LAST BREATH Interview: Director Alex Parkinson Talks World Building Under the Sea

Based on a real-life incident in 2012, Last Breath details the desperate attempt to rescue a diver trapped hundreds of feet underwater in the North Sea.

This is the first fiction feature for director Alex Parkinson, who began his career in television as an editor. Since then, he's made documentaries for National Geographic, the BBC, and HBO Max.

More important, Parkinson co-directed (with Richard da Costa) a documentary version of Last Breath in 2019. That film used archival footage and sound to recreate an accident involving diver Chris Lemons (played by Finn Cole), trapped underwater with limited oxygen. He was rescued by his partners David Yuasa (Simu Liu) and Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson).

Parkinson's experience on the documentary gave him a head-start in covering the world of "saturation divers" who repair pipelines and cables at the bottom of the ocean. Tethered to a surface ship, they operate from a diving bell pressurized to equal the tremendous weight of the water in their working conditions. They work in 28-day shifts, needing four days to return to the surface. Otherwise the "bends" from depressurizing expands the blood system so quickly internal organs liquify.

Parkinson spoke with ScreenAnarchy via Zoom.

ScreenAnarchy: You know this material so intimately. What was the biggest shift in directing it as a fiction feature?

Alex Parkinson: Probably one of the biggest differences was the world building, how to create the film itself. Obviously with documentary, you have talking heads. You have people telling you what to feel and all that kind of stuff. In translating this specific story into a feature, all that stuff has to come out organically and dramatically, without being clunky.

I think what happened is that the emotion and tension and drama emerged more in the feature than in the documentary. So in that sense they are kind of like companion pieces.

What about working with actors instead of real people?

Of course there are differences, but there's also some similarities, too. When you are working with real people, interviewing or filming them in their environments, you are in a sense getting a performance from them. You think about what you need from them to tell the story.

With actors, you're creating the characters the actors are inhabiting. I loved the interaction with actors in building characters, bringing that out in scenes.

How much of a responsibility do you have to present real-life characters realistically?

I wanted to do right by the real people. I wanted to honor their stories. But also I took liberties at points. Dramatic license at times. I'll give you an example.

The divers breathe helium while they're underwater, so in real life they have these helium voices, high and squeaky. To have that throughout the film would obviously sound ridiculous. I was very comfortable in cases that might get in the way or confuse people, anything that took away from the drama and attention and the emotion, to tweak things.

So it was okay to shift aspects of the characters? Make Allcock American instead of Scots?

We ended up making them not exactly the same as the real people, but left enough so you recognize that they are pretty realistic and pretty honest to who they are. The characters are so key to how the story's told: Dave with his cold nature, Chris with his sort of naïve wanting to prove himself. And then Duncan, the old timer who's been through it all and retiring. What they were like in real life was absolutely crucial to how the story's told.

As a documentarian, how would you modulate an actor's performance? How would you get what you needed?

I'd give them notes. I'm not sure what else I can say about it. I would talk through a scene if they weren't sure what their motivations were. It's an instinctual thing for me as a director. If what they're doing is not hitting the emotional beats for me, then I would explain that to them, say, "It's not quite working for me" for whatever reasons.

How long did the underwater scenes take?

We had three weeks with the cast and then two weeks with the second unit.

You ended up using two cinematographers, Nick Ramey Matthew and then Ian Seabrook for the underwater material. Did you collaborate differently with them?

Not really. Nick and Ian worked together. We wanted a unified feel across what was going on. We didn't want the underwater stuff to feel completely different. We strove for coherence, including with Grant Montgomery's production design.

I was always part of that discussion. So it was a collaboration with the three of us in that sense. It wasn't like I would only talk to Nick about one thing. When it came to planning and putting it all together, it was us talking as a threesome as it were.

You never have enough time with underwater filming, you have to capture the material.

We weren't just capturing stuff. How we approached it is what made it feel very different.

It's true we didn't have much time, 15 days in total of filming underwater. I don't know how much you know about underwater filming, but it's extremely time consuming. Any number of things can go wrong, which then takes an age to sort out and correct. I knew that going in from my experiences of doing a documentary. I've spent a decade filming on water.

But I storyboarded it all beforehand. Everything then was sort of laid out. Obviously if things started to go wrong, I had to think on my feet and say, "Well, we don't need that shot. We'll cover it with this."

With my documentary background, I'm very used to working and reacting to things to get what I need basically. I'm always editing in my head as I'm going along. But without doubt, planning was a crucial element because there is an enormous amount of underwater footage in the film. Much more so than in most films.

"Capture" may not have been the right word. I was so impressed by the composition and camera movement underwater, it pulled you into the story. How much of the look of the film did you achieve in post-production? Was post a different process than with documentaries?

In a top-level sense, not really. It still comes down to you and the editor in a room.

The way I approach documentaries, as I did with this feature as well, I try not to get too attached to things. If I get really attached to a shot, I'll try to bend the story, potentially to its detriment.

I started out as an editor, that was my first career in TV. In editing, I want to make it feel like I've been handed a box of rushes, and make the best I can from them. That's the approach I took with Last Breath. I made big narrative changes, moved scenes around, all kinds of things that went against how the script was written. In the moment, in the edit, the story is a different thing than on the page. A scene may read really well on the page, but I need to be free to move things around, to not be beholden to what I like in a scene.

You have to kill your babies.

Exactly. That's a crucial skill to have. You've got to be brutal about it.

Did adding the score change how you saw the film?

I worked with Paul Leonard-Morgan on the documentary, and he's been on every film I've done since as well. So I'm obviously going say his music brings a lot to the story. We have a shorthand, we know each other and how we work now. I think Paul's music and Ben Baird's sound design are so important because they're immediately emotional. Music connects to the human mind in a very subconscious way.

I loved going into detail with him at every beat basically, hearing how the score builds the drama and tension and emotion throughout.

How did you decide how to treat sound underwater? The communication between the divers and the surface, for example.

I discussed this with Ben, who did the documentary as well. He also did the sound design for Conclave. Here it was all about perspective. When you are hearing the actors talking underwater, if you are seeing them, it was about being in the helmet with them. Feeling that claustrophobia.

When you're on the bridge, you hear them through the comms with its accompanying distortion. It's all about placing the audience within the frame. When you're with Chris or Dave underwater, you want to feel that intensity, that fear. You want to be right up with them.

The film opens today, only in movie theaters, via Focus Features. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.