Joe Penna on survival thriller Arctic

Occasionally you'll find a film director’s early shorts included as extras on DVD menus, and often these formative works reveal that the themes that currently preoccupy the filmmaker have done so from the very beginning of their career. With a move from the varying screen size of YouTube to the big one, 12 years of Joe Penna’s development is catalogued for us to watch. Hundreds of videos uploaded to the platform as MysteryGuitarMan give him a filmography that charts not only his own growth but YouTube’s as well. Over these 12 years, Penna’s work becomes more sophisticated; early clips that show promise have the same ideas re-worked later with increasing quality and attention to detail. His filmmaking skills improved, as did his understanding of his audience, the main lesson, he says, that YouTube taught him. “It is very difficult to make a living on YouTube, but I learned that every second counts.”

The demands to produce enough of the right kind of content to satisfy the algorithm meant he felt like he was starting to sacrifice quality. Having uploaded everything from stop-motion animations to music videos, Penna eventually made Instant Getaway, a 14-minute-long short that made it to the big screen, premiering at Tribeca Film Festival. For him, it was a natural progression to make a feature.

Arctic is the result. The film has almost no dialogue and focuses on a single person, Overgård, a man stranded in an icy wasteland struggling to survive. It is a heavy weight for any actor to carry. Fortunately, after an intense Skype call, Penna managed to convince one of the world's finest, Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal, Doctor Strange), to take a chance on this first-time director. The Danish actor's restrained, pensive style matches perfectly with the aim of the project: to create a survival film that reflects reality and doesn’t shy away from the morality of self-preservation.

Penna is firm when explaining how important the team was in making Arctic. Shot over 19 days in Iceland, alongside Mikkelsen, there was a crew that made the $2 million budget suffice. “There is no way we could have shot this film if we didn’t have a crew who were working in their off-hours, who were getting things ready with their own cash and calling in favours.”

During post-production, the editor created an unscripted sequence out of the footage they had shot. He had Overgård make several attempts at pulling a sledge holding an injured companion up the rockface despite it not being in the script or shot that way. It becomes a more emotionally satisfying scene because of it. In the middle of the sound mixing session, sound editor Mark Mangini found out he had been nominated for an Oscar – for Blade Runner 2049. The film’s score was composed by Joseph Trapanese whose credits include The Greatest Showman and Straight Outta Compton. Penna found himself asking again and again: “How did I get that person?”

Set in a beautiful but bleak landscape and with no conversation, the film’s sound design becomes narratively vital. Penna hates referring to aspects of a film that aren’t played by actors as characters but says his sound team had to “act”. “We don’t have a bad guy, we don’t have a Machiavellian moustache-twirler, so the sound is our antagonist.” The wind, the crunching of the ice and the beeping of Overgård’s wristwatch push the story forward. Alone in an empty wilderness, the sounds of the environment are felt more intensely.

The watch beeping is a particularly clever conceit. During the research, every survivalist Penna spoke to emphasised the importance of sticking to a strict schedule, so he gave Overgård a watch with five alarms. The beeps signal when he must go clean the SOS sign carved in the ice or check his fishing lines for a catch. As the film progresses, the beeps become a reassuring reminder of order or a thrilling interruption into a fleeting moment of calm. And, as simple as it seems, they also signal to the audience that something else is about to happen.

YouTube analytics, complete with charts and graphs, detail down to the second when audiences lose interest in a video. Penna says this taught him what maintains interest, so he could then incorporate it into his next upload. It was at the forefront of his mind when making Arctic. “It was invaluable to this feature film, especially because of the lack of dialogue, we had to have ways of keeping people interested.” Penna refers to his audience-captivating technique as “little mysteries”. A sequence will raise a question, the question becomes more complex, and then a payoff is offered.

Arctic’s opening demonstrates it like so: Overgård is digging at the snow, we don’t know to what end. Then he becomes perturbed by a white rock sitting in this black trench he has been creating. Then our view cuts to a wide aerial shot showing the giant SOS sign he has carved. “Maybe you’ll keep watching just a little bit longer and then we ask more questions, and hopefully that keeps you watching until the end of the film.”

Penna talks about making use of YouTube’s analytics as if it were another tool in the filmmaker's kit. As troubling as it might seem, he is clear he uses it to inform his work rather than design it. He laughs as he suggests the headline for this piece should be: graphs, charts and algorithms, that’s the way to make art. Like classical music composed by a computer, Arctic hits all the right notes.

Perhaps a robot could have made Arctic with each trope of the survival genre perfectly corrected so as to reflect reality. Penna consulted several survivalists to make sure there would be no eye-rolling in the audience. He and his writing partner, Ryan Morrison, debated the moral dilemmas the increasingly dire situation poses for Overgård. All to ensure the audience didn’t want to shout “no, no, no” as the protagonist does something stupid.

Something that sets the movie apart is all that is left unsaid about the moral tumult going on behind Overgård’s eyes. Whether a robot could look at Mikkelsen’s face and determine whether it conveyed the correct emotional currents remains an open question. But in Arctic, it is Penna’s eyes that watched Mikkelsen transform a simple script into a film with a profound moral undercurrent – how far would you go to save a life?

Work is well underway on Penna’s next project. Written with his long-time collaborator, Morrison, Stowaway is set within the confines of a spaceship en route to Mars. Once again, Penna is humbled by the talent the project has attracted, with Toni Collette (Hereditary, Little Miss Sunshine) and Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air, Pitch Perfect) making up the cast. The film will continue to explore the moral and emotional themes that fascinate Penna. “I am asking similar questions, but I have an inkling there will be different answers here."

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Arctic is released 10 May by Signature Entertainment