British actor Martin Freeman said filming Andrew Haigh’s new movie “A Long Winter” on a snow-covered Canadian mountain meant he spent a lot of time “concentrating on not dying”. “(It was) breathtakingly beautiful and breathtakingly freezing,” the star of “The Hobbit” told AFP on the red carpet at the London Film Festival. “It was really, really cold,” he recalled of the Alberta landscape, where the sensitive drama exploring grief and longing was shot. “So, you’re sort of half concentrating on doing the scene with lovely Fred (Hechinger) and half concentrating on not dying.” “Both those things are quite a good impetus ... They focus the mind,” he said before the movie’s screening Wednesday. “A Long Winter” is an adaptation of a 2006 short story of the same name by Irish novelist Colm Toibin. Set in the 1950s, Hechinger -- who starred in the first season of “The White Lotus” -- plays Mike, who returns to his childhood home in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. His life is turned upside down when his mother (Caitriona Balfe) suddenly disappears during a snowstorm and Mike must navigate the fallout with his father, played by Ebon Che Moss-Bachrach. “We shot on location. We built a real house, the snow is real, the wind is real, we shot on film,” said Haigh, director of 2023 romantic drama “All of Us Strangers”. “So, everything for me was about having a haptic, you know, tactile quality to what we were making,” he told AFP. Hechinger said it was the “most technically challenging” role he had ever performed, recalling that one day the wind blew off the roof of the house. “You sensed how fragile this whole thing was,” he told AFP. “You need a level of resilience. And so, it was interesting,” he added. “A Long Winter” is released in UK cinemas on January 15.
