Film school be damned! There’s more than one way to make it as an auteur. Just ask whizzkid director Joe Penna. Few film-makers are able to lure in a big-name actor like Mads Mikkelsen to star in their debut feature, as Penna has done with his survival thriller Arctic. Fewer still have said feature premiere at the Cannes film festival. But no one before, surely, has done those things off the back of a career spent making novelty videos on YouTube.
Penna’s road to the top is an extremely modern one. Better known – to those of a certain age, at least – by his online pseudonym MysteryGuitarMan, the 30-year-old Brazilian was one of YouTube’s first viral stars. He took to the platform in 2006 after dropping out of the University of Massachussetts, where he was studying to be a cardiothoracic surgeon. “Very similar to what I’m doing now,” he points out. “A lot of cutting!”
Penna was worried that his father would be angry about his abrupt career change. “I thought I was going to have to change my last name,” he remembers. “But he said ‘go for it, try it for one semester and if it doesn’t work go back to school’. It didn’t work for six months, then it didn’t work for a year, then it didn’t work for two years – but by then then I was too headstrong to stop.”
After a few years in the digital doldrums, he made his YouTube breakthrough with Guitar Impossible, a 2009 stop-motion video performance of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, with Penna playing all the parts. Soon he was one of the biggest names on the platform. To date he has amassed two million channel subscribers and hundreds of millions of video views.
Penna’s early videos, he admits, were “rudimentary ... a kid with a webcam”, but as YouTube output increased, his technical chops improved. Advertisers including Coca Cola and Listerine came calling, as did the now sadly departed EDM producer Avicii, who asked Penna to direct the video for his single You Make Me. Penna now had the clout to try more ambitious fare, such as Meridian, an interactive, choose your own adventure-style webseries, and a trio of high-concept short sci-fi films, one of which was produced by Ron Howard.
Which brings us to Arctic. What’s most striking about the film is just how far away it is from the busy, noisy videos that were previously Penna’s stock-in-trade. Wordless and patiently paced, it stars Mikkelsen as a downed pilot in the Arctic circle whose hopes for rescue are dashed when the helicopter sent to take him home promptly crashes in front of him. Refusing to accept his desperate fate, he patches up the crash’s lone survivor, stuffs her in a sleeping bag and starts to drag her on a toboggan across the tundra, to either salvation or a very unpleasant death. Without giving away the outcome, what follows is an agonisingly effective thriller, ratcheting the tension up degree by degree as the temperature goes the other way.Penna did a lot of prep to get the finer details of Arctic just right, speaking to pilots, medical experts and survivalists. He also was keen to avoid the biggest pitfall of this sort of film: dumb decision-making. “I read a lot of critical reviews of survival films, and a constant thread throughout all of them was that people didn’t like it when somebody did something stupid. So we wanted to keep him as a very smart guy, but one who knows that the only way to keep this woman alive is to risk his life. Would you do it?”
Just as the film doles out the punishment to its main character, Arctic’s shoot – which took place over 19 days in Iceland – put its leading man through the wringer, sometimes shooting for 15 hours in the snow. “Mads’s wife was livid at me at the end of the shoot,” Penna says. “I was given a movie star and I returned a broken man back to her.”
Still, it seems that was as much Mikkelsen’s fault as anyone else’s. “He was so committed to the role. He was in every single frame of the film. There are close ups of a glove that could literally be anybody – that was Mads. We did a few drone shots that are from really far away without Mads and I didn’t use any of them because you can tell.”
In keeping with someone more used to putting videos up online a couple of times a week, Penna has already got his next film in pre-production, a thriller called Stowaway that’s set in a rocket heading to Mars. He’s not the only former YouTuber with designs on Hollywood either: July sees the release of internet comedian Bo Burnham’s debut film Eighth Grade, which received rave reviews at Sundance. Penna believes there will be more directors emerging from YouTube in the years to come. The platform, he says, is like a “public film school. A few of the content creators on there can be really great film-makers. I hope I’m not the only one.”
