Photo Credit: Daniel Daza/Roadside Attractions
Academy Award winner Robert Redford stars in the brand new trailer for the film ALL IS LOST, an open-water thriller about one man’s battle for survival against the elements after his sailboat is destroyed at sea. Written and directed by Academy Award nominee J.C. Chandor (Margin Call) with a musical score by Alex Ebert (Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros), the film is a gripping, visceral and powerfully moving tribute to ingenuity and resilience.
In his review from May, Jeffrey Wells over at Hollywood Elsewhere wrote,
“…J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost has completely blown everyone away at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s a knockout –a riveting piece of pure dialogue-free cinema, a terrific survival-on-the-high-seas tale and major acting triumph for Robert Redford, who hasn’t been this good since…what, Brubaker? All The President’s Men? A long time. It’s one of the most powerful, absorbing, original-feeling survivalist dramas ever made.“
The film – in Theaters October 18. A Best Actor Oscar nomination for Redford – Coming Soon.
Deep into a solo voyage in the Indian Ocean, an unnamed man (Redford) wakes to find his 39-foot yacht taking on water after a collision with a shipping container left floating on the high seas. With his navigation equipment and radio disabled, the man sails unknowingly into the path of a violent storm. Despite his success in patching the breached hull, his mariner’s intuition, and a strength that belies his age, the man barely survives the tempest.
Using only a sextant and nautical maps to chart his progress, he is forced to rely on ocean currents to carry him into a shipping lane in hopes of hailing a passing vessel. But with the sun unrelenting, sharks circling and his meager supplies dwindling, the ever-resourceful sailor soon finds himself staring his mortality in the face.
Photo Credit: Daniel Daza/Roadside Attractions
Filmmaker J.C. Chandor knew he wanted to make some form of open-water thriller long before his feature writing and directing debut, Margin Call, was nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. But it took almost six years for him to finally hit upon the startlingly original idea for All Is Lost, a harrowing nautical adventure that takes place entirely at sea and features a single nameless—and nearly wordless—character.
“It’s a very simple story about a guy late in his life who goes out for a four- or five-month sail,” Chandor says. “Fate intervenes, the boat has an accident, and essentially we go on an eight-day journey with him as he fights to survive.”
Filming in water is notoriously challenging, and that was certainly the case with All Is Lost, which does not feature a single shot set on dry land. Camera crews filmed in various parts of the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean, including off the coast of Ensenada, Mexico, about 80 miles south of San Diego. Before The Door Pictures’ Neal Dodson and Washington Square Films’ Anna Gerb are producing.
Photo Credit: Richard Foreman/Roadside Attractions. J.C. Chandor on the set of ALL IS LOST.
In some ways, All Is Lost is a tribute to man’s seemingly limitless ingenuity and resilience, with Redford’s character simply refusing to quit.
“This character keeps going to a point when some people would give up and say, ‘It’s too much,'” Redford says. “‘I’m out in the middle of nowhere. No one is here to help me and it seems like I’ve done everything I possibly can. Why not give up?'”
To answer that question, Redford references an earlier film whose sparseness and primal simplicity have something in common with All Is Lost and in which the actor plays another lone man battling nature and self.
“I thought about Jeremiah Johnson, about that film and that character, especially since I had developed that project myself,” says Redford of the 1972 film. “He had a choice to give up or continue but he continues, because that’s all there is. And this film, I think, suggests the same thing. He just goes on because that’s all he can do. Some people wouldn’t, but he does.”
It’s in those moments of maximum anguish that Our Man actually breaks his pervasive silence and utters a word or two—to great effect.
Photo Credit: Richard Foreman/Roadside Attractions
“There’s a scene where we finally hear the iconic Robert Redford voice,” says Gerb. “There is no real dialogue to speak of in the film, but in this one moment, for a very brief second, he says something. And to hear his voice, and how it comes out, is so powerful, because we all know that voice. And then it comes, and it’s this tiny beat, but it’s a very moving moment for me.”
For Dodson, it is precisely the drive to survive—even when all is apparently lost—that gets to the heart of the film’s meaning.
“It’s a movie about why we keep fighting,” Dodson says. “It’s a movie about why we try to live—about why we would fight against death when it seems so obvious that it’s our time to go. Answering that question about human beings is something philosophers, religion and great thinkers have been trying to do as long as humans have been on earth. I think this movie tries to ask that timeless question in a new way. And for my own part, I’m far more interested in going to see movies and making movies that ask questions than in movies that propose to answer them.”
It’s also part of what makes the film unlike any other, the producer says.
“I don’t think you’ve ever seen a movie like this before,” Dodson says. “It’s a truly singular vision. It’s watching one guy—a master of his craft—work through a character in 90 minutes. And it’s an adventure. But the existential questions in it, I think, will resonate for people even more powerfully.”
As for Chandor, he says he hopes audiences will see themselves reflected in Redford’s valiantly struggling survivor.
“What I’m hoping,” Chandor muses, “is that this character becomes a vessel where audience members are able to see themselves, or parts of themselves. That he becomes the embodiment of some of their hopes, concerns, dreams, worries, fears—all those primal human characteristics. It’s not something that I want to lay out too explicitly, but to a certain extent, I hope that he can become a kind of mirror. And if I did my job well, the film, like Our Man’s journey, is going to be exhilarating and terrifying, and, I hope, emotional and haunting.”
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Photo Credit: Andrew Illson/Roadside Attractions. Robert Redford (left) and J.C. Chandor on the set of ALL IS LOST.
