Reykjavík in July doesn’t do night. It just does late afternoon, stretched thin until eleven o’clock. My bio rhythm gave up on day one. Our producer Philip organized a little private tour in the evening to Hafnarfjörður (to watch thermals rise off the black sand) and to the town Grindavík, which was swallowed half by magma and the remaining residents just keep making coffee. It’s a ghost town that hasn’t learned how to haunt properly.

Next day, boarding the expedition cruise ship with a skeleton crew and six cases of equipment is less logistics and more performance art. Still in the harbour after that hassle I spent a significant portion of my remaining dignity buying up half the North Face store in Reykjavik. These clothes will likely collect dust in my Berlin flat for the next decade. On the plus side: the donuts in Reykjavik are an achievement of human ingenuity (eat them here)

The itinerary read like a breathless inventory: Skjoldungensund, Prins Christian Sund, Hvalsey, Qaqortoq, Ivittuut, Nuuk, Evigedsfjord, Illulissat, Disco Bay, Sisimiut, Kangerlussuaq. and back to civilization.

First morning: an iceberg swam by my suite window after I opened my eyes to a morning that looked like the same streched out afternoon light 6 hours earlier. I grabbed the Alexa, strained a muscle before the first frame rolled, and spent the rest of the day with a heat patch taped to my shoulder while we filmed models against scenery that doesn’t require a render farm. Note to producers: If you want "out-of-this-world," just fly to Greenland. It’s cheaper and more terrifying.

You don’t realize how loud ice fields and glaciers are until you’re bouncing through a Zodiac past jagged calving edges, The ice doesn't just melt; it cracks. It pops. It screams. It’s an insane acoustic experience. I kept dropping an underwater rig into the black meltwater until my fingers went numb and stayed that way for hours.

A couple splashy zodiac tours later, the Canon C70 we’d been using for hike-and-shoot situations started recording static and digital ghosts before giving up entirely. Electronics don’t survive Greenland politely; they just quit. At least I didn't crash a drone this time.

Day nine. I broke a front tooth. One stupid lurch, camera next to me. Half a tooth went airborne during a restaurant scene. It was already cracked and needed work anyway. But it added to the general trainwreck aesthetic.

On our last day in Kangerlussuaq, we took a four-by-four bus onto the inland ice. It’s melting at a pace that makes climate reports feel like fiction, sitting four degrees warmer than it should.

In 1999 Volkswagen spent one hundred and fifty million euros carving a test road into this exact glacier. They had to abandon it because the ice shifted too fast, turning their precision engineering into slush. You can’t schedule a shoot when the ground is leaving.

Now I’m back in summer heated Berlin. The light here is normal. A body that felt like it had been packed in dry ice and unpacked wrong. Sore, cold, runny nose. The footage is beautiful. I’ll invoice the production company, update my reel, and wait for the next email that says we’re doing it again with three people instead of six. Skeleton crews are just another word for faith in your own hands. But maybe, just maybe, we should start charging extra for the part where you carry everything yourself.

During one of the pre-production meetings, the owner of the hotel chain tells us they position themselves above Four Seasons. Mathematically, it’s an interesting concept. Where does one go after the ceiling of luxury has already been reached? But I didn't have the mental bandwidth to solve this equation anyways because my brain was overloaded with other things regarding this shoot.

You land in Malé. You get ushered into a ten-seater seaplane.

We had so much equipment that we essentially colonized the plane. There was another couple on board, headed to a different resort. They were informed that their luggage couldn't fit due to weight restrictions. Our gear had taken up half the aircraft. I felt a vague sense of guilt, but at least they didn't blame it on us.

Technically, this was an extremely demanding project, especially since we needed to pack light (which is funny saying that after the previous paragraph). I needed the camera to glide through architecture. Aesthetic and stylized kitchen and foot shots. Water sports above the surface and below it: Jet skis. Stand-up paddling. Snorkeling with turtles and mantas. Drones. I had to capture the staff—the butlers, the therapists, the barkeepers—in a way that felt invisible. Presence without identity. In short: A total walk in the park.

Then we landed. After approximately sixteen hours of transit, I started counting the bags in my head. And one was missing. We had left a case on the conveyor belt at Malé airport. It was currently sitting alone in lost and found of an international airport. This is usually where the panic sets in. But this is where the "Above Four Seasons" philosophy actually manifests in reality. We told them the detail. They said, "No problem." Two hours later, the case was standing in my water villa. It just appeared.

The weather was the other variable.

Hotels are available during the off-season. The off-season is when the weather is bad. This is a fundamental law of hospitality. Somehow, the weather gods looked at our call sheet and decided to be lenient. We had sunshine. No monsoon.

Except at night.

Everything worked out. It was exhausting. Sebastian, my AC, might still be slightly pissed about the workload. But we had the food, the beach, and a complimentary massage to buffer the trauma. The final cut should provide further compensation.

I came home with a few new practical truths. Dive weights make excellent sandbags. Lube works as camera SFX. And I will forever being spoiled when it comes to accommodations.

I had this idea. Four guys. A road movie. I wanted to capture a specific kind of masculinity. Not the loud version. Not the one that shouts or takes up all the oxygen in the room. Just the quiet, intimate side.

I might have failed at that.

It’s possible the film doesn’t actually say what I thought it would. Because of that, you probably won’t find it in my reel. It exists in a private archive of "almosts." But if you ask for it—specifically, directly—I’ll show it to you.

On this shoot, I worked with Phoenix for the first time. They were my 1st AD. The film itself might be an asterisk, but meeting Phoenix was the main event. It opened a door to a much more important collaboration later on. Sometimes you have to make a movie that doesn't work just to find the person who makes the next one work perfectly.

There was Matt and his vintage Range Rover. We spent a lot of time sitting in the back. The paperwork for the vehicle was, let’s say, optimistic.

We stayed at a farm for two nights in Elandsbai.

We were having a braai for dinner. The communal South African ritual of fire and meat. We were all there, gathered around the heat, waiting for the last two people to drift back from the coast. Except they didn't show up.

Their car broke down in the middle of nowhere. In Elandsbai, there isn’t much in the way of traffic. Hitchhiking isn't a strategy; it's a fantasy.

So they walked. They walked for more than two hours through the absolute dark to get back to the farmhouse. By the time they arrived, they looked like hobos.

It’s funny how we approach these things. You start with a thesis on masculinity—this idea of quiet intimacy and shared silence. And you end up with two men hiking through the night because a vintage car died.