Simulating Siberia

The men are suffering. Ice forming on their eyebrows, in their nostrils, their facecloths wet with breath and at the edges crusted with ice.

How do you get actors to follow such script instructions convincingly? Casper Wrede, the British producer and director of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, has a simple solution: make them cold and miserable. For the filming of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's bleak novel about Stalin's political prisoners, Wrede persuaded a former inmate of a Soviet prison camp, now living in Paris, to make drawings from which a grimly authentic set could be built. Then he took his all-male, largely English cast to a location in Norway 200 miles north of Oslo, where the topography, light conditions and bitter climate closely resemble those of Siberia. On that inhuman tundra, Wrede is trying to capture on film Solzhenitsyn's minutely detailed study of man's stubborn endurance in a world of inhumanity.

Since shooting began two months ago, the temperature has rarely risen above minus-five degrees, and more often it hovers a good ten or 15 degrees below that. The camera is equipped with arctic oil and a special heating element beneath the motor, neither of which keeps the film from going brittle and breaking periodically. The sound man has been forced to wrap his microphone in a woman's stocking to soften the noise of the wind that howls across the snow. In one scene that required going without gloves, Tom Courtenay, who stars as Ivan (and uses no stand-in), had to call a halt because he became much too numb to continue.

Focus on Details. Yet Wrede still shouts "Come out and get cold!" to his actors when they linger overlong in dressing-room trailers. He delights in closeups that capture the frost etched on a ten-day growth of stubble, or the gleam of a runny nose. "The rule in the actual prison camps was to suspend work if it reached 40 below," he says. "My rule is 39 below, not to be worse than Stalin."

Wrede and Scriptwriter Ronald Harwood have been scrupulously faithful to the novel. The movie offers no sweeping denouncements, no involved escape plots, no girls, no sex--just a tautly understated account of 17 hours of physical and moral survival against crushing odds.

"The effect," says Wrede, "is supposed to come from focusing on details--cadging an extra bowl of food, finding half a cigarette, making a compassionate gesture. We're being very wary of pretty pictures, those Zhivago-style long wide shots." His cameraman is Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, whose austere lens could seek out the gloom in a travel poster.

Little Respite. Courtenay, whose previous film roles include the young revolutionary in Doctor Zhivago, prepared to play Ivan by having the crowns of two teeth removed, leaving only gold stumps. For a man who has had no dental attention for at least eight years, "anything less would look phony," he explains. He also dieted 7 lbs. from his 145-lb. frame. "You can't really act in this." Before one scene in which Ivan eats, Courtenay starved himself a day so that he could "concentrate on-camera as if it really were my only food for a long time."

The 30 film makers stay eight miles from location in the mining town of Roros, in a hotel that has a sort of elementary ski-lodge comfort. But Roros (pop. 3,200) offers lamentably few distractions--and even they are not particularly accessible. "If her father answers," a young actor explains to the hotel operator, "he doesn't speak any English, so would you please ask him if she's in?" The cast passes the time devising new ways of getting six or eight layers of clothing beneath the tattered costumes for the next day's shooting. The Times of London published a letter from Actor Eric Thompson praising the "insulating qualities" of the copies of the newspaper--which he uses to line his boots.

A certain prisoner psychology is taking hold. One cast member recently denounced a hot meal served on location as "proper swill." Another says darkly: "We're even beginning to fight over extra bowls and hide away pieces of stale cake."

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