The TV movie "Ice Bound" re-creates the real-life ordeal of a woman who discovered she had breast cancer in the most unusual of circumstances — but it's not exactly a movie about a woman with cancer. Or so says Susan Sarandon, who headlines the production.
"I know that if I were to hear, 'Oh, gosh, this is a movie about breast cancer,' I'd go, 'Oh, I know what that's about. How does that mean anything to me? If anything, I don't want to think about it,' " the Oscar-winner said in a telephone interview with several TV critics.
"I wasn't interested in just doing another disease-of-the-week kind of TV movie," Sarandon said, "but what I thought was really interesting was the environment in which they existed."
That environment was the South Pole, where Dr. Jerri Nielsen made international headlines when she diagnosed and was forced to begin treating herself for an aggressive form of breast cancer. But Sarandon and director Roger Spottiswoode were determined not to let it become a TV movie by rote.
"There are so many mistakes you can make in the telling of that story, because it's just so easy to get sentimental and bogged down in letting the disease be the strongest character in the piece," Sarandon said. "I'm not interested in seeing victims. I'm not interested in seeing people suffer silently and then canonizing them for that.
"I want to see the underbelly. I want to see the edginess. I want to see the problems. That's what makes it real. I don't want to be just doing a formulaic story about a disease."
What it became instead was the story of an independent woman who was forced to depend on others because of the situation in which she placed herself — essentially stranded at the South Pole, where the weather made it impossible for her to leave for several months. "It's a situation in which the interdependence of people is palpable. I mean, you really are totally dependent on people that she probably wouldn't have even had a conversation with prior to her going down there.
"She did end up having to go from being a person who was not exactly a team player to someone who, with great difficulty — or, at least, that's the way we chose to interpret it — had to ask for help from someone else. I think all my movies are really about the courage it takes to extend yourself to another human being.
"That opening to another person takes so much courage and makes you so vulnerable. I thought that that was the part of the story that we really felt was necessary."
Adding to the realism of the movie (the full title is "Ice Bound: A Woman's Survival at the South Pole") was the fact that it was shot on frozen Lake Simcoe in Toronto — and the wind chill dropped to 35 below zero during filming. "We certainly had cold, thanks to when we filmed it in Canada," Sarandon said with a laugh. "Even the studio, as you can tell by our breath, was freezing. I'm just glad it wasn't a romantic comedy, where we were bouncing around in negligees or something."
She said she was "actually quite comfortable" filming the outdoor scenes, because she was so well dressed for them. But it was also cold when they filmed inside the Canadian studio. "It was actually more uncomfortable on the set than it was on the lake. But I tried to breathe out as often as possible so you'd know that it was really cold," she joked.
The real Jerri Nielson visited the set during the filming and chatted briefly with the woman who plays her. "I hope she's pleased (with the movie)," Sarandon said. "I hope we got the essence of that trip that she talks about — everyone has their own South Pole.
"I'm really grateful for something that explores different ways to look at some kind of life-threatening situation. But I think that it's only productive when it's used as a catalyst for a bigger question.
"I hope that women that are afraid to face their bodies and have any question that might deal with cancer, or don't have the finances to have mammograms and don't have the education to deal with it will reach out and ask for help. Because 40,000 women will die this year from breast cancer. This is a story of a survivor."
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com