Irish director sweating on the fate of Sea Fever

A scene from Sea Fever, which was filmed off the coast

An Irish director tells Esther McCarthy about the double-edged sword of releasing a film with the topical tale of a ship’s crew who get a strange virus

Over a year ago Neasa Hardiman shot her debut feature in Ireland. Sea Fever tells of a crew who battle for their lives as they succumb to a strange infection. At one point, they are urged to self isolate to save it reaching the larger population.

As the movie releases amid the Covid-19 chaos, it is bizarrely prescient. It’s been strange, she agrees.

“It screened at the Toronto Film Festival [in September, months before the world had heard of Covid-19], and it got a really good response, which was incredibly thrilling and reassuring,” she says. “I went straight from Toronto to New York as I was shooting a Netflix drama. And so I didn’t do the festival circuit with the film. The next time that I was in an audience was at the Dublin Film Festival, which was the last film festival before lockdown.

That was really weird, to see it with an audience when you hear Siobhan on screen saying: 'We have to quarantine ourselves'.

The lead character (played by Hermione Corfield) is a marine biologist who fears that if her ill crew docks for medical attention, the infection will spread like wildfire. Conceived as a psychological thriller with story elements about climate change, Hardiman understands why the film feels so resonant.

“Thinking about it, actually the politics of the film are dealing with exactly the same issue,” she says. “The climate crisis issue and the quarantine issue are essentially exactly the same political issue. It’s economic value over human safety. That’s the conflict. And it’s exactly the same conundrum. Do I just save myself? Or do I join hands and save my community? And that John Donne idea of: ‘No man is an island, every man is a piece of the continent and never send to know for whom the bell tolls’.”

Originally slated for a theatrical release last Friday, but with cinemas closed, Sea Fever had to go direct to video on demand.

As if writing and making your first film wasn’t difficult enough, Hardiman opted to make a sci-fi thriller, setting her story at sea with an international cast that includes Connie Neilsen and Dougray Scott. It must have been quite a challenge.

“I know — what was I thinking?” she laughs, adding that the first five days of the month-long shoot were set entirely on the trawler as it moved at sea off the Wicklow and Wexford coast.

“The brother and sister who own the trawler had been really helpful and I’d been asking questions before when I was writing, and I had been on the boat. Dougray and Connie learned how to pilot the trawler, they took them out and showed them how to pilot the boat, so that they could do it really convincingly.

“It was constantly moving, which was tough for the actors. I was on Kwells [sea-sickness tablets] every day! Even in very calm weather there’s a lot of movement on a boat. And the people who man it, they’re like dancers the way they move around.

They’re really highly skilled people and very safety conscious.

She says that the sci-fi and psychological thriller elements allowed her to explore ethical questions and ideas. A fan of Neil Jordan’s films growing up, this route appealed to her.

“That idea that you could use the full dream language of cinema to tell stories that weren’t just crash bang wallop stories, but stories that were actually about something.

That’s what I really wanted to try and do, using the kind of dream iconography that cinema does so well, but putting in real-life characters and keeping it as grounded and truthful as I could.”

Hardiman says her tense story explores various ethical questions.

“The central driving story, is how do we take responsibility for ourselves and for each other and for our world? The central thematic divide in the story is between the strengths and weaknesses of relentless scientific thinking and the importance of the scientific method, and the comfort and reassurance of magical thinking.”

She feels there is an idea that scientists are disconnected and don’t understand what’s important about being human.

“Whereas in fact, of course, the opposite is true. And we disregard at the people who are engaged in scientific methods at our peril.”

A Bafta winner from her work on Happy Valley, Hardiman has rarely been busier working as a director across UK and US productions — her many credits include Inhumans and Jessica Jones.

She is hopeful that a global demand for storytelling will help Irish filmmakers bounce back from a widespread shut-down in production, though social distancing will be a challenge in an industry where crews work closely together.

I feel like when we can, I think we’re going to bounce back because we’ve got so much talent, and there will be resources available to people.

Sea Fever is now available on VOD platforms such as Sky Store, iTunes, etc