Screening this Saturday on Rialto Channel is Norway’s most expensive film, the incredible ocean adventure Kon–Tiki. It tells the true story of Thor Heyerdahl’s epic 1947 journey across the Pacific from Peru to Polynesia in an attempt to prove it was possible for South Americans to settle in Polynesia more than 5000 years earlier.

Screening this Saturday on Rialto Channel is Norway’s most expensive film, the incredible ocean adventure Kon–Tiki. It tells the true story of Thor Heyerdahl’s epic 1947 journey across the Pacific from Peru to Polynesia in an attempt to prove it was possible for South Americans to settle in Polynesia more than 5000 years earlier.

What’s remarkable about this journey is Heyerdahl couldn’t swim, but insisted on the journey was completed as it would have been centuries before, using only a traditional Balsa wood raft tied together with rope. With a basic radio for communication, Heyerdahl and his crew literally set themselves adrift, hoping Heyerdahl had correctly predicted where the oceans currents would take them.

Jeremy Thomas, one of the most successful independent producers of our time, produced Kon-Tiki. An Academy Award winner, Thomas has spent the last forty years working with auteurs such as David Cronenberg, Nagisa Oshima, Bernardo Bertolucci, Wim Wenders and Nicolas Roeg.

Thomas met Thor Heyerdahl in 1996, and it took him several years to persuade Heyerdahl to give him rights to his book on the Kon-Tiki expedition. Turns out getting the rights was the easy part, it would be another decade before he secured the funding to bring his passion project to life.

“I tried to make it as a big Hollywood film thinking I’d need those resources to make it on water,” explains Thomas, “and during the time I tried to get it together unsuccessfully, digital technology changed so much that when I reconceived the film ten years later, digital technology was here to make incredible water effects.”

Thomas then approached Norwegian directors Joachim Rønning & Espen Sandberg, who had just completed Norway’s most successful film Max Manus. As Thomas sums up, “they made me a fantastic film.”

Instead of the US $80 million budget initially envisaged to make this film, US $16 million did the trick. The whole film was shot in 59 days in 2011 in Norway, Sweden, Peru, Thailand, the Maldives and Bulgaria (which doubled as New York), but most of the filming took place at sea off the coast of Malta and in a giant water tank, also in Malta.

Despite it’s economical budget, Thomas was thrilled with the result. “It’s an epic sized film and an incredibly strong story, and I was very happy and very thrilled to discover it was nominated for an Oscar and Golden Globe. It was a surprise, I must have to say.”

Check out Kon-Tiki, Saturday 15 March at 8.30pm