“I’m in New York doing a pilot with an actor from Belfast, Lola Petticrew,” reveals Armagh-born director Brian Kirk when we Zoom to discuss his latest film Dead of Winter, released in cinemas today.
“It’s another ‘female revenge thriller’, so there seems to be a theme emerging,” jokes the London-based director of tackling this still untitled TV project directly after his new feature staring double Oscar-winner Emma Thompson.
She plays Barb, a widow forced to battle against man and mother nature when she stumbled upon a kidnapping while visiting a frozen lake in the sub-zero wilds of northern Minnesota.
As the kidnappers (an excellent Judy Greer and Marc Menchaca) attempt to snuff out Barb and keep their grisly plans for imprisoned teen Leah (Laurel Marsden) on track, the wily Minnesotan draws upon experience gleaned from a lifetime of ice-fishing and rural living to stage a daring rescue attempt.
“Emma really had to put the training in,” enthuses Kirk (57) of his lead actor, whose daughter, Gaia Wise, features as a younger Barb in flashback sequences.
Read more: Emma Thompson’s daughter was ‘very excited’ for them to star in film together
“She got so fit for this movie - she was training for two hours a day and did a lot of underwater training in the lake to acclimatise her body.
“You know, she’s 65-years-old - a very fit 65 -but her commitment was still enormous.”
Thompson, who mastered an unwaveringly authentic Minnesotan accent for her role in Dead of Winter, convinces as a self-sufficient woman steeled by the many challenges and set-backs life has already thrown her way.
By the end of this tense, snowbound thriller, the two-time Academy Award winner has definitely been through the physical and emotional wringer.
“I think she really connected to the idea of a hero who is a real woman and not an impersonation of a male action figure,” offers Kirk, whose previous credits include the action thriller 21 Bridges and TV hits including The Day of The Jackal, Luther and Game of Thrones.
“Barb is not John Wick, she’s not Liam Neeson in Taken. She’s a regular character with no special forces training, no superpowers. She’s not a heroic loner - she’s alone and scared.
“But she also has an instinctive connection with the natural world that gives her access to an armoury that she wasn’t even aware she possessed.”
Shooting on location in northern Minnesota meant that Kirk and co were also forced to reckon with its deep-frozen landscape, where temperatures can drop as low as -50F.
“It was insanely challenging,” comments the director, who made his feature debut in 2006 with the Daragh Carville-penned Middletown.
“The coldest day was -29F,” recalls Kirk.
“When you get under -30F the equipment starts to malfunction. But between -15F and -5F is cold but manageable.
“Weirdly, above -5F you’re in trouble, because the snow and ice starts to melt. Then the landscape changes and it becomes hard to match your footage.
“We were all wearing five layers and walking in about eight feet of snow, which had to be compacted and then refreshed after every take after the crew had marched through it. So you were literally working at half speed.”
On the plus side, the amazing visuals afforded by the snowy northern Minnesotan wilderness added instant production value to the project lensed by Christopher Ross, the same director of photography Kirk worked with on last year’s Sky TV hit The Day of The Jackal.
“It was an amazing experience,” he explains of Dead of Winter, which was also scored by Jackal composer Volker Bertelmann.
“The air is so clean and the vistas are so huge. The lake we filmed the end sequence on is about 75 miles long.
“We actually chose it because it had little islands on it and you need those distance markers to actually even understand the scale of it.
“So the film is almost like a modern Western. You have these isolated figures in a giant landscape with very spare dialogue and sudden explosions of violence.
“There’s quite a mythic force to that, you know? And you just feel that instinctively in the landscape.”
Of course, for an Irishman unused to such extremes of climate, setting foot on a vast, frozen body of water required a big leap of faith.
“I was in northern Minnesota on the first day the lakes were frozen enough to get out and do ice fishing,” he tells me.
“There was this huge flood of people heading out onto the ice, and they all wear these little hooks around their necks so that if they go through the ice, you’ve got something to pull them out with.
“I met this guy who told me that he’d went through the ice the day before - but there he was back out again, and with his kid, who was about five-years-old. It’s just a way of life for those people.
“While I was talking to him, there was this enormous groaning sound. Of course, I’d never been a mile out on a frozen lake before, so I was like, ‘oh s***’.
“But the guy told me it was totally normal and caused by the movement of air under the ice. I called the writers that night and said, ‘that’s got to be in the movie’.
“It happened again when we were doing the tech recce with the crew before the shoot and all I could see were about 100 terrified faces staring back at me. It really made me laugh!”
Such attention to atmospheric detail helped the movie to go down a storm during its sold-out premiere back in August at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland.
“They were screening at this amazing outdoor auditorium that holds 8,500 people,” recalls Kirk.
“I had this vision of there being about 4,000 empty seats, but we filled it - and they had to organise a second screening.
“That was pretty incredible, as was seeing how proud a double Academy Award-winner was of the film and the pleasure she took in introducing it to the world.
“There was tremendous amount of validation in that.”
Indeed, Kirk has come a long way since making his first films on scraps of left-over filmstock donated by another famous Armagh-born export.
“One of my first short films was made on film stock that Seamus McGarvey gave to me,” reveals Kirk of the Oscar-nominated cinematographer.
“He was definitely an inspiration. I went to St Pat’s and he was the year above me at the Christian Brothers.
“It was great to see him blaze a trail at a very early age. He definitely kicked open the doors for the rest of us.”
As for the already confirmed second series of The Day of The Jackal, reimagined from the Frederick Forsythe novel by acclaimed Belfast screenwriter Ronan Bennett, Kirk can’t reveal too much about what’s in store for Eddie Redmayne’s enigmatic hitman.
“The geography is slightly more expansive, with a bigger global reach, and he’s in a less confident position after being knocked from his perch in season one,” says Kirk of the upcoming second series, which is being penned by Lockerbie writer David Harrower.
“So it’s a comeback story, which will be very rich emotional territory for Eddie Redmayne. But the essential DNA of Jackal is still there: the best assassin in the world, the most difficult target in the world and the most dogged detective in the world.
“That’s something Ronan identified very early on, and that’s what we will be delivering to the audience again in season two.”
Dead of Winter is in cinemas from today.
