Excerpt from the Foreword by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
Queen Margrethe II of Denmark was working as the costume designer on an adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale that was being directed by a good friend of mine, Peter Flinth. During filming, she suggested that the memoir Two Against the Ice by Ejnar Mikkelsen would make a great movie. As a good, proud subject, Peter then sent a copy of the book to me. It was 2011, and I was in Bolivia working on a fictional story about what would have happened if Butch Cassidy had lived out his days in the mountains there. Reading Two Against the Ice, I was struck by how reality often is stranger and more extreme than fiction. I have always been attracted to stories of explorers, tales of men and women who knowingly put themselves in harm’s way in the pursuit of adventure and discovery. Mikkelsen’s story grabbed hold of me and did not let go.
At the turn of the previous century, Arctic explorers — alpha males born with incredible self-belief in their abilities to achieve the impossible — traveled to places where nature held no respect for human life. Risking their lives to go where no man had gone before, many of them perished.
What set the story told in Two Against the Ice apart is that it featured two men who were the unlikeliest of companions. Ejnar Mikkelsen, an experienced explorer, ends up with a young mechanic, Iver Iversen, who only joined the expedition to Greenland that Mikkelsen was leading when its original mechanic turned out to be useless and a drunk. Iver had little if any ambition and zero experience in the Arctic.
So, when Mikkelsen needed a volunteer to accompany him on an arduous journey, it was surprising that it was the rookie Iversen who stepped up and threw himself into what he believed would be a few months of adventure.
These few months became three long years during which the two men battled the ice and deadly cold of the Arctic, managing to survive by virtue of companionship, friendship, and an unwavering trust in each other.
Within this book there is a particular moment that made me want to adapt it into a movie. . .
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
Copenhagen
October 2021
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