A Not So Super Yacht

I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay on this 83-metre luxury hybrid superyacht but then I found out Keira Knightley filmed a murder mystery on it and now I think it might be worth experiencing.

“The Woman in Cabin 10” might have been a Netflix dud with a 28% critic rating and an equally damning 32% audience score but you have to admit, that was a sweet yacht. We ID’d it as being Savannah, made by Feadship. This 274-foot masterpiece was a star in its own right as murder mystery shenanigans unspooled throughout its opulent interiors. It’s been hailed as the first electro-mechanical superyacht thanks to its hybrid propulsion powered by a 1 megawatt powerbank and a hull designed to provide fuel savings of 30% compared to other yachts in her class. The yacht used to belong to the late Canadian oil billionaire Lukas Lundin, but along with its submerged observation areas, DJ stations, marble bathrooms, gyms and spas was sold on for about $150 million.
You’d think that chartering a yacht for a week would be perfect for a film crew to get in and get all the shots they want without any additional work done on props. But according to director Simon Stone you actually had to treat the yacht like it was worth $150 million dollars and not touch anything. He summarised the experience as being the “inverse of luxury”. There was no eating, drinking or sitting on the furniture. Other gear was also prohibited like tripods and stands as well as their shoes had to stay on shore. This last point had to be woven into the film so they didn’t have to add shoes in post production. Keira joked that it was easier to film on a pirate ship.

“You can break the pirate ship,” Knightley told Decider. “Whereas this it’s like, ‘Okay, run because somebody is trying to kill you—but don’t touch the walls!’ It was a particular challenge not breaking anything, and knowing that if you did break something, you’d get a bill for like 200,000 grand.”

The crew managed to keep costs low however “I think we scratched a little bit of the floor, and had to spend a grand on buffing one section of floor,” Stone admitted to Decider. “But that was pretty good.”

Unlike these promo shots of the boat in blue crystalline waters the crew had to shoot in the English Channel to give a suitably miserable scandi-noir vibe.

“I think a lot of the actors who I was meeting with for the film, were like, “Oh, great, we get to be on a superyacht! So where are we shooting?” And I’d be like, “Oh, the coast of the south of England in fall.” And then you see the face drop of like, “Oh, this is going to be miserable.” laughed Stone.

The ship can handle 25 crew and 12 guests living in absolute luxury. The 25 crew were aboard but the shoot required 70 film crew and 20 actors, none of whom couldn’t touch anything.

“We weren’t allowed to like, walk on the carpet. So we were all just kind of crammed in the middle.”

Movie stars might look glitzy swanning around on superyachts, but the realities are far more grim.