Filming “Sukkwan Island,” a visceral psychological thriller world premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, provided its French director Vladimir de Fontenay and everyone involved in the multi-national production with an epic yet transformative experience, mirroring that of the film’s protagonists.
Adapted from David Vann’s harrowing “Legend of a Suicide,” “Sukkwan Island” tells the story of 13 year-old, Roy (Swann Arlaud, “Anatomy of a Fall”), who agrees to spend a year of adventure with his estranged father, Tom (Woody Norman, “C’Mon, C’Mon”), deep in the Norwegian fjords. Faced with the harsh realities of the relentless Arctic weather, the pair’s journey turns into a test of survival and brings out their inner turmoils.
De Fontenay’s follow up to his 2017 feature debut “Mobile Homes” starring Imogen Poots and Callum Turner, “Sukkwan Island” was a passion project for de Fontenay, who chased rights to the novel for years after his father gave him the book to read. The NYU grad was stunned when he was coincidentally contacted by Carole Scotta and Caroline Benjo, the revered French producers duo behind “The Class,” and “The Night of the 12th,” who had bought the rights to “Legend of a Suicide” and thought of him to direct it the bigscreen adaptation.
“When we told Vladimir that we had acquired rights to the book and were looking for a director, he stopped breathing and said, ‘No that’s not possible!” De Fontenay, meanwhile, says he thought it was a prank because he had been trying to buy those books for ages in vain.
“When Caroline and I read the book it struck us but we though it was so violent that it wasn’t unadaptable,” Scotta says. “We knew that Vladimir’s adaptation, his mise-en-scene and the actors he’d choose would give the film some glimmer and humanism even if it’s very tragic.”
Vann wrote “Legend of a Suicide” to overcome the grief and guilt he felt as a teenager when his father killed himself after he had refused to accompany him in the wilderness for an entire year. The semi-autobiographical book imagines Roy embarking on that doomed trip with his father and killing himself.
“What’s magnificent is the possibility of redemption for David Vann, in writing this book, where he says to himself: ‘What would have happened if I’d gone?’” the director says. “We said to ourselves: ‘There’s a very beautiful humanist message in here that touched us. We thought, ‘It’s a tragedy but one that says something meaningful about resilience,” he continues.
In “Sukkwan Island,” De Fontenay and his producers, Scotta and Benjo, decided to take a different route and had the character of Roy, now an adult, traveling to the remote hut to revisit the place where his father killed himself. The film shifts from the present to an alternate past.
“The gamble we took in our adaptation was for the author to make that cathartic journey to the hut in the wilderness, to return to the ‘scene of the crime.’ It’s not in the book,” says de Fontenay. That ‘mise en abyme’ structure was essential,” Scotta said, to make the outcome more soothing than in the book, and one that “allows for a sort of metaphysical reconciliation between Roy and his father.”
The success of the film depended in large part on the casting since the father and son duo are nearly in every frame of “Sukkwan Island” and de Fontenay said he felt the need to soften and flesh out the character of Tom who is played by Arlaud and “brings depth and vulnerability to the part.” Norman, whom de Fontenay had spotted in Mike Mills’s “C’Mon, C’Mon,” also delivers a gripping and layered performance in the film which de Fontenay says only a seasoned actor like Norman could have played.
Ultimately, the story of “Sukkwan Island” is universal, de Fontenay says, “regardless of our point of entry which could be being a son, being a father, being a mother, whatever the angle, I get the impression that it’s what’s at stake in family relationships in general, and those bonds are always evolving through life as they are in the film. We are constantly questioning the nature of those relationships.”
“Sukkwan Island,” which is represented internationally by MK2 Films, also marks the inaugural movie emerging from “The Creatives,” an alliance of ten international independent production companies. As such it’s produced by Haut et Court‘s Scotta, Eliot Khayat (“Santosh”) and Caroline Benjo, and co-produced by Synnøve Hørsdal, Petter Onstad Løkke at Maipo Film, Jacques-Henri Bronckart at Versus Production, Tatjana Kozar, Mike Goodridge’s Good Chaos, and Sydney Oberfeld.
The long list of producers on “Sukkwan Island” reflects how difficult the film was to finance, Scotta says. Since the book takes place in Alaska, Scotta says they first thought of shooting the film in Canada since there’s a co-production with France but that turned out to be too expensive.
“At a certain point, we thought to ourselves we needed to be more European. We had the idea of making a real film set in the Far North, in the Norwegian fjords which is just as wild as Alaska. And all of a sudden, the film was built around that, with a European cast,” says Scotta, who pointed that the contraint allowed for a brilliant cosmopolitan crew (including production designer Eva Martin, editor
Nicolas Chaudeurge and makeup artist Saara Räisänen) and cast to come together, including Arlaud and Norman, but also Alma Pöysti, the star of Aki Kaurismäki’s Cannes prizewinning “Fallen Leaves,” Ruaridh Mollica (“Witness Number 3.”) and Tuppence Middleton (“His Dark Materials”).
The difficulty in financing the film also stemmed from the fact that it shot in English, which made it ineligible for French subsidies.
“The English language is great when it allows you to be in a very commercial genre with a big cast, because you’re going to be able to raise a lot of money. But when you’re in a pure auteur genre like Vladimir’s, but in English, you don’t necessarily get any more international funding and you get zero French funding,” she says. The only French soft money the movie tapped into was from the region of Brittany where de Fontenay edited the film. Even French TV passed on it because they hardly ever buy films in English unless it’s an Almodovar or Ken Loach film,” she says.
But in spite of these difficulties, Scotta says “there was never a question to do in another language than English,” adding that “Woody Norman was even cast before Swann Arlaud.”
Today, everyone involved in the production is bound by the unforgettable memory of their joint experience filming across two seasons in the Norwegian wilderness, sleeping in a military camp, and coping with temperatures down to 20 degrees below zero celsius, brutal winds, endless nights in the winter and then endless days in June, but also the visits of crows, a reindeer, and even a bear on set.
The film opens in June and ends in the winter, but filming had to be the other way around for planning issues.
De Fontenay said that shooting “Sukkwan Island” in reverse and across two seasons was his “most marvelous experience.”
“Being in a place that was covered in ice and in snow, with actors playing such tough stuff, and being able to come back several months later with the ice melting, this lake melting, and this father and son starting to apprehend each other and act out the beginning of the film, it was a bit magical,” says the filmmaker. “We were all so happy to be back together after so much adversity. It was a moment of life and communion with everyone.”
