- 6/22/2025
Producer Ruth Johnson, Historian Dan Snow & Director of Exploration Mensun Bound talk to The Inside Reel about approach, context, logistics, history and technology in regards to their new documentary film: “Endurance” from National Geographic and available on Hulu & Disney+.
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00:00Why we go, I cannot say.
00:15Today is the day.
00:17What the impelling thought is that makes explorers, I cannot describe.
00:21Come on, boys!
00:22And as long as there is any mystery on this globe, it is not only man's right...
00:26Oh, my God.
00:27Look at that.
00:28But it's duty to try to unravel it.
00:36First, for Menson, could you talk about just sort of the, you know, it's an untenable, almost task to do what you guys did.
00:45And I was talking to Nico and to Dr. Shears about it.
00:49What did doing this expedition mean for you?
00:54Now that it's over and done with and you guys have found endurance,
00:57what is the reflection for you?
01:01Well, I think all of us have this huge satisfaction of having achieved what many people thought would be unachievable.
01:08I mean, she was known as the unreachable endurance.
01:10And we did it.
01:12The technical challenges, the archaeological challenges, you've seen the film, you've seen the weather and stuff, the ice and the blizzards.
01:20I mean, the way it all came together and a brilliant team.
01:24I just feel so utterly proud of everything we did.
01:27And then the ship itself.
01:28Oh, my God.
01:30You know, we just, I mean, yes, as an archaeologist, I argued that she'd be in a brilliant state of preservation.
01:36But, you know, nothing prepared me for what we saw that day.
01:39I mean, I've been excavating, evaluating, surveying shipwrecks for 32 consecutive years of my life.
01:45But never, never have I ever seen anything as bold and beautiful as the endurance.
01:50We tried once before in 2019 to search for the endurance.
01:56It felt like my whole life had been converging upon that moment.
02:00And then it all went wrong.
02:02Imagine being here in a little wooden boat.
02:03No GPS.
02:05No nothing.
02:06And then the leader says, oh, by the way, boys, we're stuck.
02:09And we're going to spend the winter here.
02:13People don't understand what, you know, I had no idea there was 10,000 feet there below the ice.
02:19I mean, it's funny when you see the history, the obviously archival footage, all this kind of stuff.
02:25You don't almost get a sense of that.
02:27But, I mean, that's why the history and what you guys show in terms of, especially like the parallels of showing what it looks like on the floor.
02:36And then going to the actual image, it really brings it home.
02:41Could you talk about just the story?
02:43Obviously, Dan, if you could talk about that, the history and what Shackleton did, how unbelievable that was.
02:51But then to come back more than 100 years later and to find it as they did.
02:57So the great thing about this documentary is that it is one of the greatest stories ever told.
03:04And we have some of these astonishing images that were taken by Frank Hurley in the past.
03:08We now, to add to those, we've got images of one of the greatest shipwrecks in the world.
03:12Mensen's found dozens of shipwrecks in his career.
03:15And none of them are in a state of preservation and in a situated like that ship is keeled down on the surface of the seabed, sitting proud of it, intact.
03:25And so that's what's, and the story is remarkable.
03:29Shackleton sets out to cross Antarctica from one side to the other.
03:32It's a catastrophic failure.
03:33His ship is trapped in the ice in the beginning of 1915.
03:36He doesn't even make it to, he doesn't even make it to the mainland.
03:39The ship is crushed by the ice throughout the year, but it's given its lethal blow towards the end of 1915.
03:50They're forced to watch it sink beneath the ice.
03:53They live on the ice.
03:54They have virtually no chance of getting home at that point.
03:57They are thousands of miles from help.
03:59And yet he keeps them alive.
04:01He gives them the strength and the belief that he will get them home.
04:04They then wait for that ice to break up.
04:06They take to their open boats.
04:07They manage to row and sail about a week.
04:11One of the great, even that was one of the great journeys of all time, but it would be followed by even greater.
04:16They managed to get a toehold on a piece of land.
04:18They land on Elephant Island for the first time in 397 days.
04:21They go on to land.
04:23They camp there, but Shackleton realizes they'll die there if they have to endure another winter.
04:28And so he sails with an elite crew of five other men, 800 miles away to South Georgia,
04:33which is the nearest place he could realistically get to, where there were human beings living.
04:37Somehow they pull that off.
04:39It's the greatest open boat journey of all time.
04:42The descriptions of killer waves, of ice forming on the ship, of hurricane force winds are astonishing.
04:48They run out of food and water.
04:50They land just, they thread their way through rocks and reefs onto South Georgia.
04:54They land on the wrong side of South Georgia.
04:56They have to walk up and over South Georgia in the winter.
04:59No one has ever done that before.
05:00They're wearing inappropriate clothing.
05:02They haven't done any mountaineering training.
05:04And they make it in one fell swoop.
05:08And they arrive back at these whaling stations on the other side of South Georgia.
05:14And then he goes and rescues everybody.
05:16So even before the shipwreck, it's one of the great stories of all time.
05:19And the fact that we now have the shipwreck on the seabed looking as great as it does,
05:23connecting us to that story, and the fact that we have Chai and Jimmy who came on board,
05:26the world's greatest filmmakers, to tell that story,
05:29means that this is, it's sort of an unbeatable project.
05:33We're ready.
05:34Yes.
05:34Okay, let's find the endurance.
05:36We're still talking about Shackleton because this is the greatest tale of survival in history.
05:43And it's a story about failure.
05:44Success awaits.
05:45Dive ones, let's go.
05:47In 1914, Shackleton was convinced the greatest Antarctic journey was yet to be done,
05:52crossing the Antarctic continent from one side to the other.
05:55So he dragged his men on a doomed quest.
05:59But taking that, though, under root, the aspect of knowing all the logistics,
06:03seeing everything and being able to be in the right place at the right time,
06:07put all the clearances, the technical.
06:10Can you sort of talk about what it takes to make a film like this with the expedition going on in these conditions?
06:17Could you talk about that a little bit from your perspective?
06:19Sure. It was also during COVID and we had an out, it was Omicron, so in South Africa in particular.
06:24So we were very nervous about that when we mentioned.
06:26So we had to go through various procedures to make sure that we didn't all get sick on the boat and pass it to each other.
06:32So we ended up on the vessel, a South African icebreaker with helicopter crews from Alaska and North America.
06:39Then we had scientists from Europe.
06:43We had a subsea team from France and elsewhere.
06:46Mensenbaum, legendary marine archaeologists from the Falkland Islands and the UK.
06:52So we assembled a team from all over the world.
06:53Captain Knowledge Bengu, the captain, first black African ice pilot,
06:57a man who was born in poverty under apartheid,
07:00who was able to become a trailblazer for Africans in the shipping industry.
07:07So there were all sorts of extraordinary elements that were put together just to make this exhibition happen in the first place
07:12as a result of the hard work of Mensen and his team.
07:16And then that was before we even set sail.
07:19Then we set sail with the closest people on Earth,
07:22sorry, the closest people, Freudian, the closest people to us at that point were on the International Space Station.
07:27There was no possibility of resupply, no possibility of equipment.
07:30If the equipment failed, so they had to take a duplicate, triplicate of anything they might need,
07:3525 kilometres of fibre-optic cable, drones, spares.
07:40We had to be able to fix anything, and we did have to fix stuff.
07:44The witches, hydraulic pumps went at one point.
07:49So the crew were astonishing.
07:51The embarked subsea groups were astonishing.
07:54And then we had to also operate cameras at minus 30.
07:57As Mensen says, one of my cameramen got his eyelids frozen together.
08:02It was tumbling temperatures.
08:04The drone was not designed to operate in those conditions, right?
08:08Absolutely not.
08:10In fact, it failed a couple of times.
08:11We lost the main thrust towards it.
08:13But you know, listen to you tell the story, Dan.
08:15It's Shackleton.
08:16You know, one obstacle.
08:18Yeah, Shackleton.
08:18You know, it's like everything.
08:21Just like Dan was telling you, it was one thing, then the next.
08:24So you get past that, then the next one.
08:29We lived long, dark days in the South.
08:33We lived through slow, dead days of toil, of struggle,
08:39sharp striving and anxiety.
08:47As long as we can come out of this predicament with our lives,
08:50we shall not crumble.
08:54And please, God, we will succeed.
08:57Yeah, I think watching you asked about the footage,
08:59there was a lot of footage taken on that ship
09:01that came back to us again to make the film,
09:03as well as there's archive from, you know, from 1914,
09:06this incredible early archive,
09:08but also archive that exists in different places in the world.
09:10And we had an amazing archive producer called Brianna,
09:13who, Brianna Bierman,
09:15and she was the one who did a lot of those licenses for us.
09:18And there were a lot.
09:19You can see how much archive there is in that film
09:21from many, many different places and sources.
09:24We worked with the descendants as well.
09:27We were in touch with a lot of the descendants
09:28of the original expedition crew in 1914.
09:31They've been fantastic supporters of us
09:33as we've been producing this film.
09:35And then we did use AI as well,
09:36so we had to look for the voices of these men
09:38to be able to make sure that the voices were authentic
09:40and that we were telling these stories
09:41using their exact writing
09:43in their voices as close as we could possibly get
09:46to the samples that we had from their voices.
09:49So we went out and did a large search
09:51to try to get those voices
09:52to be able to make sure
09:53that we could stitch them together
09:54and make it, you know,
09:57their story told for the first time
09:59in their own voices,
10:00in their own words,
10:00because it is a story, like you said,
10:02that's been told for a very long time.
10:04So we wanted to use all those, you know,
10:05those tools that didn't exist a long time ago,
10:07just like the guys on the ship
10:08and this expedition,
10:09amazing, amazing expedition.
10:10And the team had to use new technology.
10:13We decided to use a little bit of new tech
10:15in our actual producing of the film,
10:17both in the color treating
10:18for the first time of the footage,
10:20you know, that the BFI have lovingly
10:22protected, preserved for 100 years,
10:24as well as using the AI voice conversion technology
10:28by a company called ReSpeecher
10:30based in Ukraine,
10:31who were actually in Ukraine,
10:32you know, with,
10:33we had a call where they did have shells landing
10:36and they had to take a little beat
10:38and a little stop
10:39before we would continue our call with them.
10:42And we just had so many partners
10:44across so many countries
10:46and I worked across many time zones
10:47for the three and a half years,
10:50especially when you guys were in Antarctica.
10:52There are three different time zones.
10:54So we had to kind of,
10:55you know,
10:55there were a lot of time zones involved
10:57in the production of the film.
10:59There are a lot of pieces that went together.
11:01You were asking specifically
11:02about the footage,
11:03the clearance and the filmmaking.
11:05There are a lot of partners.
11:06We had the easy job.
11:07We just filmed everything.
11:08Ruth had to go through it all.
11:09We just dumped a whole lot of cans of film
11:12right on our desk
11:13and said,
11:14choose the bits out of that.
11:15There are a lot of formats as well.
11:17So if you think about all of these places,
11:19pieces of,
11:19you know,
11:20pieces of footage from a filmmaking
11:21and from an editing standpoint,
11:23our assistant,
11:24our lead assistant editor,
11:25Adam,
11:25and our two editors,
11:26Simona and Bob,
11:27the reformatting of all of that footage as well
11:30was quite a task in itself
11:32before we even got to,
11:33you know,
11:33the producing and the deciding,
11:35okay,
11:35what's the story that we need to tell here?
11:37They had to get it all
11:39into a viewable format for us.
11:41So there were a lot of technical challenges
11:42in the production.
11:43It's interesting talking about filmmaking,
12:10but talking about an expedition,
12:11Munson,
12:11if you could talk about that.
12:13The logistics.
12:14I mean,
12:14I had no idea the way the ice moved
12:17and you're talking about,
12:18I love how there's a balance you see
12:20in the shackles of the finish
12:21about millions of ton of ice,
12:23but then the certain things have to be done,
12:25like the swinging up that propane tank
12:27to get everything undone.
12:29Like these little details,
12:31sometimes people don't understand
12:32what it takes to mount this kind of thing
12:34and to think ahead,
12:35but also to be able to pivot
12:37when something isn't where it's supposed to be.
12:40Sometimes,
12:40can you talk about that?
12:42Looking at this specific expedition
12:44versus say the one in 19,
12:47or like even the Giorgio,
12:48which is a completely different thing.
12:51Yeah.
12:52I mean,
12:52for us,
12:53it was always the ice.
12:55That was the big challenge.
12:57And especially during the first search,
12:59the ice was incredibly aggressive.
13:01It would muscle up around us.
13:03You could feel the pressure.
13:05It was like you were in the coils
13:07of a boa constrictor.
13:09And indeed,
13:10in the second season also,
13:11we got caught a couple of times there.
13:14And there was one occasion
13:15where I forget how many more,
13:16but two days,
13:18I think it was,
13:19we were stuck on the ice
13:20and there were some very nervous people on board
13:22who were talking about,
13:23you know,
13:23are we going to end up like the Endurance?
13:25It was as worrying as that.
13:27And you're right.
13:28All we had was that 16 ton tank
13:30of helicopter fuel,
13:32which was all swing from one side to the other.
13:34And that was just to prevent us
13:36from becoming cemented in,
13:39just to stop the ice getting its grip on us.
13:42And then all we could do
13:44was hope against hope
13:45that as the tide rose
13:47and pushed on the underside of the ice,
13:49that the reaction would be such
13:52that cracks would go open and let us out.
13:54And that, in fact,
13:55was what happened.
13:56You know,
13:56in some of the views,
13:58you can see the crack
13:58that opened in front of the ship.
14:00And we just,
14:01the captain just gunned the ship
14:02and we got into that crack.
14:04We got out.
14:05But it was touch and go.
14:06But those guys are such experts.
14:08Captain Knowledge
14:09and Freddie Knight films,
14:10the captains of the ship.
14:11They've done that before.
14:12It was not their first time
14:13and they've definitely done this before.
14:15They know exactly what they need to do
14:17in those conditions.
14:18You know,
14:18they weren't,
14:19you know,
14:20they weren't scared of the ship going down.
14:22They, you know,
14:22they knew,
14:23they knew
14:23and they had the tools,
14:24like you were saying,
14:25they have the technical tools these days
14:26and they know when they're going out there
14:28what is possible
14:29and what isn't possible.
14:30And I think the fact that Captain Knowledge
14:31was able to call,
14:33okay,
14:33we can spend longer,
14:34but he would call
14:35whenever it's time to head out.
14:36So I think there's a,
14:38you know,
14:38that knowledge
14:39and also just again,
14:40like failure to success,
14:42you know,
14:42failing teaches us everything
14:43and the first expedition failed
14:45and the expedition team,
14:47not to talk on,
14:48on your behalf,
14:48but the expedition team
14:49learned from all of those technical mistakes
14:51and technical challenges
14:53that they experienced in 2019
14:55to be able to go back and succeed.
14:57So just like,
14:58Shackleton,
14:59fail,
14:59fail,
14:59fail,
15:00fail,
15:00but he succeeded
15:01in bringing back 28 men alive
15:03and what a feat.
15:04We watched the death of the ship.
15:06Shackleton's six of the men.
15:08She's gone,
15:09boys.
15:10From that moment on,
15:11he's laser focused
15:12on getting those men home.
15:13Now we're stuck on ice
15:15and losing time.
15:17Patient.
15:18Comment est-ce qu'on peut être
15:19quelque chose qui s'inscrit
15:20dans l'histoire de Shackleton
15:21et renoncer?
15:22One more question
15:23and I'll let you guys go
15:24is the aspect
15:25because like,
15:26I think Nico was talking,
15:27it's just like the moon down there,
15:29but the preservation,
15:30the fact that you can see the boot,
15:32all these things.
15:33I mean,
15:33and people will see this in the film.
15:35Can you talk just about
15:36once you saw it,
15:37especially like that 3D rendering,
15:39it's unlike anything I've seen.
15:41Well,
15:43the absolute pinnacle
15:44of my life
15:45as a professional maritime archaeologist
15:47was when we moved in on the wreck
15:49for the first look.
15:50I mean,
15:51we only got two dives in on the wreck.
15:53The first was to secure the data
15:54and the second was
15:55the archaeological inspection dive.
15:57After that,
15:57we had to get out of there
15:58because the winter was upon us
16:00and the ice was getting really scary.
16:02But we approached the ship
16:03from the stern
16:04and it was all darkness
16:05because we're trying to save energy.
16:08We didn't want to drain
16:08the batteries at all.
16:09So it wasn't until we got
16:10right up to the stern of the ship
16:12that we turned all the lights on.
16:14And when we did so,
16:16I'll never forget it.
16:18We just illuminated
16:19the entire stern of the endurance
16:21and there was the ship's name,
16:23nine letters,
16:24sort of curved over
16:25the five-point star,
16:27the Polaro star
16:28after whom the Norwegians
16:29originally named the ship.
16:31And the state of preservation,
16:32we just could not believe it.
16:34I was saying before,
16:35you know,
16:35how many,
16:3632 years I've been working
16:37on shipwrecks,
16:38but nothing like that ever.
16:41And you could see the paintwork
16:42where the paint had rubbed off.
16:44You could see the grain
16:45of the timbers.
16:46Then we went up
16:46and over the stern,
16:47over the tap rail.
16:48And we're looking down
16:49into the well deck
16:50and there was the ship's wheel,
16:52absolutely perfectly preserved.
16:54You could pick out
16:55the kingspoke on the wheel
16:56and there beside it
16:58was the compass
16:58and then there was
16:59that doorway open behind
17:01if you look carefully
17:02and it goes down
17:03into the accommodation deck.
17:05And then the best moment of all
17:06was when we were looking
17:08at these portholes
17:09and I knew that those
17:11were the portholes
17:11through to Shackleton's cabin.
17:14And that was such
17:15an exquisite moment
17:16because I knew
17:16on the other side
17:17of that wall,
17:19midway between
17:20the two portholes,
17:21there was a square
17:22wooden picture frame
17:24and that within
17:24the picture frame
17:25there was a copy
17:26of Rudyard Kipling's poem,
17:28If, and I knew
17:28it was still there,
17:29I knew it was still legible
17:31and you're thinking
17:31what the hell else is there
17:33in Shackleton's cabin,
17:35you know,
17:35it was unbelievable.
17:38We're not finding
17:39anything at all
17:40and temperatures
17:41are going to go
17:41off a cliff
17:42and we'll have to
17:43call the search off.
17:44As long as we can
17:45come out of this
17:46predicament with our lives,
17:47we shall not crumble.
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