6 days Ago
1 of 5 | From left, Simu Liu, Woody Harrelson, Alex Parkinson and Finn Cole film "Last Breath," on DVD and Blu-ray Tuesday, in a marine studio in Malta. Photo courtesy of Focus Features LOS ANGELES, April 29 (UPI) -- Alex Parkinson says he wanted his film Last Breath to respect the audience's intelligence. Based on the 2019 documentary that he co-directed, Last Breath, on DVD and Blu-ray Tuesday, is a survival thriller about a deep sea rescue mission.
In a recent Zoom interview with UPI, Parkinson explained how he adapted his own documentary about the 2012 rescue of stranded diver Chris Lemons as a feature film. In the documentary, the diving crew explained deep sea diving procedures to the audience, but the narrative movie had to deliver that information through character dialogue. Parkinson, who co-wrote the script with Mitchell LaFortune and David Brooks, had crew members Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson), Dave Yuasa (Simu Liu) and Lemons (Finn Cole) discuss the upcoming dive, along with the surface crew who will be monitoring them, in the beginning of the film.
"It could've been quite clunky and quite forboding about 'Wouldn't it be terrible if your umbilical snaps and you were stuck without any oxygen' type thing," Parkinson said. "I was really keen to respect the audience, treat them with intelligence and immerse them in this world so when it got to the incident, essentially people weren't asking questions about how things work." The umbilical cord refers to the tether that connects deep sea saturation divers to the diving bell on which they live for weeks, providing them oxygen.
While doing maintenance work on an oil rig on the North Sea Bed, a storm caused Lemons' umbilical line to snap. Parkinson wanted to use basic enough terminology so the audience could feel they've learned the technical procedure, rather than spewing a lot of jargon at them. The.
.. Fred Topel.
