In The Woman in Cabin 10 – a brand new psychological thriller now streaming on Netflix, primarily based on Ruth Ware’s bestselling novel of the identical title – journalist Laura Blacklock (Keira Knightly) will get a journey project that us Condé Nast Traveller editors would absolutely be combating over: a luxury superyacht journey by means of Norway’s fjords.
But when Laura witnesses a fellow visitor fall overboard, her hosts, Richard Bullmer (Guy Pearce) and his ailing spouse Anne (Lisa Loven Kongsli), are steadfast that nobody is lacking. Soon, she finds herself entangled in a harmful scenario in the midst of the open sea.
Much of the movie’s ensuing drama takes place on board the yacht, named the Aurora Borealis. Instead of constructing the fictional vessel from scratch, director Simon Stone and manufacturing designer Alice Normington chartered an precise superyacht after which created further interiors on a soundstage. (Although the yacht is now a film star, it can stay nameless.)
“The sea is a nightmare to fake with VFX [visual effects],” Stone explains. “So any interaction between the characters and the sea would have cost so much to do. It was a purely pragmatic decision. The only thing we really needed to change was the number of cabins for story purposes, so we had to build the cabins and we designed some of the interior of the ship.”
“You can’t shoot on a real yacht with that amount of wealth and then fabricate that in a studio on a really cheap level,” Normington provides. “If we had built it entirely, we wouldn’t have had the scope and the scale we got by using a real yacht. It also gave a sense of real peril being on a boat at a certain height with water below.”