What Mr. Kormakur does at home will hit American screens this week: “The Deep,” shortlisted for the foreign-language Oscar this year, tells the real-life tale of the fishing trawler Breki, which in 1984 went down with all hands save one: a sailor (played by Olafur Darri Olafsson, a regular in Kormakur films) who survived six hours in 40-degree water before reaching the volcanic shores of the Westman Islands, off the southern coast of Iceland. Baffled researchers concluded that the man’s unusually thick body fat made him, in effect, part seal.

It was an important moment in recent Icelandic history, one Mr. Kormakur said he had to get right, because of the national trauma and the sea’s importance to the economic and spiritual life of Iceland.

“It’s an almost mythical story,” he said. “Everyone in Iceland knows it. But what I didn’t want to do is create emotional porno. It’s so easy to fall into that. What I’m trying to say in the film is, this is inevitable. This is the country we choose to live in. It’s not even so much about the real guys in the accident; it’s about all the sailors in Iceland. It took a long time because I wanted to get it right.”

Getting it right meant getting in the water. For “The Deep’s” shipwreck scene, “two of the actors opted out when we were turning the boat over,” he said. “I wasn’t going to push them. I just said, ‘O.K., I’ll do it myself, give me a costume.’ ”

David Linde, a veteran of the American independent scene, met Mr. Kormakur during a salmon-fishing trip to Iceland and became a producer of “The Deep.” He said the director’s intent, as with all of his work, was to make a movie that was commercially viable worldwide.