Linus Wilson's Blog, page 21

BREAKIN’ the RULZ! FLYING a DOG to TAHITI

For the sailing season in French Polynesia, we flew in the dog. Visiting Tahiti with a dog is tough! This video will show you how. We fly into LAX early to get our vet visits and USDA APHIS forms filled out after getting a preliminary import permit after 9 months of work including a rabies shot, titer test, two APHIS forms, and much more. After all that they fly into the Papeete airport (PPT).

Linus can’t get back to the Slow Boat in Hiva Oa because of a firefighter strike that closed down most of the airports in French Polynesia. He stays at the Tahiti Airport Motel and Pension de la Plage while he waits. He visits the beach and Le Meridien Tahiti. They try to catch the Aranui 5 cruise ship, but no dogs are allowed. This is a much watch for anyone travelling to the French Polynesia with a dog. It is very hard to fly your dog into a rabies free country.

Subscribe to get season 2 in the crossing the Pacific and sail the Marquesas, Fakarava, and Tahiti.

For a limited time get $5 off your next purchase with SailTimer at the link below:

SailTimer Wind Instrument: Advanced features, low price.

http://www.SailTimerWind.com/SlowBoatSailing

The SailTimer Wind Instrument is a wireless, solar-powered masthead anemometer. It works with lots of navigation and charting apps. You can raise it from deck level if your boat is in the water, and it has lots of other cool innovations too. Check out the web site to see how it works — and get a discount while supporting our sponsor.

We use a Mantus Anchor and swivel on our boat. Get all your Mantus gear at

http://www.mantusanchors.com/?affiliates=15

Mantus Anchors and SailTimer Wind Instrument (TM) are corporate sponsors of this video.

Support us at

http://www.Patreon.com/slowboatsailing

Slow Boat to the Bahamas

Slow Boat to Cuba

and

How to Sail Around the World-Part Time

have been #1 sailing bestseller on Amazon.

Associate Producer, Anders Colbenson

Sign up for our free newsletter for access to free books and other promotions at http://www.slowboatsailing.com

music by http://www.BenSound.com

Copyright Linus Wilson, Vermilion Advisory Services, LLC, 2018

BREAKIN’ the RULZ! FLYING a DOG to TAHITI

For the sailing season in French Polynesia, we flew in the dog. Visiting Tahiti with a dog is tough! This video will show you how. We fly into LAX early to get our vet visits and USDA APHIS forms filled out after getting a preliminary import permit after 9 months of work including a rabies shot, titer test, two APHIS forms, and much more. After all that they fly into the Papeete airport (PPT).

Linus can’t get back to the Slow Boat in Hiva Oa because of a firefighter strike that closed down most of the airports in French Polynesia. He stays at the Tahiti Airport Motel and Pension de la Plage while he waits. He visits the beach and Le Meridien Tahiti. They try to catch the Aranui 5 cruise ship, but no dogs are allowed. This is a much watch for anyone travelling to the French Polynesia with a dog. It is very hard to fly your dog into a rabies free country.

Subscribe to get season 2 in the crossing the Pacific and sail the Marquesas, Fakarava, and Tahiti.

For a limited time get $5 off your next purchase with SailTimer at the link below:

SailTimer Wind Instrument: Advanced features, low price.

http://www.SailTimerWind.com/SlowBoatSailing

The SailTimer Wind Instrument is a wireless, solar-powered masthead anemometer. It works with lots of navigation and charting apps. You can raise it from deck level if your boat is in the water, and it has lots of other cool innovations too. Check out the web site to see how it works — and get a discount while supporting our sponsor.

We use a Mantus Anchor and swivel on our boat. Get all your Mantus gear at

http://www.mantusanchors.com/?affiliates=15

Mantus Anchors and SailTimer Wind Instrument (TM) are corporate sponsors of this video.

Support us at

http://www.Patreon.com/slowboatsailing

Slow Boat to the Bahamas

Slow Boat to Cuba

and

How to Sail Around the World-Part Time

have been #1 sailing bestseller on Amazon.

Associate Producer, Anders Colbenson

Sign up for our free newsletter for access to free books and other promotions at http://www.slowboatsailing.com

music by http://www.BenSound.com

Copyright Linus Wilson, Vermilion Advisory Services, LLC, 2018

BREAKIN’ the RULZ! FLYING a DOG to TAHITI

For the sailing season in French Polynesia, we flew in the dog. Visiting Tahiti with a dog is tough! This video will show you how. We fly into LAX early to get our vet visits and USDA APHIS forms filled out after getting a preliminary import permit after 9 months of work including a rabies shot, titer test, two APHIS forms, and much more. After all that they fly into the Papeete airport (PPT).

Linus can’t get back to the Slow Boat in Hiva Oa because of a firefighter strike that closed down most of the airports in French Polynesia. He stays at the Tahiti Airport Motel and Pension de la Plage while he waits. He visits the beach and Le Meridien Tahiti. They try to catch the Aranui 5 cruise ship, but no dogs are allowed. This is a much watch for anyone travelling to the French Polynesia with a dog. It is very hard to fly your dog into a rabies free country.

Subscribe to get season 2 in the crossing the Pacific and sail the Marquesas, Fakarava, and Tahiti.

For a limited time get $5 off your next purchase with SailTimer at the link below:

SailTimer Wind Instrument: Advanced features, low price.

http://www.SailTimerWind.com/SlowBoatSailing

The SailTimer Wind Instrument is a wireless, solar-powered masthead anemometer. It works with lots of navigation and charting apps. You can raise it from deck level if your boat is in the water, and it has lots of other cool innovations too. Check out the web site to see how it works — and get a discount while supporting our sponsor.

We use a Mantus Anchor and swivel on our boat. Get all your Mantus gear at

http://www.mantusanchors.com/?affiliates=15

Mantus Anchors and SailTimer Wind Instrument (TM) are corporate sponsors of this video.

Support us at

http://www.Patreon.com/slowboatsailing

Slow Boat to the Bahamas

Slow Boat to Cuba

and

How to Sail Around the World-Part Time

have been #1 sailing bestseller on Amazon.

Associate Producer, Anders Colbenson

Sign up for our free newsletter for access to free books and other promotions at http://www.slowboatsailing.com

music by http://www.BenSound.com

Copyright Linus Wilson, Vermilion Advisory Services, LLC, 2018

Who was Donald Crowhurst? #ColinFirth #RachelWeisz #TheMercy

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Donald Crowhurst was born near Delhi in British colonial India in 1932 to John and Alice Crowhurst. At the age of eight he was sent to an Indian boarding school where he would spend nine months of the year. Two years later, his parents moved to Western Pakistan. After the Second World War, aged fourteen, Donald was sent back to England to board at Loughborough College. His parents returned to England in 1947 when India gained Independence from Britain and the Partition took place. His father ploughed all of his retirement savings into an ill-fated business deal in the new territory of Pakistan. The Crowhurst’s life in post-war England was a far cry from colonial life. The lack of funds forced Donald to leave Loughborough College at the age of sixteen once he passed his School Certificate, and sadly John Crowhurst died in March 1948.

After starting as an apprentice in electronic engineering at the Royal Aircraft Establishment Technical College in Farnborough, Donald went on to join the RAF in 1953; he learned to fly and was commissioned. He enjoyed the life of a young officer and was described by many as charming, warm, wild, brave and a compulsive risk-taker who defied authority and possessed a madcap sense of humour. After he was asked to leave the RAF, he promptly enlisted in the army, was commissioned and took a course in electronic control equipment. He resigned from the army in 1956 and went on to carry out research work at Reading University aged twenty-four.

Crowhurst is remembered as being quite dashing and he caught the attention of his future wife Clare at a party in Reading in 1957. Clare was from Ireland and had been in England for 3 years. Apparently he told her that she would “marry an impossible man”. He said he would never leave her side and took her out the very next evening. Theirs was a romantic, whirlwind courtship that took place over the spring and summer of 1957. They married on 5th October and their first son, James was born the following year. It was at this time that Crowhurst began sailing seriously.

He secured a job with an electronics firm called Mullards but left after a year and aged twenty-six, he became Chief Design Engineer with another electronics company in Bridgwater, Somerset. His real dream was to invent his own electronic devices and he would spend hours of his spare time tinkering with wires and transistors creating gadgets. He also found solace in sailing his small, blue, 20-foot boat, Pot of Gold.

Crowhurst designed the Navicator, a radio direction-finding device for yachting and set up his company Electron Utilisation to manufacture and market the gadget. Donald and Clare’s family expanded with the arrival of Simon in 1960, Roger in 1961 and Rachel in 1962 and they lived happily in the Somerset countryside.

When Electron Utilisation hit financial difficulty, Crowhurst was introduced to Taunton businessman, Stanley Best, who agreed to back the company and Best eventually

sponsored Crowhurst’s attempt to circumnavigate the world in the trimaran Teignmouth Electron.

With the Empire gone, in 1960s Britain there developed a phenomenon where men sought adventure, recognition and heroism. Sending men to the moon was something Britain couldn’t afford, so instead, heroes came in the form of people like Francis Chichester who was the first person to tackle a single-handed circumnavigation of the world, starting and finishing in England with one stop in Sydney. Upon his return in 1967, Chichester was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and instantly became a national hero.

Capitalising on this wave of interest in individual round the world voyages, The Sunday Times sponsored the Golden Globe race, a non-stop, single-handed round the world yacht race. No qualifications were required for entrants but the rule was that they had to depart between 1st June and 31st October 1968 in order to pass through the Southern Ocean in summer. The trophy would be awarded to the first person to complete the race unassisted via the old clipper route, of the great Capes: Good Hope, Leeuwin and Horn. The newspaper also offered a cash prize of £5000 for the fastest single-handed navigation.

Nine sailors started the race, four retired before leaving the Atlantic Ocean. Chay Blyth who had no previous sailing experience, retired after passing the Cape of Good Hope. Nigel Tetley was leading the race but sank with 1,100 nautical miles to go. Frenchman Bernard Moitessier rejected the commercial nature of the race, so abandoned it but continued sailing, completing the circumnavigation and carried on half way around the globe again.

Donald Crowhurst’s Teignmouth Electron was discovered mid-Atlantic, 1,800 miles from England at 7.50am on 10th July 1969 by the Royal Mail vessel, Picardy that was en route from London to the Caribbean. On inspection, the trimaran was deserted and a subsequent US Air Force search for Crowhurst followed to no avail.

British sailor Robin Knox-Johnston was the only entrant to complete the race. He was awarded both prizes and subsequently donated his £5000 prize money to Clare Crowhurst and the Crowhurst children.

Director James Marsh carried out painstaking research and delved deep into the heart and soul of what made Donald Crowhurst tick: “If I can speculate on Crowhurst’s background and his experience, he seemed to have a series of failures, if you like, and he escaped the failure by rolling the dice bigger on the next adventure. He was a man of enormous energy and charm and that energy and charm led him into decisions like the ones he made in joining the race, for example. He had enormous self-belief as well, and people around him substantiated that. He managed to fund and build that boat, so there’s a danger of overlooking what he achieved in this story as well as what he didn’t achieve. He achieved enormous amounts”.

“He was a fairly inexperienced sailor but he wasn’t as inexperienced as some people think he was. He hadn’t sailed the ocean properly, yet he built this very fast trimaran, but the boat wasn’t fully tested and finished. He made a pretty good go at sailing round the world – he stayed out in the ocean for the best part of seven months so all in all, he achieved much more than people ever thought he could, he just didn’t achieve what his objective was. It was a case of over-reach, it was hubris and that is what caused the tragedy of his demise”, concludes Marsh.

The research materials available on Crowhurst were “endless” says James Marsh, “there are quite a few books out there and great raw materials that he left behind, his logbooks, his diaries and letters he wrote to his wife”.

In the course of the research, Marsh also read a lot about psychology and about isolation, “You can read about what happens to prisoners who are on their own for six months and what that does to their minds. I made a documentary about a chimpanzee and he went mad within three days. There’s something about us as animals that are entirely social”.

Marsh found Crowhurst’s logbooks to be one of the most fascinating elements of research “because they’re the real thing when they’re not the real thing, he’s disguising the real thing. You can perceive the real story through the disguise”.

“I would drive around the country looking at locations listening to Crowhurst’s tapes” recalls Marsh, “He sings on the tapes, mostly sea shanties and he speculates about the state of the world, about politics, about his own life. It’s extraordinary really, some of that is a persona but some of it also is the truth. That’s the great joy of this kind of film – you get a chance to research and the more you know the more you want to know”.

The public persona Donald Crowhurst created through his tape recordings and the way he talks to his family and people on dry land were, according to James Marsh, “increasingly divorced from what he was feeling and experiencing. In our portrayal, he becomes primitive essentially. He’s stripped of civilisation and becomes much more elemental and that’s shown in his physicality, he loses weight, doesn’t wear as many clothes and starts to look like a vagabond on the boat. The mental journey is much more interesting than the physicality and we just had to bring that to the character”.

“There are entries in the logbooks and in the tape recordings that he became aware of the cosmic reality of where he was.” comments Marsh. “No-one behaved rationally after a certain point in that race. Moitessier lost his mind a bit too – he went round again! Robin Knox-Johnston was perhaps the exception but his boat was in a very strange state when he came back to the British coastline. All in all, no-one was spared by this journey”.

“The sea is like a desert. It’s also mercurial, it has moods, it changes, and it threatens you. But, all you’re seeing is a horizon and a sky. The sea changes colour, it can be stormy and it has this sort of personality that can destroy you,” muses Marsh. “The

isolation is a huge part of what goes wrong in Crowhurst’s mind. Your brain chemistry changes when you don’t speak to people”.

When a real-life character is portrayed on screen, there comes a certain responsibility to the memory of the person and to the feelings of loved ones. James Marsh doesn’t think there is any ‘definitive’ version of any true story, “that’s the great virtue of true stories, you can interpret them this way or that way, endlessly”. He says The Mercy is “a version of a story that we think has some truth to it. There’s no definitive version apart from the reality of what actually happened. You capture and distil it somehow into a dramatic form or a documentary form. There is a duty to respect that character and to be sympathetic. Colin and I both respect that – we both really liked Crowhurst, we felt we knew enough about him to go on with this story and get to the truth of it. Colin plays him with such sympathy and such careful precise emotional progression, which is totally profound”.

“A lot of artists became quite obsessed with Donald Crowhurst” notes Rachel Weisz who plays his wife Clare in The Mercy, “I actually think this story is a very loving portrait of him and his ambitions. There’s a kind of Donald Crowhurst in all of us, we all dream of some kind of glory. I think in the culture we live in now, we’re encouraged to reach beyond our lot or our station. Crowhurst could have made it and it would be a very different story. At the time, there was perhaps this notion that he’d cheated and lied, but I don’t really feel the story’s about that. It’s about somebody who is a dreamer and he gets caught up in a kind of white lie. Everybody exaggerates a little bit now and then to suit his or her story but obviously, this is a very extreme version of it, therefore it makes good drama. I think Donald Crowhurst is immensely human and relatable. He’s not a strange, un-understandable being. I think he’s very understandable. I think the essence of the film is celebrating him as a kind of romantic hero. I hope his family might feel that too, because that’s my feeling about the film” concludes Weisz.

This post and photo was from the StudioCanal UK production notes and press assets for The Mercy movie premiering in the UK on February 9, 2018.

The Secrets of Filming on a Sailboat: The Mercy (2018) #ColinFirth #RachelWeisz Movie Director Talks about Filming the Story of Donald Crowhurst at Sea

[image error]The logistics of shooting out at sea both in the UK and Malta were a constant challenge. During the UK shoot, aside from shooting Crowhurst’s departure from Teignmouth, production moved to Portland in Dorset where the unit battled weather, tides and long hours out at sea.

Producer Pete Czernin admits that every other producer he spoke to said, “Don’t go near the sea”. Malta posed its own challenges because of the heat and length of the shooting day out at sea and “endless problems with the horizon and seeing the land, with other boats passing so you’ve got to make sure you’re far enough out at sea”. “On top of that we were shooting on film so magazines would run out while we were out there so we had all the logistics associated with that but I think Portland and Weymouth was the biggest challenge because of the wind, changing weather and waves. Then there’s the fact that the crew need to eat and go to the loo. It was kind of bonkers and very difficult. I don’t think I’ll make another film on the water in a hurry” confirms Czernin.

In Malta, numbers were limited to eight people on the crew catamaran, when normally you would have around 30 shooting crew. The camera department were on a separate boat, as were hair and make-up there was a main boat for director James Marsh, a safety boat, three or four ribs, then a runner boat. When you’re shooting an eight or ten-hour day, three or four miles offshore everything the crew requires has to be on hand, hence the need for the ‘mothership’ as it became known. This large motorboat had amongst other things, essentials like toilet facilities and drinking water. “You can see why a lot of people don’t want to film at sea” says Jim Dines, “but you do get such a better image, the movement and the whole thing feels much more real”.

When asked what his thoughts were on filming at sea again, director James Marsh responded quite simply by saying, “Well, just not to do it again because it’s a foolhardy thing to do in a way. I can see why people want to shoot films in the controlled environment of a tank where you can very easily control the movement of the boat. But, the actual motion of the boat and the experience of shooting with Colin on the boat was so important to the texture of the film.”

Marsh worked with French cinematographer Eric Gautier who was also insistent on shooting it for real on the ocean. “The experience is more like a documentary because it’s a minimal unit and Colin. It made the collaboration with Colin so interesting because there were no other actors involved. It wasn’t easy. You’re stuck out there so you get a small sense of what Crowhurst went through, but it’s an amateur’s vicarious thrill compared to what he was doing”, concludes Marsh.

The above text and photo were taken the StudioCanal UK press assets and production notes.

Rachel Weisz Discusses Playing Clare Crowhurst in THE MERCY (2018)

“I think this film is about family”, comments Rachel Weisz, who plays Donald Crowhurst’s wife, Clare. “Donald, the head of the family is an amateur sailor, an inventor, a dreamer and a fantasist, so when he sees a competition in the Sunday Times offering £5000 to the first man who circumnavigates the earth single-handedly, without stopping, he dreams that he could do this. Chichester had sailed around the world recently, stopping once and he was knighted upon his return and became a hero. It’s a story about how boys and men become fixated with becoming heroes”.

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“I think Donald had a lot of madcap ideas which often didn’t get carried out, so at first when Clare hears he’s going to enter this race, it’s such a preposterous idea to her, because he’s not a professional sailor, he’s just pottered around. I don’t think she believed he would actually do it. Slowly but surely it dawns on her that he’s getting closer and closer to actually going and there’s a moment where she asks him ‘Are you really going to go?’ and  he says ‘yes’”.

The question is – could Clare Crowhurst have stopped her husband from embarking on this risky challenge? “Perhaps he would have been stoppable,” says Weisz, “but from my viewpoint, it’s a portrait of a marriage and a relationship and what would have happened had she stopped him from going? Would he ever have forgiven her? In a relationship, can you stop the other from living out their dreams? In this case, it turns out to be tragic decision. Clare Crowhurst has said in interviews that she felt retrospectively that she should have stopped him. But, I think in the moment, she didn’t feel like she had the right to. She was in an impossible situation.”

“It sort of becomes two films, the one at sea, where myself and the children are not there, and then there’s the family home, waiting for news of her husband and their father who is becoming a national hero whilst he’s at sea. Clare has to deal with the press, with long periods of silence and Christmas and birthdays without him. She also has to deal with having no money to buy food or heat the house without him because Clare depended on Donald for money.”

In the course of her research for the film, Rachel Weisz got a sense of Clare from the documentary Deep Water and from reading about her, “that she really wasn’t interested in being married to someone famous. I sense that she loved him very, very deeply and she didn’t want to stop him living out his dreams.”

“At that time in history, men were leaving their homes and crossing new frontiers, be it in outer space or circumnavigating the world. So, for Clare, she was happy he was going to be successful as that was going to make him happy” muses Weisz, “I think she was happy if Don was happy.”

When an actor approaches a role where the character being portrayed is real and still alive, there comes a certain responsibility. Rachel Weisz was keen not to do an impersonation of Clare Crowhurst, but to simply convey something of her spirit as she explains, “I think it would be different if one were playing someone already iconic, as everybody would know what they looked like and how they spoke. I’m playing a real person who has been very media-shy. She has not sought fame or publicity, she was never interested in that. I want to honour her. I watched a lot of footage to get an essence of her but at the end of the day, it’s me being her”.

In telling Donald Crowhurst’s story on the big screen, Rachel Weisz hopes, “We’re celebrating the beauty of being a dreamer, the beauty of thinking big, wanting great things and following one’s passion and one’s heart towards doing something incredible.”

For director James Marsh, the heart of the tragedy and what made the stakes so high, is the fact that the Crowhurst family was such a happy one, “In the archive, you can see what a lovely couple Donald and Clare were together. You sense they were really well connected as a couple and it’s a happy family unit. They sail together and Donald is a very good father and we really wanted to show that in the film. His children all remember him so fondly. He was a good husband and father, and what’s so tragic, part of what he wants to do is to prove to his wife and children that he’s someone special. I think that’s part of the motivation for him.”

“In the archive of the real Clare Crowhurst, she’s a formidable woman and a very good mother and they’re sort of equals as a couple” notes James Marsh. He’d long wanted to work with Rachel Weisz, so when it came to casting the role of Clare Crowhurst, a perfect opportunity presented itself as he explains, “Rachel is great and there’s an interesting physical connection you can make between her and Clare. They don’t look alike but they’re on the same sort of spectrum of humanity if you like, just as Colin and Donald are which is helpful.”

“Rachel is one of those actors who just surprises you and does things you don’t quite expect her to”, recalls Marsh, “that flushes out things in other actors. I loved working with her. She really relies on instinct, she doesn’t really like to do lots of rehearsals or commit to things. Rachel always wants to be loose and to respond. I love that style of work from her.”

Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns feels that for the audience, the voyage Clare goes on is just as important as the voyage Don goes on, “You get the sense that her insight into her husband – both in terms of his need to go and her acceptance of what happened afterwards – is extraordinary, it’s from a place of reluctance to a place of forgiveness.”

“The great thing about Rachel is that she understands the strength of Clare Crowhurst”, observes Burns. “Rachel also understands that the moment in history we’re talking about, also asked certain things of a woman in terms of being a wife. I think she very quickly understood the journey Clare went on. On one had she wanted to be loving and nurturing but you also see a very progressive thinker. Most people would be aghast at the prospect of their husband setting off on this kind of adventure, but Clare understood how fundamental it was to his being and that casts a really interesting light on their relationship.”

“To me it’s a love story”, concludes Rachel Weisz, “you don’t see them meeting as teenagers, you meet them when they have children and they’re settled into their marriage. I think they were passionately in love with each other and Clare’s whole life is Donald. She didn’t have a job, though I think she wanted to teach amongst other things, and to write. But she was a mum and very devoted to Donald. That’s how I perceive her. I guess what makes it so romantic is the fact that they’re separated because that’s what old school romantic with a capital ‘R’ means – something that’s unattainable, unfulfilled and broken. That’s why it’s tragic because I think they were yearning for each other while they were separated.”

The interview and press asset pictures were taken from THE MERCY (2018) production notes produced by StudioCanal UK.

THE MERCY trailer REACTION | Colin Firth & Rachel Weisz | Sailing Movie Review 2018

The Mercy (2018) starring Colin Firth, as Donald Crowhurst, and Rachel Weisz as his wife promises to be one of the best sailing movies of all time. This is a NO SPOILER reaction and review for trailers #1 & #2. Linus Wilson breaks from his round the world sailing trip to analyze this Oscar-worthy movie.

There is a lot of talk of madness, sanity, and dreams in this trailer about Donald Crowhurst’s attempt to be the fastest man to sail solo around the world in 1968. It is beautifully written script by Scott Z. Burns. The movie debuts in 9 February 2018 in the UK. It is planned to be distributed by Village Roadshow in the USA later in 2018. This movie has big time Academy Award potential not just for the Oscar winners Rachel Weisz and Colin Firth, but everyone involved in this marvelous production.

Linus discusses the official StudioCanal trailers #1 and #2:

Trailer #1

“THE MERCY – Official Trailer – Starring Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz”

Trailer #2

“THE MERCY – 60″ – Starring Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz”

From the StudioCanal UK Production Notes for THE MERCY

“Short Synopsis

Following his Academy Award® winning film The Theory of Everything, James Marsh directs the incredible true story of Donald Crowhurst (COLIN FIRTH, The King’s Speech, Kingsman: The Secret Service, The Railway Man), an amateur sailor who competed in the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race in the hope of becoming the first person in history to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe without stopping. With an unfinished boat and his business and house on the line, Donald leaves his wife, Clare (RACHEL WEISZ, The Light Between Oceans, The Lobster) and their children behind, hesitantly embarking on an adventure on his boat the Teignmouth Electron. Co-starring DAVID THEWLIS (Anomalisa, The Theory of Everything) and KEN STOTT (‘War & Peace’, The Hobbit), and produced by Blueprint Pictures (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, In Bruges), the story of Crowhurst’s dangerous solo voyage and the struggles he confronted on the epic journey while his family awaited his return is one of the most enduring mysteries of recent times.”

Check out our other video about this movie and the Crowhurst story featuring director Simon Rumley:

Subscribe to get season 2 in the crossing the Pacific and sail the Marquesas, Fakarava, and Tahiti.

For a limited time get $5 off your next purchase with SailTimer at the link below:

SailTimer Wind Instrument: Advanced features, low price.

http://www.SailTimerWind.com/SlowBoatSailing

The SailTimer Wind Instrument is a wireless, solar-powered masthead anemometer. It works with lots of navigation and charting apps. You can raise it from deck level if your boat is in the water, and it has lots of other cool innovations too. Check out the web site to see how it works — and get a discount while supporting our sponsor.

We use a Mantus Anchor and swivel on our boat. Get all your Mantus gear at

http://www.mantusanchors.com/?affiliates=15

Mantus Anchors and SailTimer Wind Instrument (TM) are corporate sponsors of this video.

Support us at

http://www.Patreon.com/slowboatsailing

Slow Boat to the Bahamas

Slow Boat to Cuba

and

How to Sail Around the World-Part Time

have been #1 sailing bestseller on Amazon.

Associate Producer, Anders Colbenson

Sign up for our free newsletter for access to free books and other promotions at http://www.slowboatsailing.com

music by http://www.BenSound.com

Copyright Linus Wilson, Vermilion Advisory Services, 2018

Q&A with Colin Firth about Playing Donald Crowhurst in THE MERCY (2018) a February 9, 2018,UK release

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Q: You were attached and committed to the project from very early on. What

was it about this film that spoke to you?

A: You don’t have to have been to sea, you don’t have to be a sailor, you don’t

have to be an explorer. You don’t even have to have taken on anything particularly

extreme in the obvious sense. I think people will recognise what it feels like to go

further than you are truly able to, to take on something ambitious, risky and really

dare to make a gesture like that in their lives, even if it’s just in their relationships. I

think they’ll also recognise the idea of having rather random things seem to conspire

against them. There are very few stories that really deal with that.

The traps that one can get into are so gradual and incremental that you don’t see

them until they’re too big to do anything about. From my own life, that moment I

should have turned back, is never something I can identify except in retrospect.

I think when we were looking into this story, all the details, all the preparations, all the

things that were going wrong, all the things that conspired against one particular

individual, these would be the stories that applied to the heroes that we celebrate.

Every time you hear about the guy who reached the top of Everest, the whole space

programme or the first man to cross the desert or the ocean, if you study the stories

of their preparation there were always things going wrong.

The narrative is interpreted completely differently if it ends happily than if it doesn’t

and I think sometimes there’s a hair’s difference between it going one way or the

other.

Q: Did you have an immediate connection with Donald Crowhurst and that

duality he felt between his public and private persona?

A: I think we all have a public and a private persona, perhaps more than that. I

think we live in a time where we are all quite obsessed with broadcasting ourselves,

in some way or other, through social media. Perhaps that’s always been the case,

but we now have new tools for doing it. We take photographs of ourselves, we post

versions of ourselves and we create profiles of ourselves.

If the profile becomes a big one and in cases where people are very well known

and they develop a reputation, whether it’s politicians or people in the arts, I think it

can become a sort of a burden. I think you can be trapped by your reputation

whether it’s a good one or a bad one.

In some ways, when I read this story, I felt that was something that would resonate

with a lot of people.

Q: Do you think Donald Crowhurst was fated in some way?

A: No, I don’t think so. Fate, I don’t even think it’s about that. If you believe in

fate you’re welcome to look at it through that lens but no, I think it’s random. We’d

be telling a different story, had one piece of equipment been on the boat, if one

day’s weather had been different, the business arrangements worked out

differently. But it’s almost impossible to deconstruct the ‘what-ifs’.

There are a lot of random elements. It’s a whole other discussion when you look at

what makes somebody want to take on something so extraordinarily difficult and

dangerous. I reflected on the main differences between me and Donald Crowhurst,

his virtues and his strengths. I wouldn’t dare do what he did. I wouldn’t have the

ability to apply myself to a task like that. I wouldn’t be able to design that boat, I

wouldn’t have the mathematical skill, I wouldn’t have the sailing skill, and I wouldn’t

have the knowledge of astronomy and navigation. All the other things could be

me and the problems could be ones any of us encounter. I just wouldn’t have the

resources that he had to get as far as he did and do what he did. It was a most

extraordinary thing.

Even to this day, what Crowhurst did is unparalleled because, although people

have gone round the world and have endured all sorts, I don’t know if it’s even

possible now to construct a challenge with that sort of adversity. I think it was Robin

Knox-Johnston who said ‘they were like astronauts’. They were sailing across a

frontier, because there was no GPS and the ways of finding you were scant. They

had a radio but their communications were rudimentary by today’s standards. They

were sailing with the same sort of equipment that Captain Cook was using. It hadn’t

moved on much. It was sextant, barometer, compass, wind vane and your own

skills. You could get lost and no-one would be there to rescue you, unless you were

very fortunate and someone was within range of your Morse Code.

I’m certainly not saying anything to diminish the extraordinary feats of what people

do today, but the idea of that degree of isolation for that length of time, I can’t think

of how one could parallel it now, because the communications are so

comprehensive. I understand that there is some sort of plan to reproduce this race

for the anniversary in a couple of years’ time, and if they decide they’re not going

to use GPS but to use precisely the tools and technology that were available in the

1960s, there are still so many satellites up there, you can’t really get so completely

and utterly lost and out on your own, as you could then.

Q: It took place at a time in history when men could reinvent themselves and the

classes were breaking down. It’s perhaps for that reason that Crowhurst’s story is

such an enduringly fascinating one. Did you ask ‘why did he do it?’

A: Well, I just had to accept at face value what he said about it himself. But I think that

by not accepting the challenge that it would have affected something within him.

It makes sense to me. I think he did have the ability to do it. He had more ability

than most of us to create the possibility in terms of boat design, in terms of his sailing

ability and in terms of his navigational ability. Things just went wrong. There’s a very

fine line between succeeding and just not succeeding. Nine guys went out on that

race and only one actually came home, all for various reasons.

People do take on extraordinarily dangerous things. I can understand why

Crowhurst did it. As the famous saying goes, why does anyone undertake these

things: “Because it’s there.” (*quote from explorer George Leigh Mallory).

Q: There is obviously a wealth of research material on Crowhurst. Can you talk

us through your own research?

A: I just went through everything that was available. It started with the script, then

the documentary Deep Water and then the book, The Strange Last Voyage of

Donald Crowhurst by Tomalin and Hall. The book is an interesting read. Even before

I became partial and tendentious in my own views and felt so personally drawn to

Donald Crowhurst, the book – which is brilliant journalism and very rigorously written

– I felt was unfair on him, in ways that at times it was just to do with the subtlety of

inflection. I thought they were uncharitable interpretations. One has to remember

it was written very soon after the events, and by the Sunday Times journalists, and I

think there was an agenda, or at least they were writing from a particular point of

view. But, it was certainly very, very compelling in terms of information.

There’s also the archive footage and there are the tapes that Donald Crowhurst

made during his voyage for the BBC. They were fascinating partly because of some

of the information he was able to give about daily life. He focussed on his cooking

regime, on what he was seeing, on the weather, his problems with his transmitter.

He sang a lot – Christmas carols, sea shanties, ballads. He played his mouth organ.

Paradoxically, you can feel you’re in the company of a man who’s completely

alone. But they are in some ways much more his public self. I think it was even

observed by people who were close to him, that the tapes didn’t really quite sound

like him.

Then you have the logs, some of which are just ship’s log – positions and records of

the things you’re supposed to put in a ship’s log. Some of it was more to do with his

thoughts and were very, very rigorous and stark breakdowns of his practical

problems – calculating his chance of survival if he went forward as being at best

fifty-fifty. There are also very realistic and professional lists of things that needed

doing – ones that might have solutions, and ones that couldn’t possibly have

solutions. You start to see the extent of his problems and the trap he was in through

a very hard-headed analysis. I’m an amateur but he lays it out so clearly that you

look at it and think, ‘No-one could go forward. You have to stop.’ But the conditions

of stopping were so brutal. That was the kind of pressure, whether it’s the pressure

of the public eye or whether it’s something about, what you’ve had to summon in

yourself to embark on something like that, followed by the solitude and everything

you’re up against. I don’t think any of us can possibly understand that.

I think it’s very important to note what Robin Knox-Johnston said specifically about

Donald Crowhurst: ‘No-one has any right or is in any position to judge unless you’ve

experienced that solitude, unless you’ve experienced the elements in that way’. In

telling this story, it’s my hope that it can be distilled into that particular objective.

When I read it, it was a feeling that we are in no position to judge and that it’s no

good for us, or anybody to judge.

It’s very interesting to read around and look at the experiences of the other sailors

in the same race, because there were sailors who were considerably less

experienced than Donald Crowhurst. Chay Blyth hadn’t sailed in his life – he went

out with an instruction manual and a boat behind him yelling out instructions. He’d

rowed across the Atlantic but he hadn’t sailed and now he’s a legendary sailor.

Ridgeway who’d rowed with him, the solitude got the better of him, very early on in

the voyage, and he quit. Carozzo was up against similar problems to Donald

Crowhurst in that the deadline was looming and he did something that was rather

ingeniously strategic, in that he met the deadline by sailing on the day of the

deadline, and then he dropped anchor off the coast of the Isle of Wight and spent

another two weeks doing what he needed to do, but the stress of it all gave him a

stomach ulcer and he had to pull out.

Q: The truly unique thing about your job is in how close you have to get to a

character and how you pour that empathy into it. What’s that experience like? Did

you hear Crowhurst’s voice?

I literally heard his voice because I listened to the tapes continually. I went into the

material continually. Actors have to withhold judgement. It’s not our job to judge

at all – they even tell you this at drama school. Other people will probably make

their own judgements and again it’s usually a pretty easy, facile thing to do. As an

actor, we have to inhabit and justify a character and there’s nothing particularly

strange or airy-fairy about that.

As actors, we’re just doing it from the inside and to some extent you feel you’ve

walked a mile in someone’s shoes. But there’s always that sense that you haven’t

reached it, particularly if you’re telling the story of a real character. When the

character’s fictional you can satisfy yourself, hopefully, that you own it, that you’ve

created something which is much more yours. When the character’s real it’s partly

a privilege or just sheer good fortune and is helpful to have the made material there.

If the character’s somebody that you’re able to meet, you have all that to inspire

you and to work off. But to me it’s also a reminder that you’re not him. It does put

you in a very strange and very close relationship.

Q: There must be a sense of duty as audiences will take this as the definitive

account of Donald Crowhurst’s story?

A: Well, there is and it’s troubling because of the limitations of fictional

filmmaking. You can’t scrupulously observe all the facts. You have to mess around

with the chronology in order to distil it into its three acts. It’s frustrating for all of us

but you are still trying to keep it as honest as possible. You hope that in taking a

compassionate approach, we’ll end up telling the story in a way that engages

people’s sympathy and understanding, even if it’s not claiming to be an exact

account of what happened.

My hope is that if a film breaks through, it becomes part of a conversation that will

lead people to want to look a little harder. There’s a documentary, there’s a book

and there are different versions of all of this. Even journalism has to take an angle,

however impartial it is. Even a photographer who’s taking a picture of an event has

to stand somewhere. So, in some ways there’s no such thing as a completely

neutral, three hundred and sixty degree perspective on anything. I just think you’ve

got to do it with as much compassion and as much imagination as you can muster

really.

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Q: Let’s talk about Crowhurst’s actual experience on that boat. There’s obviously

the very practical, technical side to it, but there’s the spiritual experience too. Do

you think Don ever got close to being at one with himself?

A: I think he did. I think he got more than close to it. Just going from what he

himself said. We can’t guess more than beyond what we have from his own words.

In one of his recordings, he’s musing and reflecting on life and some of the more

philosophical questions that are associated with everyday life that you wouldn’t

perhaps have time to do if you were back home, in amongst it all and he was aware

that ‘Watching the sun go down in the tropics, does lead one to deeper thoughts’.

He asks our pardon for rambling on the tape, but these are the sorts of things that

occur to him, and this is only what he’s saying to the BBC. I think it’s inevitable that

the parameters of your world would be different, quite literally. You are in a tiny, tiny

little space – a forty-foot boat, with a cabin, which is shockingly small. So the cabin

is utterly claustrophobic and you’re right between that and infinity. So you’re

experiencing extreme space and lack of space.

What relationships have you got? Human relationships are limited to radio, whether

it’s BBC World Service, Voice of America, or Morse code communication or the

radiotelephone. You are creating a relationship with your environment that means

you probably won’t be ever quite the same again when you come back. He had

books but he didn’t take any fiction or any novels. The reading material he did take

was Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. He took books about sailing and he had his

Admiralty charts but the rest of it was about relationships with celestial bodies – the

sun, the moon, the stars, the horizon, the light, the wind, obviously the sea, and his

own boat. Your boat takes on a persona. The boat becomes a living thing to you.

Solitude, the physical environment, the elements, celestial bodies, whatever marine

life, whatever books, whatever bits and pieces you get through the radio, that

becomes your entire universe.

One of the last scenes we shot was a moment based on Crowhurst’s own recordings

where he finds a sea creature, a little fish, in our story it’s a Sargassum fish. He

describes them as being like little Cornish pasties, which he found absolutely

delightful. He tried to keep one as a pet but it died in the bucket that he kept it in.

In reality he also developed a relationship with a migratory bird that landed on his

ship and he wrote a poem about it called The Misfit. He wrote a rather wonderful

piece in his own personal log, describing the bird, and clearly identifying with it in

some way, because it wasn’t a seabird, it just landed on the boat because the

nearest land was a couple of thousand miles away. It sat there for a while and

rested and he hoped that the bird would take off in the direction of the closest land

but it didn’t. He clearly connected with that image. As I understand the character,

there’s a constant feature of this gentleness and it’s in everything he writes. There’s

compassion and decency and he values reason and honesty. I think it was very

important to him for things to be fair and I think that’s partly why the trap he got

himself into must have been such a turbulent one.

Crowhurst’s imagination was probably a big enemy to him. He talked about the

noise. He also said ‘Everything on the boat’s wet. It’s not damp. It’s dripping in your

ear all the time’. You imagine spending a bit of time down in the cabin where it’s

cosy but when we shot the storm scenes, I went down in the cabin a lot, but I never

battened down there for long when we were at sea, because of the waves, the

claustrophobia and nausea, you want out of there so quickly. It was

horrendous…talk about lying at the bottom of a mineshaft in an earthquake! It’s

extraordinary what Crowhurst was made of and that he stayed coherent for as long

as he did. He made it to the Falklands and back. I mean most sailors wouldn’t

dream of a trip like that.

Q: The endeavour was a peculiarly English thing to do don’t you think?

A: Oh it’s very English although it’s not exclusively English – the Americans have

their own version of having a go but they were going to the moon.

There’s a British maritime obsession, with Chichester and Alec Rose and all these

guys. It’s partly because we’re an island, it’s partly because of maritime history, and

it’s partly because we had a bit of a self-esteem problem in the 1960s. We couldn’t

afford the space programme so all you need is a guy on a boat and we’d prove

our mettle.

Q: Was being out there on the boat in the nothingness a good exercise from a

performance viewpoint?

A: Yes, it was interesting but you’re in collaboration. What’s quite nice about

being the only person in front of the lens is that it brings you quite a lot closer to the

work that’s going on the other side of the lens. It sometimes became a little bit of a

huddle between James Marsh, Eric Gautier (cinematographer) and myself in the

decision-making process. You’ve got one guy with a handheld camera, a director

orchestrating things and bouncing the ideas, and then one guy on the other side of

that camera so we were feeling our way together, often without dialogue. It was

for us to discover.

Then of course we had the elements to deal with and they don’t cooperate – when

you want bad weather you’ve got smooth weather. James didn’t want to film in

tanks, he wanted to film on real sea and we did that. We had to use the tank for a

couple of moments, night shoots in the storm but we were out at sea generally. The

sea was so still on one particular day it was even stiller than the tank, it might as well

have been a swimming pool, which is frustrating because on a day when you want

calm of, course it’s rocking. A lot of things can conspire against you when you’re

filming and the number of things that can go wrong when the clock is ticking, that’s

notorious in the filmmaking process.

When you’ve got land in the background that you’re trying to hide, and something

goes wrong with the camera and you’ve got to do it again but the land’s now even

more in the background, you can’t just say, ‘Can we just move the boat back

couple of metres and do that again?’ You’ve got to tack back and by the time

you’ve done that, which might take an hour, the light’s changed and the wind’s

changed.

You have to use your imagination and tailor the nature of the scene to the

conditions. We did an awful lot of cabin interior stuff in the studio, which was

surprisingly claustrophobic. I’d imagined we’d have half a cabin and we’d be

shooting from the outside but it was closed in and they’d just make a little hole for

the camera to come in. It was set up so that it could rock violently so we’d actually

get home in the evenings with the room still rocking.

Q: What were your original conversations with James Marsh about what type of

film this was going to be?

A: The script gave us the shape. It doesn’t focus on the other people in the race,

they don’t appear in the film, they just exist in the background and they’re reported

on, their presence is felt but the film doesn’t focus on them directly. It does take us

into the family life and it focuses on Rodney Hallworth the press agent who is an

important character, as is Stanley Best the sponsor.

I think it’s as much about what inspires the desire to do it and what creates the

problems before the journey starts. We’re probably about half way through the film

before the race begins, for Donald. It’s every bit as interesting to see the trajectory

towards the departure.

Q: There’s a mechanism at work and chain of events that’s forcing his hand to

embark on the journey when he’s not really ready isn’t there?

A: They’re his decisions, but often it’s about the entanglements that your own

decisions create. Then, there are his attempts to solve problems as they go – they’re

ingenious and there are signs of resolution, determination, resourcefulness and

ingenuity. I for one found immense admiration and sympathy for him every step of

the way. I could see each problem as it occurred, however trivial it was, it is also

rather diabolical – the whole notion of Sod’s Law. He made a very sincere attempt

to face up to the reality that the race was not going to be practical. He explicitly

attempted to pull out – it’s mentioned in the documentary. The night before he left

he said to Hallworth and Best, ‘The boat’s not ready.’ He knew that but he had to

go. They told him he had to go. The contract that he had signed meant forfeiting

his house and his business if he didn’t go, indeed if he didn’t finish either. So he had

to set out.

He was persuaded to fix his problems as he went and he might have succeeded in

doing that had the piece of tubing been on board that was supposed to pump out

the floats that were leaking. Everyone’s boats experienced leaks but he had to bail

out with a bucket because one item that had been chased down wasn’t on board

just because of the last-minute rush to get everything ready. There was a pile of

important stuff left on the jetty that should have been on the boat and there were

things on the boat that he might not have needed. Moitessier was apparently

throwing stuff overboard throughout his voyage. We’re trying to offer a study of

what led up to the day of departure and the traps you get into with a business

transaction when someone’s giving you a lot of money to help you, what are the

conditions? What kind of traps does that put you into?

Then of course there was the press who could be a great tool to use in his favour

because that’s what brought in sponsorship. But they were an unwieldy instrument.

It’s not something you control and I think the mythologised version of Donald

Crowhurst that was growing before he left, didn’t leave him particularly

comfortable, but it was something that his press agent was using to facilitate the

whole thing. Before he knew it, stories of his progress were being vastly exaggerated

without his having anything to do with it.

Q: Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns said that he’s very aware that in our culture right

now there’s a kind of a gloating at failure, whether it’s the tabloids or social media

and that in writing this take on the Crowhurst story, he hopes it to be something of

an antidote.

A: Absolutely, I think this is saying, ‘Who are you to judge?’ It’s a terrible reflex, so

I think there’s a side of us, when the mob forms in social media or in the comments

sections that we’re no better than playground bullies. It’s a way of distancing

ourselves from the spectacle of someone who’s been humiliated or who’s fallen

short of something. There’s safety in the numbers of smug people who aren’t going

through that at the moment. It’s a very, very ugly phenomenon.

While I was shooting I read Jon Ronson’s book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,

where he talks about this phenomenon. It’s almost as if social media has revived the

old idea of the stocks and the pillory where public humiliation was a part of our legal

sanction system. It’s quite extraordinary. I mean the slightest gaff now will be

punished on such a grand scale. It seems that people aren’t satisfied until the

person is completely ground into the dust. I hope anything that challenges that

reflex is probably a good thing. I think that incredibly facile and unfair judgments

have been applied to the Crowhurst story. My hope is that by taking people through

it on a personal level and in revealing some of the nuances that people won’t be

able to do that. When the cast all sat down and read the whole script that was

certainly the abiding feeling afterwards. People didn’t speak for a few minutes. I

think the one thing everybody agreed on was an outpouring of compassion for

everybody concerned really in the story and just how dare we judge?

Q: Rachel Weisz as Clare Crowhurst is a great piece of casting. What does she

bring to the performance and how do you see Clare Crowhurst?

A: Rachel is, as Clare Crowhurst herself is, a fiercely intelligent, insightful and

strong person. I think she brings a wryness and an alertness about her that can see

the complexities of what Donald wants to do. She’s afraid for him and she wishes

that he wasn’t doing something so dangerous. She believes in him and in his ability

to see it through. I don’t think she was wrong to believe in that.

Clare was very, very keenly aware that this was something he really needed to do

and that not doing it would be as dangerous to him as doing it. I think you need to

have a great deal of love for somebody to embrace all that. I can only speculate

as far as our interpretation goes but I think that Rachel would probably concur with

all that.

Q: You shot the family scenes before the boat scenes. Did that help establish the

close relationship he had with his family?

A: I think it would have been very difficult if I’d had to shoot the boat stuff before

I met anyone who was playing the family. We formed a relationship. You always

hope that when you are doing a film about a family that you can form something

of a family in the process and we did start to enjoy each other’s company. The kids

were absolutely great. It helped that they were talented and disciplined, that’s not

to be taken for granted. But they were just such lovely company, and they seemed

to understand what we were all trying to do in a given scene. It was also very

important to me in the few scenes we had to stage was to establish a very happy

family, a truly wonderful father. The children adored him. He was imaginative and

incredibly committed to them. I think in some ways I think his venture was for them

as well.

We can very easily pronounce judgement on why a man with a family would take

such great risk. Well, people do need to take risks and some of them have families,

and I think he believed he could do it, that he would come home, and that it would

be a gift to his family, from a financial point of view as well. He hoped to come

back as the father he wanted to be to them. A lot of this is me imposing what my

motives would be, because I think every time you play a role, to some extent, you

want to be that character and the whole story and this setup is as if it were me.

I honestly think that Crowhurst did almost everything with his family in mind.

Q: What experience of sailing did you have already and what did you have to

learn?

A: I had almost no experience whatsoever. My uncle Robin took me sailing when

I was a little boy. The last time I did it, I must have been about eight years old. He

came to visit me on the set as he’s down in Devon and he still goes out sailing every

weekend. That was my connection as he’s the same generation as Donald and

Clare Crowhurst and he knew all about it.

Obviously there was a bit of a rush to get me acquainted with the basics in order to

do this film. I did everything from going out on the boat that we had built for the

film, to single-handing on a little catamaran when I was on holiday on an island off

the coast of Cambodia and that’s when I started to love it. Just being on my own,

on a tiny craft, just beginning to get acquainted with your relationship with the wind

really. It was a very simple boat, it didn’t have a jib, didn’t even have a boom. But

it did do what boats do in relation to the wind. I understood why, particularly on a

tiny little multi-hull for instance, because it struggles into the wind. I learned why it

performs very well on a reach. These things were just theory and in some ways if I’d

had my first lessons on a big boat with a crew, it might have remained theory. I was

only out for an afternoon at a time but it started to make sense to me. Then of

course I started to realise how many people I know are truly avid sailors and

everything I’ve just said is real potted beginner’s stuff.

If you do sail then this stuff will sound so green and ignorant, and if you don’t sail,

even the basics sound like some sort of extraordinary foreign language. They were

very patient with me, but I had to learn their language and all sorts of little rules. I

never had to really single-handedly, meaningfully sail the boat, certainly not without

somebody on board, waiting to help out if anything went wrong. But I did, very

much enjoy learning the basics in the end. I don’t think it’s got a future for me

though!

Q: Crowhurst set sail from Teignmouth and you filmed there. The event is in living

memory for a lot of people who still live there. How did that feel?

A: The people were really very lovely down there. We were made to feel

extremely welcome. People tolerated a great deal. It’s not convenient to have a

film crew in your town. There was an awful lot of affection for Donald Crowhurst and

for this story. There were older people who told me that they’d known him and

were very anxious to share their experiences and their anecdotes. I think his story is

now regarded with immense sympathy. Maybe it always was, but we were very

struck by how people felt both sympathy and admiration for Donald Crowhurst.

We were treated with nothing but grace and good humour. Devon is the most

beautiful county and I think filming in Teignmouth might have been one of the

highlights of our shoot really.

Q: What characterises James Marsh as a director?

A: He’s very bright, he’s extraordinarily committed and very collaborative. At

times I think we both went down a bit of a rabbit hole, talking through ideas and

trying to resolve conflicts in terms of storytelling and what’s possible, what’s

important and what has to be sacrificed. He seemed to welcome that

collaboration. I found the partnership with James to be the perfect one for a story

like this, really. Once it was just me in front of the camera, it became even more of

a kind of nexus that I was very dependent on. It wasn’t just the two of us obviously,

it was our relationship with not just camera, not just sound, but with the marine guys

as well, as they’re the experts.

James is very exhilarating company and he’s a very exhilarating collaborator. I think

it’s one thing to have very clear ideas about what you want to do, it’s another thing

to have that coupled with flexibility because they often exclude each other.

Q: What was the experience of shooting in Malta like?

A: Malta obviously suited our needs in so many ways, because they have this

extraordinary tank, and the word ‘tank’ doesn’t really tell a story as to what it is. It’s

a big infinity pool with the sea at the end of it. The effects you can create there are

a very dramatic spectacle, where these pumps and water cannons could basically

create a storm. It was fantastic for shooting the warmer climes. That’s where we

shot all the Sargasso Sea stuff and all the summer zone material out at sea. It’s a

beautiful island and so basically it’s an ideal spot to shoot. If you’re shooting on

boats, I don’t think you could be in a better environment really.

Reprinted from a StudioCanal UK Press Release. The Mercy starring Colin Firth as Donald Crowhurst premiers in the UK on February 9, 2018.

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OUTREMER CATAMARANS | UNDER $250K | Is SAILING LA VAGABONDE’s catamaran right for you? Yacht Broker, Gary Fretz

Sailing La Vagabonde recently switched to an Outremer Catamaran. Should you be looking to buy an Outremer catamaran or focus your sailing catamaran search on the big builders like Lagoon and Leopard? We also list the best sailing catamarans for under $200K or $250K. Yacht broker Gary Fretz argues that Outremer is like many other semi-custom builders in that they have small production runs. Smaller production runs mean that there will be more bugs that have not been fixed in each new model. Custom yachts or boats from semi-custom builders according to him do not have the resources or feedback to fix all the production bugs. He argues that you should never own hulls 1-10 because every model has a lot of bugs, which show up in the early models. Fretz argues that semi-custom or small production run builders do not have the scale to afford to fix all those bugs or the buying power to pass build savings onto the buyers.

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Gary Fretz is the

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Copyright Linus Wilson, Vermilion Advisory Services, 2018

Most sailing vloggers will never make another dime on YouTube ads after February 20, 2018

Small YouTubers have been dealt a death blow by the January 16, 2018, announcement that they will need at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time before they will ever see a dime in AdSense revenue. This is a HUGE change to the YouTube Partner Program (YPP). Most creators never reach 1,000 subscribers. Thus, most will never see ad checks from YouTube again after the new policy comes into effect on February 20, 2018. My study of over 400 sailing vloggers found most of these active video creators never broke 1,000 subscribers.

Check out my video on the Linus Wilson YouTube channel “DEMONitization of SMALL YouTubers | 1000 subs $ 4000 hours | YPP AdSense Lost to Most Channels” at

See my video about my study entitled:

“How to Make $ on Patreon Like Sailing LaVagabonde & SV Delos: Tips, Tricks, Facts, and Advice”

My academic study with all the facts is at

https://ssrn.com/abstract=2919840

It is called:

“A Little Bit of Money Goes a Long Way: Crowdfunding on Patreon by YouTube Sailing Channels”

21 Feb 2017

Linus Wilson

University of Louisiana at Lafayette – College of Business Administration

Date Written: February 17, 2017

Abstract

This study finds that YouTube channels crowdfunding on Patreon have more frequent video creation. The median YouTube channel that crowdfunded on Patreon produced a video every 7.5 days compared to 105 days for the median comparable channel that did not link to Patreon. Crowdfunders have more views per video, are more likely to link to their Facebook pages, and uploaded videos more frequently. While two channels in the sample, each earned over $150,000 in 2016 from Patreon, the typical crowdfunding sailing channel earned $73 per video, per month, or creation. It appears that a little bit of money was associated with a big increase in new video production.

While most folks don’t make more than $100 getting to their first 1,000 subscribers 240,000 minutes of watch time is only achievable for low 1,000 subscriber channels that are active. Less active small channels will be kicked out of the program. Linus Wilson not only discusses the big change to YouTube monetization, but also he reads the two blogs at the end of the video.

The YouTube blogs are:

https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2018/01/additional-changes-to-youtube-partner.html

Creator Blog

“Additional Changes to the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) to Better Protect Creators”

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

by Neal Mohan, Chief Product Officer and Robert Kyncl, Chief Business Officer

and

“A New Approach to YouTube Monetization”

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

by Paul Muret, VP, Display, Video & Analytics

https://adwords.googleblog.com/2018/01/a-new-approach-to-youtube-monetization.html

These changes make the April 2017 requirement of 10,000 views to be a new AdSense partner no longer in force. That was announced in the blog below:

https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2017/04/introducing-expanded-youtube-partner.html