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A Remarkable Story!

George Clooney's latest film tells dark tale of underwater peril

Vannessa Thorpe The Guardian (London)

Hollywood takes on tale of dangerous dives, risky pipe installation and a decades-long battle for compensation 

A dark Nordic mystery played out beneath the icy waves of the North Sea almost 40 years ago is now to find a dramatic resolution in Hollywood. A brave band of Norwegian divers, who put their lives at risk and unwittingly damaged their health by working up to 400m below the surface, may soon receive justice, as George Clooney takes up their cause.

The battle to win compensation for the pioneering divers, who suffered life-changing side effects to secure Norway's enormous oil and gas wealth, has found a new champion in Clooney.

The Hollywood star's own production company plans to tell their story in a film that the divers hope will crown a recent victory in the lengthy legal battle for compensation. The extraordinary feats of the 24 men are already the subject of a Norwegian thriller, Pioneer, which opens in British cinemas on Friday. Now Smokehouse Pictures, run by Clooney and his producing partner Grant Heslov, is to remake the film.

"The plight of the divers is a very well-known story in this country," said Christian Fredrik Martin, producer of the Norwegian film, "and when we first started work on Pioneer, Smokehouse got in touch. They came back to us last year when the film was released in Norway. Clooney and his fellow producers were attracted by the cinematic possibilities of the underwater world, I think, and also because it is the kind of non-fiction story their company has been interested in turning into films in the past."

This year saw the release of Smokehouse Pictures' The Monuments Men, a film directed by Clooney which told the true World War IIsecond world war story of the art historians who set out to save priceless pictures and sculpture from Nazi looting. Clooney and Heslov also wrote 2011's The Ides of March, about a corrupt presidential campaign, and Good Night, and Good Luck, about the McCarthy era communist witch-hunt of the 1950s.

At the end of last year the European court of human rights, in Strasbourg, judged the Norwegian state guilty of not giving the divers enough information about the level of danger they faced in the work they carried out during an oil and gas boom that has since been described as a "wild west" frenzy.

The verdict came after a long battle through the Norwegian courts. In a 2007 case in Oslo, four former North Sea divers successfully sued the state, but the Norwegian government appealed and in 2009 the case came before the supreme court, which ruled that Norway was not liable to pay damages for injuries inflicted by the oil industry. The case went on to Strasbourg, where the divers eventually won last December. This weekend, however, their union has turned down an individual offer of 1.7m Norwegian krone (£170,825) because it is holding out for a larger sum agreed with the government before the last election.

"The interest of film-makers here and in America has been a great help," Henning Haug, director of the Offshore Divers Union, told the Observer this weekend. "It has been especially good because the Norwegian film is so realistic. But we are not satisfied yet. We want to win our members full compensation for this national scandal." The union will not settle for less than 2.1m krone (£211,019) for each diver, he said. "Anything less than that could not be considered decent."

The divers performed crucial tasks to secure the installation of pipelines on the seabed, carrying out surveys, collecting samples and attaching and removing wellheads. They regularly worked at 400m below the surface, while the safe limit for dives is now set at 150m. A hospital in Haukeland, in Bergen, subsequently found evidence of brain damage in 240 former North Sea divers in 2010. After spending an average of 14 years working in the North Sea, a relatively high proportion of divers also acquired significant psychological and physical health problems, including lung disease, brain damage and post-traumatic stress disorder, while others complain of loss of concentration, and memory and hearing impairment. During the 1970s, 99 Norwegian divers died at work in the North Sea.

The producers of the new Norwegian thriller, which is directed by Insomnia's Erik Skjoldbjærg, believe they have closely mirrored the facts of the case, while adding a fictional character-led plot to the story. Set during the early 1980s, Pioneer follows two brothers who take part in a test to see if it is possible to lay pipelines on the bed of the North Sea. When the test goes wrong, one brother begins to investigate the greed and corruption that lie behind the search for oil and gas.

Martin told the Observer that he and his fellow Norwegian producers interviewed between 40 and 50 of the surviving divers to research the film and faced obstruction from vested interests as they tried to uncover more detail.

"They were not trying to stop the film directly," he said, "but it is certainly true that our requests for information came back very slowly indeed and when we finally got permission to film in some of the original buildings and locations, the price they set was so high that we did our own recreations.

"I had not understood before just how the companies involved were prepared to experiment on these men by putting them in conditions never tried before. It is sad and bizarre that this case has had to go all the way to Strasbourg."

2002 Directs and stars in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, based on the life of game show host Chuck Barris, who claimed to have been a CIA assassin.

2005 Stars in Syriana, taken from the Middle East memoirs of CIA agent Robert Baer, focusing on global oil politics.

2005 Co-writes, directs and stars in Good Night and Good Luck, telling of the conflict between radio and TV journalist Edward R Murrow and senator Joseph McCarthy.

2009 Stars with Ewan McGregor in The Men Who Stare at Goats, based on Jon Ronson's book about US military attempts to develop weapons grade psychic powers