Interview: Writer/Director Neasa Hardiman on the Prescient Nature of SEA FEVER and More

Writer/director Neasa Hardiman’s Sea Fever had enjoyed a successful festival run throughout 2019, but she had no idea just how topical her tale of aquatic horror would become this year back when she was originally making the film. Sea Fever centers around a marine biology student named Siobhán (played by Hermione Corfield), who is tasked with traveling on a fishing trawler, but quickly finds herself out of place alongside the rest of the ship’s crew. As they travel into unchartered waters, a biological entity takes hold of the vessel, infecting the unsuspecting passengers, and it’s up to Siobhán to figure out just what exactly they’re dealing with before it’s too late for everyone aboard.

Daily Dead recently had the opportunity to speak with Hardiman about her approach to the story of Sea Fever, and during our interview, she discussed exploring the themes of taking responsibility for our communities, the importance of staying true to the scientific method, and her experiences collaborating with her stellar cast and crew for Sea Fever.

Congrats on the film, Neasa. I’d love to start off having you discuss the inspirations for this story and how it all came together on the screen.

Neasa Hardiman: Well, I always come from this really abstract position at the very beginning whenever I’m thinking about a story. One of the big ethical issues that I wanted to raise is this conflict between individual need and global need. So, the film is informed by this painful awareness of how fragile we are and how fragile our ecosystem is, and how me must recognize ourselves as individuals existing outside of the system rather than being a dynamic part of a community, a society, and a world.

So really, the big theme that I wanted to explore was this idea of taking responsibility for your community and also for the climate in a more broad sense. I wanted this film to ask important questions like, ethically do I protect my self over the group? Do I protect my neighbor over a collective group? Or do I protect the group over my neighbor? And it’s mind blowing just how those things are suddenly really pertinent to what’s happening in the world right now.

I loved a lot of aspects to Sea Fever, but I think what really hit me hard is that it plays out almost like an episode of The X-Files, where it’s smart and mysterious. And I also loved that the characters don’t have all the information or all the answers, so it really pulls you in for this ride, too.

Neasa Hardiman: You know, I think you’ve put your finger on something that’s really important to the success of this story. I think you're absolutely right and while I was developing it, I remember one of the executive producers saying to me, “Oh no, Siobhán really needs to be more definite, she needs to be more of a hero who knows exactly what to do and she should have all the answers.” I thought that was actually the opposite of the scientific method and it’s the opposite of what I want to say here. The truth of it is that when you’re a scientist, or when you’re operating at that level, you’re feeling your way [through], you're looking for evidence and you’re making conjectures and testing your theories.

What I wanted from Siobhán was that throughout the story, she is constantly saying, “I don’t know. I don’t know. We can try, but we don’t know.” I had a scene that we shot where when they’re on the other trawler that they visited, it’s discovered that the other trawler was bottom trawling, which is a very dangerous situation, and it destroys the ecosystem because when you bottom trawl, you pull up everything from the sea bed. There are lots of things down there and we don’t know what they are and it’s illegal, too, you’re not allowed to do it.

And I had this scene where Freya (played by Connie Nielsen) and Omid (played by Ardalan Esmaili) discuss the fact that it’s illegal to bottom trawl and how dangerous it is and how you can pull up anything from the base of the sea and you can subvert biospheres by doing this. When we were editing it, I realized that we didn’t need that scene because we know they’re deeper than they should be, we know that the biosphere has already been corrupted and the point is that you don’t ever know you’ve transformed a particular ecosystem until it’s too late, until it’s transformed.

I loved the way that Ruairí O'Brien utilized the camera here in a way that really elevated the dramatic elements of the story and heightened the paranoia and tensions. How was it collaborating with him for Sea Fever?

Neasa Hardiman: It was great and I’m delighted that you feel that way. It was very important for me that you feel the claustrophobia of the boat, that you feel the fact that what really happens when these crews go out to sea is that they are living cheek by jowl and you never get away from each other, and they really prioritize humor and being easy to get along with. We really needed to feel that, we really needed to feel the fact that they’re out on what is essentially a big desert of water and they’re trapped in this tiny confine of wood and cast iron, and that was one thing we wanted to do with the camera, we wanted to feel what it’s like for Siobhán when she gets into the water, that Hermione, who herself is an absolutely beautiful swimmer, that there’s something quite wonderful for Siobhán about being in the water.

Then the other thing that I wanted to do with the camera was with Siobhán, where we keep the camera inside the boat all the time very tightly fixed on everything, and then, when she does her dive, we let the camera go very wide so you feel the tininess of the boat on this vast ocean. The third thing we did was to try and make our frame as close to Siobhán’s intellectual perspective as possible, so they’re always made into these grid shapes, where you’re looking at verticals and horizontals because that’s the way she sees the world around her.

Before we go, I’d love if you could discuss putting together the fantastic cast for this. I am a big fan of Connie and Dougray [Scott], but I also loved seeing Olwen [Fouéré] here as well, as she’s made a huge impression on me over the last few years. And of course, Hermione is fantastic in this as well.

Neasa Hardiman: I’m really glad to hear that you enjoyed this cast, as I did as well. The only way that a movie ever really comes to life is if you have really grounded, truthful performances and properly contextualized three-dimensional characters, so I wanted the film to not have any villains, where everybody in the story has their reasons and they’re all complex and nuanced characters that have to make tough decisions. Like, Connie and Dougray’s characters are living on an economic edge and they are doing their best in order to provide some kind of economic recompense to their crew, and they’re also carrying with them this unspoken grief about their loss and it just informs every decision that they make.

I’m delighted that you enjoyed Olwen Fouéré, because I love her and she is a national treasure here in Ireland, not only as a cinema actor, but also a very accomplished and wide-ranging theatre actor, and she breathes such life into that woman. We had a full backstory for her as well, and again, I ended up cutting things from the film about her husband and the previous ship that she had worked on because she brought such authenticity to the character and such love for her nephew and her family that we didn’t need to articulate really concretely what her backstory was. She was just present in her performance and I loved that. But I also felt that we were so lucky to have Ardalan Esmaili, too, who plays Omid, because he has such a wonderful presence and he and Hermione got on so well in this.

[Photo Credit: Above photo of Neasa Hardiman courtesy of DUST/Gunpowder & Sky.]