The old saw that January is a new-movie wasteland, a dumping ground for studio rejects and misfires, is slowly eroding.

Sure, in January the crap-to-cream ratio is still tilted toward crap, as any scan of the Cineplex marquee attests.

But each year there seems to be a few extra small, genre gems–well-made little films that probably would not have stood a chance against the blockbusters of summer or holiday event and prestige flicks.

Black Sea is one of this year’s worthwhile dead-of-winter genre gems. Written by British playwright Dennis Kelly and directed by Kevin MacDonald (Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland, The Eagle), the action-thriller stars Jude Law as a present-day commercial submarine captain who, after getting laid off from his underwater salvage job, gathers a crew of British, Australian, and Russian submariners. Their secret heist mission: using a dilapidated Russian submarine to search for a lost German U-Boat supposedly full of Nazi gold that sunk in the Black Sea during WWII.

As directed with a sharp eye by MacDonald and featuring a terrific multi-national cast that includes Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn, Black Sea is that rare genre film that respects its genre’s tropes but never lazily leans on them; that aims for authenticity and character-driven narrative logic without sacrificing genuine tension and thrills.

Another writer and I sat down with MacDonald earlier this month to talk about Black Sea, the Russian response to the film, and how to shoot a low-budget submarine movie on a real submarine.

Black Sea is playing in select theaters.

__________________

You just got back from doing press and a screening of the film in Russia? What did they think of it?

Kevin MacDonald: There’s this massive antipathy against the West right now due to the whole situation with the Ukraine. They’re very anti-Western, so it was interesting watching this film with them. It’s a big market for the film because we have all these Russian actors in it—three of them turned out to be some of the biggest stars in Russia, which I hadn’t quite realized.

The actors were very sensitive—when I cast them, they didn’t want to play stereotypical criminal Russian characters in Western films. But I pointed out to them that in this film they aren’t as bad as the Brits… or the Australians. The Russian press was all over me about Russian stereotypes. They didn’t like the fact that the sonar operator was wearing a fur hat with the red Russian star in the middle—they said, “That’s such a stereotype!” But actually I didn’t want to use that hat, the Russian actor wanted to. Blame him! [Laughs]

There’s a little oddity about this film. The place they go to pick up this submarine and bribe an admiral to get it is Sevastopol, which is the main city in Crimea, which has been taken over by the Russians since we shot the film. There was quite a lot of sensitivity about that, since the character was supposed to be a Ukrainian admiral. We were going to go back there later and get shots of a real submarine in the Ukrainian navy submerging, but we couldn’t go back because of the invasion—the Ukrainian Navy ceased to exist.

Despite our Western ideas about Russian corruption and greed, in your film the Russians turn out to be some of the more honorable characters.

MacDonald: They have more in common with the Brits than they don’t, because they’ve all been sailors their whole lives. But it’s more because they’ve all been thrown on the scrapheap.

These are blue-collar working-man guys with skills that are no longer needed or wanted. I think that happens as much in Russia, even more so than it does in America or Europe. It’s more about the 99% and the 1%. What drives this film’s characters isn’t just about getting rich, it’s about wanting to get back at these fuckers, at the bankers, at the guys who screwed us over and made us lose our self-respect.

It’s not the most noble of causes, going after the gold.

MacDonald: What interests me is that as characters they are very flawed because they’ve been warped by their anger at the system. If the film is about anything in the end, it’s about how instead of worrying about getting rich or getting respect, you should pay attention to your family and be a good dad.

That’s why we didn’t want to personify the evil corporation. You can’t point and say, “That’s the guy behind it all who’s getting rich.” It’s about what greed and wanting desperately to get your self-respect back do to individuals.

Society values rich people, so that desire drives these characters, but you have to realize that isn’t necessarily true. It’s more complicated than going off and getting rich. It’s about how money and greed destroys you, whether it’s gold or whatever. That applies to these men as well as the bosses. It’s probably unhelpful in terms of making a mainstream movie – there’s no clear villain. The villain is within.

That’s part of why I love sea stories and films—when you put your characters out on a ship, you strip away all the societal noise and isolate them, so themes and issues like that really scream out.

MacDonald: That’s one of the reasons why I got Dennis Kelly the playwright to write this, because there’s something theatrical about being on a boat or submarine where you’re in one place and you have to account for everyone in that place all the time. It gives you a very intense social interaction under pressure, observing human behavior under stress in a different environment.

The other thing that’s interesting that I only realized as we were about to start making this film was how many other submarine films have the idea of the Captain Ahab character, who starts off or goes crazy. The idea of that single-minded obsession that starts to endanger everyone’s lives when they start behaving irresponsibly. Something about that myth sits so well with this genre.

It gets much harder to rationally, reasonably resolve conflict when you’re always in each other’s faces with nowhere else to go.

MacDonald: You can’t say, “Let’s  all go have a good night’s sleep on it and come back to it in the morning.” [Laughs]

Or go take a nice, calming walk outside. Having never been underwater in a submarine, I can’t imagine how much you must have to mentally block out the idea of where you are, how close to death you are.

MacDonald: Jude actually went on a Royal Navy nuclear submarine for five days. There’s something about being in that confined space, underwater, somewhere where you as a human being shouldn’t be. You can only exist thanks to technology, so that technology becomes part of you, as important as an arm or a finger.

It intensifies everything, it makes emotions and anxieties concentrated. I think that’s one of the reasons why a drama on board a sub is so fantastically intensified and tense. Almost anything that happens on a submarine has a tension inherent to it because of where you are.

Every genetic, instinctive bone in your body is screaming, “I don’t belong here.”

MacDonald: It makes you really want to trust your crew. You weren’t born into a crew, but you are reliant on them and them on you, and if something goes wrong, you’re all going to die. But of course when that great of a trust is necessary, it makes you start to think, “Can I really trust him?” The seed of doubt is there and the paranoia sets in.

Did any of that claustrophobic anxiety from the characters in the story spill over into the actual film shoot? You worked with a very small crew…

MacDonald: This isn’t a very big, expensive movie. The crew was not large. Not many people would be foolish enough to make a low-budget submarine movie. [Laughs] We shot for two weeks in a real submarine, so that was a tiny crew of just six or seven down below, then makeup and hair and stuff were up above on a platform, floating offices with toilets and stuff. We were shooting in corridors in that real submarine and there’s just no room at all, you have four people just crushed in next to each other. That definitely changed how the actors felt—they understood what it was like to be in that situation.

But it also affects what you can do with the camera and how you can move the actors. A lot of the tools you’re used to having as a director, you just can’t use. That really frustrated me while shooting, but I realized as I was cutting the film together that it has the benefit of making it feel real. You know that camera has to be there because it can’t be any further out because there’s a metal wall. That contributed to the sense of tension and claustrophobia.

So when we moved on to shooting on the sound stage, I had designed the sets so we could move the walls out, but I decided not to do that. I tried it the first day, removing walls and moving the camera out and around, and it just felt so completely wrong—it was obvious to everyone instantly.

So we put everything back and treated the set like the real submarine. You couldn’t cheat. The environment totally dictates how the film feels in terms of film making.

Did you do any story boarding?

MacDonald: I did for the big underwater scene. That was the first time I’d done story boarding and pre-visualization. It’s so difficult filming underwater. You can’t really communicate with the actors, so it’s much easier to just show them the visualization and say here’s the shot I want to get.

The other thing we played around with a lot through trial and error was how often we’d see CGI shots outside of the submarine. At first we did lots of complicated camera moves around when showing the sub in the water. But again that felt wrong because we were so restricted inside the submarine, so we reduced the complexity of the camera movements even when we did have the complete freedom to do more, like with outside shots of the submarine. Of course there’s something artificial when you’re going for naturalism inside the submarine and then suddenly the camera is outside the submarine and you think that’s impossible—the camera couldn’t be there.

But you desperately needed those shots in terms of the rhythm of the editing and storytelling, you needed those moments of pause. In a regular film you have those interstitial moments, those shots of houses and trees, that act as pauses.

I remember talking to Danny Boyle about what was the hardest thing about making a science fiction film like Sunshine. He said when you do a sci-fi or space movie, you realize you’re given nothing for free.

Normally you make a movie and you say, “Oh, look at that sunshine streaming in, isn’t that lovely?” Or leaves, or people in the background—all that stuff you didn’t plan and didn’t pay for. But when you make a movie in space or underwater, you have to create every single thing. It was novel for me—I’ve never done anything like that.

I always complain that too much CG sucks because the actors never feel fully emotionally committed to a green screen, but what you said is true, too—if the CG camera movements are too inventive and impossible, a voice in the back of your mind is saying, “Well, this couldn’t really be happening.” It further disconnects you from the fictional experience.

MacDonald: I think that’s really true—that’s one of the problems with CG. When anything is possible, nothing matters.

The eleven-year-old in us loves to see it, but…

MacDonald: But it doesn’t truly connect psychologically. It’s not true.

I love how in Kelly’s script we not only get to know the characters, but their actions and motivations logically drive the plot progression.

MacDonald: It’s definitely an unusual genre film—there’s a lot going on, a lot of things that wouldn’t be in a normal genre film, in terms of the writing. Dennis is very good writer—his series Utopia is a big hit in Britain.

He’s got a way of taking bits of reality—like Hitler and Stalin in 1941—and creating a plausible story based on a nugget of truth. He takes that and builds something. Then he adds in conspiracy and mythology and Nazi gold and combines it all, truth and mythology and fantasy and genre.

It doesn’t follow any one genre. There’s the submarine genre, the horror-movie whatever, a bit of Aliens in there in terms of the look, and there’s a morality tale as well, like Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It’s got bits of all these things. That’s what I loved about the writing—he’s so free with grabbing bits and influences, but it’s not post-Modern in a Tarantino way. It’s more messy and human.

The moments that I love best are the little character bits, what they want to do with the money, their relationships with their wives and kids, and the little bit about these guys being “penguins”—awkward and inadequate on land, elegant and sleek in their environment in the water. That’s a lovely piece of writing. The ability to write and make a film that’s hopefully exciting and tense but also has other stuff going on—that’s what he’s really good at.

I don’t know how exactly Kelly constructed his script, but at least it feels like the actions and events come from the character’s motivations and the consequences of their behavior.

So often in big genre films, you feel it’s the other way around—someone decides they want this scene or that action beat and then spend all their time pushing and twisting the characters and plot to get to those big scenes.

MacDonald: Well, that’s what you do when you have a bigger budget. [Laughs]