actors], and whether we should, and how it might work. We ended up working with an incredible Ukrainian company called Respeecher, which is an ethical AI company. When they sent back the results of the test, I was blown away. It was amazing to think that this could be a viable option for helping us to give the men back their voices. I think that was really powerful.
The thrill of discovery
Finally, the expedition very nearly didn’t find Endurance. How did it feel to be present when the ship was actually found?
It was overwhelming relief – but then I was back into filming mode so we could capture everything that was going on.
I could watch the footage for hours, it’s so mesmerising. To see the tiny details like the window of Shackleton’s cabin is so enticing. I just desperately wanted to go inside! I’d had this really special connection to the story for a long time, but it had always weirdly felt like a fairy tale. Even having been there myself and lived in those conditions, I still couldn’t quite believe it was real, I couldn’t believe that people could go through that experience and come out alive. But the moment I set eyes on Endurance for the first time, the whole thing became real in a way that had never happened before. The story is true – and we found the final survivor.
One of the French guys on the survey team described it as if we could close the book now, like it was a nice epilogue to his story. It was really emotional.
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Endurance streams worldwide on Disney+ and Hulu from Saturday November 2, 2024.
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