Deep Water
Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell

Iona Firouzabadi
posted 6 December 2006

This is a true story. It documents a tragedy that is both grand and pathetic. In October 1968, Donald Crowhurst, a 35-year-old engineer and father of four, embarked on one of the last great adventures of the 20th century. Donald was one of nine men who set out from the English coast that autumn as part of the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, chasing to be either the first or the fastest man to circumnavigate the globe - single-handed and non-stop. But for Donald Crowhurst the dream cracked.

Deep Water is produced in association with Darlow Smithson, the same company behind the seminal 2003 feature documentary Touching the Void. Where that film told a tale about hope against the odds, Deep Water is its dark mirror image: an adventure story that bears the sad scars of isolation and madness, not heroism and survival. Pieced together from archive footage, new interviews and location filming, with minimal and unobtrusive narration, voice is given to those who were part of the 1968 events. They tear scraps from their memories, and stitch a portrait of Crowhurst; a seemingly ordinary man caught in the vortex of dreams greater than himself. The BBC producer who gave him a camera to record the voyage tells of his feelings of culpability in the charade Crowhurst perpetrated. His wife tells of her continuing guilt that she didn't dissuade him from the voyage. The dignity and honesty with which these emotions are expressed on camera are a credit to the filmmakers. This is not a sensationalist or showy film, but it does make a concession to having villains.

Working chronologically, Deep Water evokes its era beautifully through the artful use of archive footage and an original score. It was to the glad rags and glory of 1960s Britain that Sir Francis Chichester made his return in the spring of 1967, having become the first man to circumnavigate the globe solo, though not non-stop. A national hero, he set the stage for a new age of Elizabethan sailors. On to this stage walked some curious characters. They included Stanley Best and Rodney Hallworth, Crowhurst's sponsor and press agent. These are our villains, and very modern villains they make, unscrupulous men driven by the desire for money and publicity. The archive footage of Hallworth is a gift. A man with a no-nonsense northern accent and Michael Caine glasses props up a pub bar with a pint next to him. He tells us many people who do great things are bit dull, 'so you've got to dress it up'. You can tell he's in PR.

Between them Best and Hallworth embody the darkness that consumed Crowhurst's mind in the Atlantic. Indebted to Best for the cost of constructing his trimaran, the Teignmouth Electron, Crowhurst signed a deal before embarking, stating that if he failed to complete the voyage he would be liable for the boat's total cost. The idea of financial ruin haunted Crowhurst, having watched his father go bankrupt as a child. He did everything he could to prevent the same fate befalling him and his young family - including the extraordinary falsification of his voyage. Caught in the ever-increasing knot of his terrors and lies, his mind began to sink. What has remained are the media that recorded the lies and the mental descent - film, tape and log books, cataloguing the last 243 days of his life.

One of the most intriguing questions that this film raises is the eternal one of the objectivity and responsibility of the journalist. In filming Crowhurst's preparations for departure, the BBC began by charting a very British story - a man the press had characterised as a 'mystery', the maverick, the eccentric, the wildcard, the underdog. All the things the British public and press love. But what the producer ended up documenting was something quite different: he recognised 'this is not a voyage that's going to happen' and told his cameraman to 'film the chaos of it all'. What unfolded on camera, even before Crowhurst set sail, was a journey into oblivion.