 
GW: Tell us for the thousandth time -- I know you're probably sick of telling it -- tell us about that entire experience.
MW: It was the time of our lives.
GW: Freezing time of your lives!
MW: You know what? I didn't mind. I like cold! I don't mind at all! I wear shorts year round in Canada. I have my whole life. The experience was one where we were prepped for it -- I was prepped for it longer than anybody else was, because I was talking to Barry Campbell who put this thing together.
Barry Campbell came up to John Smith and I when we were sitting at a Gatecon convention in Vancouver. He came up and said "Can you sign this for me please," and then put a picture down in front of John Smith and said "You guys want to come to the North Pole?" And I went "Yes," and Andy says "Sure," and John goes, "Of course!" And he says "OK, let's talk." He put his picture down of him at the North Pole with a submarine behind him.
We went two years later.
Amanda Tapping and Ben Browder go for a walk on an arctic glacier. | |
We'd been talking a lot along the way. I understood there was polar bears. I understood there was cold. I had to direct a movie when I was up there. Those things were logistics, those were things we had to get past, but not things I had to concern myself with too terribly much.
There was always a person facing this way, and always a person facing that way, with rifles, in case polar bears came. And there was always a helicopter to chase them away, because they don't want to shoot the polar bears. They want to scare them off.
Now, there were a couple people up there that kept spinning around in circles looking for polar bears themselves, but I couldn't be one of those people. And you know, there's things like while you're talking to each year you're in a balaclava up to here, you have goggles on, your nose is exposed, and there's times when you have to pull that stuff off and start talking to each other, but you're always looking to each other to see if there's frostbite. There were a couple times I'd look at Peter Woeste and I'd go "Peter, cover that up." Somebody would look at me and say "Pull your goggles down a little bit. You're getting a little white in here."
You can't be out in that kind of temperature. We were out for ten hours and nobody complained. Not one person up there complained. There were huge smiles on everybody's face, only you couldn't tell. You could just see a little balaclava move like this. It was amazing. And honestly, I cannot imagine another television star that would stand out there like those guys did. And for ten hours. And they weren't dressed like that. They were dressed crappy.
We did everything we could. Christina McQuarrie took everything she could and packed it underneath those suits, but they still had to have Edmondson South Pole foul weather on.
GW: Well when are you going to be able to do something like that again? That is almost ...
MW: I hope next year! I really hope so! I keep pushing Brad. "You know, we could actually go up there. We could shoot in the camp. It'd be great. Doesn't have to be the North Pole. Maybe the south pole this time. It doesn't matter. I want to go up." Amanda, Ben. "Let's go! Come on!" Not one of us wanted to leave. And as warm as it got, the warmest it got was minus 19. We were chucking our clothes off, walking around in sweaters, "Hey, it's minus 19 today!"
GW: Well if you can experience minus 60.
MW: They said the coldest it got was, in the wind chill, minus 80. That was the day we couldn't shoot.
GW: Oh, so weather halted production?
MW: It did on one day. We woke up one morning and I looked outside and thought "This is not going to be good." We're in little 8 by 8 by 20 foot plywood hooches, they're called. Little plywood 8 by 8 by 20. And there was me, Ben Browder, Richard Dean Anderson, the captain of the base, and another guy called George, who was a government worker who was not allowed to tell us what he did. We spent the entire time in the hooch trying to find out what George did.
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"'If it feels like the submarine's coming up underneath you, run.' "
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You can't have Richard Dean Anderson and Ben Browder -- we laughed all night long. Inside it's plus 75, and outside, as soon as you open the door, it drops the temperature down to minus 50. I looked outside the little window we have, the polar bear window, and thought "We're not going out in this." We have a helicopter and we have snowmobiles. We can take either one of them to get where we need to be, which doesn't make a lot of sense because you're on an ocean that's frozen. It's all the same. "Hmm, should we shoot over here or should we shoot over there? Uh, let's see, uh, Peter?"
Well it depends on which direction you're facing because that's the way the sun is. "Let's shoot this way." "OK, we'll just turn them that way." It's all the same. I was constantly scouting for places that was slightly out of the wind so that we could work longer, because if the wind's up you can't work as long.
What was funny to me is this one day I look outside and I see the helicopter is completely battened down. I thought, "OK." So I go out and Evil Kenny, the props master who was my assistant up there, assistant director up there, we jump in a snowmobile. We get about 40 feet. "Man, this is cold today." Our hood's down to here, so we huddle together and we take off in a snowmobile, we go flying around, come back and look at the temperature. "Minus 59. OK that's pretty cold. I think we'd better wait until it warms up to about minus 50, and we'll try it then."
That's what we were talking about when we were up there.
GW: Did you know the day you were scheduled to get out of there?
MW: Yeah, we actually extended it. We got out two days later.
GW: So you were able to do that?
MW: Yes.
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