Adam Berg Interview: Black Crab | Screen Rant
Black Crab is the latest in the line of Netflix's high-quality international fare. The Swedish action thriller, which arrives on the streaming platform March 18, follows a top secret mission undertaken by six soldiers living in the midst of a post-apocalyptic world at war. Based on the novel by Jerker Virdborg, the tense story sees them risking life and limb to get a mysterious parcel across a frozen landscape without knowing the consequences in store for them.
Noomi Rapace, whose horror film You Won't Be Alone is following closely on Black Crab's heels, stars as speed skater-turned-soldier Caroline Edh. While her fellow soldiers are led by duty and despair, Edh has a much stronger source of inspiration: a potential reunion with her daughter. After being separated from her child for years, the promise of seeing her again leads her to take several extreme courses of action in order to keep hope alive.
Writer and director Adam Berg spoke to Screen Rant about the lessons he learned while making his first feature film, as well as the approach he took to Black Crab's harrowing action scenes.
Screen Rant: The character was originally male in the Black Crab novel. What was the process of creating Caroline like, and working with Noomi to really develop that character?
Adam Berg: From the start, when we started talking about the script and the film, it just felt like... The book was written 20 years ago. I think society looked slightly different then, and obviously we moved on in many ways. Having a female lead just felt normal, and I just felt right for it.
For me, it was quite important to not feel like a gung-ho military-style film. We wanted more humanity in there, so that was a good way to move away from everything that you've seen before.
And then I had a meeting with Noomi, maybe five or six years ago, when we started first talking about this film. She really liked it and came on board. From that point on, the character merged with her and just became her, so a lot of her traits became Edh's traits. They became quite inseparable; it just had to be her. For sure, the role was totally written for her.
In the book, obviously, there is no daughter; that doesn't really exist. But we just wanted to give her a motivation that was outside of any mission. It wasn't about that. The film, for me at least, is all about what you're willing to do to get what you want or to survive or [help] your loved ones. What are you willing to sacrifice for your freedom or for survival? I think that's the bottom of it, and it was just finding the themes to lift that up.
I believe this is your directorial debut in terms of feature films. How different was it from your previous work, and were there any obstacles for you to overcome?
Adam Berg: I shot a lot of commercials and music videos and short films and stuff, so on the surface, it's more or less the same. It works the same way practically, and on set it's the same.
But I think the big difference is that, first of all, you have a narrative that you always have to follow. That dictates how the camera works and what follows what, and it's just over a much longer time. It's a marathon; it's not a sprint race, where you can just go. It takes a long, long time to finish it. Practically, it's two or three years of work, but I worked much longer on this because it was such a long time coming before that. That's a huge difference.
I haven't necessarily really worked with actors before. I worked with actors, but in a very simplified way or form. That was also quite daunting, in a way, but I think I was blessed with an immensely talented cast for this. I'm so grateful and humbled to have this array of actors on my film. Noomi, obviously, with all her experience and enthusiasm and energy was a huge help to bring it to life. So, I was in good hands.
Noomi's role is very physically intensive, but in general, there are a lot of action scenes. Everyone's ice skating and shooting. How do you prepare your cast for that process, and how do you yourself approach those action scenes?
Adam Berg: For the cast, we had to train quite a lot. Obviously, there was a lot of skate training to do. And I think, as with most things, you tend to simplify in your mind how, "It can't be that hard." They learn how to skate, and then you put all the gear on them and a gun, and then there's the night and the wind - it just changed. Every layer you put back in, it made it harder. Going and shooting, and also the conditions we shot in, which was cold and windy and dark and night and wet. All the misery of it was complicated.
But for the action sequences and how we prepared for it, I was quite aware that when you're on skates, you travel really fast. You're never really stuck in one little place, because you can skate 30 kilometers an hour. It goes fast, so you need quite huge expanses to shoot on, which was obviously a challenge to get that room to shoot.
I'm not a huge action fan. I think it can be exciting, but I wanted to keep it really short. In reality, they tend to be fast. It goes very, very quickly. When something happens, it just happens, and then it's over. That was kind of the approach to all the action scenes, because we didn't want the soldiers to be some elite squad. We wanted them to be real people, so they're not perfect shots. They're not great marksman. They're not superhumans, they are just trying to survive.
When it happened, it needs to be fast, and then it's over. Everything is acted out of panic, so we tried to keep the action sequences pretty swift.
Now that you have mastered this genre, is there any other kind of film you'd like to tackle next?
Adam Berg: I really like genre films. I think stepping even further into science fiction will be fun, and I have a weak spot for horror.