Barbarella talks with John Andreas Andersen about the new Norwegian disaster film THE BURNING SEA

Hello, my friends. Barbara here. Did I ever tell you how much I love Norwegian disaster films? I mean, they're so well executed, shot in beautiful locations, have believable characters, and they're so entertaining. It's no surprise that I jumped at the chance to speak with one of my favorite Scandinavian filmmakers, John Andreas Andersen. His latest, LA MER BRÛLANTE, is released today in theaters and on demand and digitally. While it's worth checking out the visuals alone, it offers so much more, including corporate types that feel more human than their counterparts in American studio-made disaster movies.

In the film, a crack in the ocean floor causes an oil rig to collapse. When a team searches for the missing and assesses the damage, they discover that this could just be the beginning of an apocalyptic disaster.

I would have loved to have had time to delve into a number of topics with John, perhaps over a beer, but given that he was in Oslo, Norway, it wasn't really a option. Instead, I hopped on Skype with him from my home in Texas and managed to talk about a few of the topics I was interested in. Check it out.

If you were to be stuck in a situation from a Norwegian disaster movie, would you rather it be in The Wave, The Quake or The Burning Wed, and why?

"Oh, that's a tough question. I think The Burning Sea is probably the one where you at least have the opportunity to get away from it."

The movie is shot beautifully and it looks so expensive. I read that it cost about 6.5 million euros (about $12 million) to manufacture. If that's true, how can you make movies that look like $80 million movies for that kind of price? What's the secret ?

"Well, first of all, thank you. Of course, we compete in the same market as the really big Hollywood movies, as you know. Our movie, I guess, cost a Hollywood movie, but yeah. It's kind of weird, but it's possible. I think one of the reasons it's possible is that in terms of visual effects, there's been this little group of people who really became, I think, really amazing VFX artists in Oslo and Norway, so it gave us the ability to suddenly do these movies and tell these stories that we couldn't do before, because it was too expensive. Even though Norway is a very high cost country, the VFX artists managed to do it at a much lower cost than in Hollywood. They did a wonderful job on this movie .

"Also, we have to choose our battles. You can't really shoot a movie that gives us all the editing possibilities. We have to decide pretty early on which rooms we want to spend our money on.

From what I understand this was shot on real oil rigs. How did you get permission to do this, and how did it work?

"It was a huge challenge, because, I mean, first of all, we were planning to do maybe studio stuff or stuff in other countries , but then COVID came along, and we realized we had to shoot everything in Norway. You might read the movie as a bit critical of the oil industry, so we were afraid it would close those doors to us, but the oil industry in Norway really stepped up and gave us access, and as you say, getting access to these platforms is really difficult. [There are] a lot of security issues, and the whole team had to follow safety courses and things like that, but in the end, I'm really happy with it because it gave us these amazing places that are real. I mean, even when the helicopter p ic of the nose, it's a real helicopter that pitches down. I think it really gave a bit of realism to the film which I'm super happy with."

Yeah, I loved the place, and I just thought it was amazing. I'm curious about writers collaborating on projects. Did the writers just hand over the script and let you run with it? What kind of involvement did they have once filming started? Were they on set, changing things up?

“No, not really. I mean, I know those writers. I've known them for a long time. They're there if I need anything. Of course, always during filming, there are things that you see, okay, maybe we want to go a certain way a bit more than what we had in the script. But on the other hand, the writing...