20/09/2013 - Iceland – and the Icelandic film industry – profit from the country’s incentive scheme to attract international productions: 20% of the costs are reimbursed

Russian director Dmittriy Grachev and his Calculator cast and crew had hardly left Iceland, before UK director Christopher Nolan arrived with his team for Interstellar. To Nolan, whose latest feature The Dark Knight Rises (2012) grossed €820 million worldwide, it was a déjà vu: he shot Batman Begins (2005) on the island which marks the juncture between the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.

With a 320,000 population, Iceland – and the Icelandic film industry – profit from the incentive scheme to attract international productions: 20% of the costs incurred during the production of films and television programmes in Iceland are reimbursed. And since the country is a member of the EEA, they receive European content status.

Having already lent locations this year to US director Joseph Kosinki’s action-adventurer Oblivion, with Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman in the leads, and the American HBO series Game of Thrones, Iceland was last month (August) visited by Calculator: the production team spent a week finding five different locations before the rest of the cast and crew flew in for 19 days of shooting.

A sci-fi thriller, the film stars UK footballer-turned-actor Vinnie Jones as a man who does not see people, only numbers, and accordingly calculates everything around him. Co-starring Evgeniy Mironov and Anya Chipovskaya, the Unified Media Group production was assisted in Iceland by local production company Sagafilm (photo by Pétur Oli Gíslason).

Sagafilm also services Nolan, who co-wrote the sci-fi depiction of how a group of explorers uses a newly discovered wormhole to exceed the limits of human travel in an interstellar voyage. Matt Damon, Anna Hathaway, and Matthew McConaughey play the leads; filming takes place at the Svínafell glacier in Eastern Iceland, with a 300 crew, including 100 locals.