The art of noise

To The North director Mihai Mincan on the noise of the ship: 'It felt melodic, it felt really industrial, it felt threatening'

Most of the action in To The North takes place on a ship outside of regular jurisdictions and Romanian director Mihai Mincan also sets sail into grey areas of morality in his tale of a stowaway who becomes dependent on a Filipino crewman for safe crossing. Romanian Dumitri (Niko Beker) sneaks aboard the ship bound for America with his friend (Dimitar Vasilev) but it soon becomes clear that the Taiwanese captain takes a brutal approach to stowaways. When Dumitri crosses the path of bosun Joel (Soliman Cruz), the older man offers to help him but tension mounts as the fears of both men begin to rise. The film premiered in the Orizzonti competition in Venice and we caught up with Mincan ahead of its screenings at Thessaloniki Film Festival. In the first part of a two-part interview with him, we talked about the practical challenges of shooting a film set on a boat and working with Sound Of Metal sound designer Nicolas Becker.

Amber Wilkinson: What were the challenges of both finding a ship on which to shoot the film and of shooting a film on one.

Mihai Mincan: That was the biggest challenge production wise. For the first two or three years, when the project first got funded, we tried to find the ship in which to shoot the whole film in the classical way - 30 days of shooting on a ship. But it turned out very fast that we couldn't do that, because one of those huge ships is making a lot of money every day, just transporting things from one continent to another. So we kind of had to split the shooting. We shot the interiors on an old ship, from Romania, located at the seaside. It was actually broken and didn't function any more but for us, it really worked great, because that ship has been there for the past 10 or 15 years or so. It looked like the Nineties, so we didn't have to change like a lot. The exteriors we shot in Greece, on a real ship moving from one place to another. This created a lot of problems with continuity, of course, but we worked so hard in the pre-production on it, that by the time we shot, we kind of knew what the challenges were and how we were going to fix them as we went along.

AW: I suppose being able to shoot on the older ship was useful in the sense that you wouldn't have any of the noise you would have if the ship was moving?

To The North director Mihai Mincan: 'Before we shot the film, we went prospecting. We went on one of those large ships and as soon as we heard the engine we kind of knew that all of our instincts were right'

MM: It was a different kind of noise, the ship was located in a harbour. And every second of the shooting, you could hear cranes. It was actually a nightmare for the sound. There were a lot of good takes which we had to abandon and redo because of the sound, there was quite a big problem. Yes, we didn't have the noise of the engine, of course, but I think by the end of the shooting, we kind of realised that the sound of the engine would have been a little bit better than what we actually had.

AW: Nicolas Becker’s sound design and the scoring are very important to the film. How did you come at those elements to make them marry up so well?

MM: I met Nicolas in, I think 2018. It was two years after we got the first funding and he hadn’t won an Oscar yet but he had been working on things like Gravity. We had a French co-producer and he gave him the script. He loved it and then I went to Paris to meet him. We had a few drinks and we started talking about how I saw the film. He was so into it, I don’t know how to explain that feeling today. Nicolas is like this beautiful madman. All the sounds that you can hear in To The North, none of those is taken from a library. They are sounds that he recorded by doing the actual thing for like 20 or 30 years.The time I spent working with him and finding those sounds and making the sonic environment was one of the most beautiful weeks or two in my life.

Mihai Mincan on working with Nicolas Becker: 'The time I spent working with him and finding those sounds and making the sonic environment was one of the most beautiful weeks or two in my life'

Before we shot the film, we went prospecting. We went on one of those large ships and as soon as we heard the engine we kind of knew that all of our instincts were right. It felt melodic, it felt really industrial, it felt threatening. And after that, I just spoke with Nicolas about my feelings about what I heard. Then he went on a ship on his own, separately from us, using some connections with a sailor who was a friend of his. And by the time we started working we knew exactly what we wanted. And we wanted the same thing.

AW: And how did you get the score to fit with that?

MM: Another thing that we kind of knew before we started shooting was that we will use Alessandro Cortini’s music. The main reason I guess is that Cortini’s music comes from this punk industrial environment and you can really hear that through his music. It has a lot of grain, a lot of dirt, somehow, in a good way, his music. The second reason is that I used the lot of Cortini while I was writing the script. So it became this emotional thing, I was really connected to his music. So we kind of knew that we would use some of his tracks. I spoke to him on Zoom and the first idea was for him to compose new music for the film, but it didn't turn out he was really kind of busy, then Covid started and he became a father and then he went touring with Nine Inch Nails. So we decided in the end that we will use some already recorded tracks.

The advantage was that by the time I started working with Nicolas, I kind of knew what tracks we were using in what parts of the film. So what Nicholas did was to create the sound design in such a way that it would blend in and out. It was organic. That is what I was saying about working with Nicolas, it’s something really special to work with him. He has like this ear for an organic and very immersive sonic atmosphere.

Read the second part of our interview with Mincan, in which we'll chat about his film influences, working with an international cast and the theme of fear in To The North.