If you thought you were cold this weekend, go ahead and watch Arctic, the 2018 survival drama that is now streaming on Netflix. Because no matter bad that windchill was while you were out walking your dog, it’s not going to compare to Mads Mikkelsen being stranded in the Arctic Circle after crashing his plane.
Directed by Brazilian filmmaker Joe Penna, Arctic is an almost entirely dialogue-less film. Perhaps that’s why the film has been a hit on Netflix, which streams to many non-English speaking viewers. But no matter what language you speak, it’s easy to understand the premise of Arctic: this man is stranded, he’s very cold, he’s very hungry, and he’s trying not to die.
It’s a story that everyone can understand, but that doesn’t mean it happened in real life. While there may be real-life stories of pilots who crashed in the Arctic Circle, they were not the basis of the fictional movie Arctic. Read on to find out what did inspire the Arctic movie.
Is the Arctic movie on Netflix based on a true story?
No. Perhaps you’ll be relieved to hear that Arctic is not in any way based on a true story of a real-life person who was stranded in the Arctic. In fact, Brazilian filmmaker Joe Penna—who directed the film and co-wrote the script with Ryan Morrison—initially conceived of the entire film taking place on Mars, rather than on the icy tundra of Earth.
“The original idea was this image that I saw on the internet that was a half-terraformed Mars,” Penna said in a 2019 interview with Screenrant. “I brought it to my co-writer, and I said, ‘This is interesting. Let’s tell a story in this world.'”
Penna and Morrison decided they wanted to tell a survival story. “We started looking into different survival films and I eventually found an image of what Mars is going to look like one day when we start planting trees and whatnot, and it looked so hostile, still,” Penna said in a different interview with The Hot Corn. Penna and Morrison wrote the entire script taking place on Mars… and then the trailer for The Martian dropped.
“We sent it to our agents and they liked the film, but they gave us a link to the trailer for Ridley Scott’s newest film The Martian. So… best of luck trying to get it made now,” Penna explained. “So we moved it to the Arctic and thought it could work just as well there.” He added, “It went from him being unable to breathe, to him just being really cold. The core of the story that we wanted to tell stayed the same, and it can be anywhere, in the Arctic or in a desert.”
So you can thank Ridley Scott and Matt Damon for sending Mads Mikkelsen to the Arctic, instead of Mars.
Where was the Arctic movie filmed?
Arctic was filmed in Iceland, which Penna described as “worse than I thought it was going to be, especially as a Brazilian!” in that same interview with The Hot Corn.”The sleet and sometimes the rain—those were the worst because then you were just soaked,” Penna said. “Everything that says it’s weather-proof is not. Don’t trust any parkers that say they’re weather-proof.”
He went on to say it was “one of the hardest shoots” of his career. “Even when had the perfect opportunity to shoot everything that we wanted,” Penna said, “you always had to move your camera and then shoot it again, otherwise he’s stepping on not-fresh snow and it’s really, really hard. If you need a foreground element it had better be a fake rock or a rock that you can move, because that’s what you’re absolutely gonna need.”
