In 2009, the world was captivated by the story of Jessica Watson, an Australian teenager who was deadset on completing a solo sailing trip around the world. The journey would require nothing short of true spirit, with 210 lonely days at sea that brought both physical and mental knockdowns.
It’s the stuff you’d think exists only in movies, but here, the world watched Watson endure it. Now, 13 years later, we’re getting that movie.
True Spirit is an adaptation of Watson’s story, which charts her gruelling seven-month journey at sea from start to finish. The film stars Teagan Croft as Watson, alongside Anna Paquin and Josh Lawson as her parents Julie and Roger, and Cliff Curtis as her coach, Ben.
Speaking to Lifehacker Australia via Zoom, Watson confirmed she was fairly involved in the development process and got to know the director, Sarah Spillane, “really well” after talking for a number of years about the project.
Watson and Croft also developed a close working relationship. The duo explained how a pre-production dinner helped them build out Jessica Watson as a character for the movie.
“Sarah, Jess and I had a big conversation about how we wanted the character to not just be a mimic of Jess, but to be a fully-fledged character that we all put our own creative input into,” Croft told Lifehacker Australia.
“That’s what makes filmmaking so magical is that so many people put in their own personal touches and create a community-built film.”
True Spirit was filmed locally on the Gold Coast but, due to COVID-19, Croft’s shooting experience ended up somewhat mimicking that of Watson’s sailing expedition.
“At that time, COVID was really big and the New South Wales to Queensland borders were closed, so I hadn’t seen my sisters at that point for seven months,” Croft explained. “So I was really able to pull a lot of emotion from my real life and from those real phone calls I was having with my family.”
“It was isolating but it was also a perfect isolation and it made the performance, I think, a bit more authentic.”
Croft said that her past experience working on action and genre-heavy projects, such as DC’s Titans, helped prepare for such an action-packed true story.
“I’m glad I had that experience with the green screen and the stunts. It’s a very specific way of filmmaking. But because [True Spirit] was this mix of an action film, and because it was a very real story we were telling, that mix was difficult to navigate at first. I was kind of getting into two headspaces at once.”
That stunt experience would certainly come in handy when it came to one particular sequence in the film that shows Watson and her faithful boat, Pink Lady, dragged underwater in a storm.
It’s a terrifying moment that Watson said was “pretty damn close” to reality.
“It comes across like it was probably a bit long to be real, but at the same time, in that moment, the sense of time was really odd, and it kind of did feel like it stretched on forever,” Watson explained.
For Croft, recreating the scene involved an “incredible” set piece.
“I was on this big wheel rig. So they like made the inside of the cabin, the sideways version so you could just see half of it, and put it on a big wheel and they turned me upside down. And I was hanging there crying,” Croft said.
While True Spirit does dip into some movie magic, Watson said that on the whole there’s “so much” that the film gets right about her story.
“I think it captured the essence of it and the inspiration and the absolute joy that I still get from just being out on the water,” she said.
“There’s this kind of uplifting sense that you take from it and that sense of adventure and wanting to explore. There are so many little moments, little lines, like the world being so tough but also so beautiful, that just resonate and ring so true to me.”
Along with a love of sailing, which Croft picked up while making the film, the pair shared that there are some life lessons they gained from each other throughout the process of making True Spirit.
“Seeing the sense of fun that Teagan brought to it… I think that’s something I want to hang on to,” Watson said. “I think the line in the movie is like dance in the rain.”
“What so many people learned from Jess, obviously, was if you’ve got a dream you can follow it,” Croft said. “Just making sure that if you’ve got self-belief and you really want to do something, you have the power to do that and you have the autonomy, no matter your age.”
True Spirit releases on Netflix on February 3.
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