Describe the performance of Kon-Tiki's central character as wooden and you've hit the nail on the head. Kon-Tiki was a balsa-wood raft Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl built in 1947 to prove ancient South Americans could have floated to Polynesia, thus challenging accepted theory that continental drift was west to east.
The raft was rudderless, had a skeletal crew of inexperienced seamen and a patchy radio. It became waterlogged and began to rot well before the 101-day voyage, covering 6300km of ocean, came to its reef-challenged conclusion. Clearly co-directors Joachim Roenning and Espen Sandberg know a good story when they grow up with one.
The pair have made films together since they were 10, culminating in the huge domestic success of 2008 Norwegian biographical film Max Manus: Man of War and now Oscar- and Golden Globe-nominated Kon-Tiki. They grew up in a town near Larvik, where Heyerdahl was born.
"He was a great inspiration, not only because of his inspiring expedition, from the fact he went out and did crazy things no matter what people said, but also because he actually made a movie about it," enthuses Sandberg. "The Kon-Tiki documentary was the only Norwegian movie ever to win an Academy Award. To have a guy from the same kind of place as us winning that was a great inspiration."
