So you've got 200 extras dressed as skating priests, plus another 100 people - a handful of your host country's leading actors, crew, one of the hottest directors around, nervous agency producers and a gang of technical advisers - and you're in the middle of a frozen lake, 150 meters from the shore, in the far east of Poland. The ice is all that separates you from 34 meters of freezing water. And an odd booming noise is turning into loud cracks. "It's OK," say the ice experts. "It's expanding. We're quite safe."

"Just a typical Stella shoot," says Academy producer Simon Cooper, recalling two and half weeks of "insanity" on location with Jonathan Glazer for another 120-second Stella Artois epic, "Ice Skating Priests" (Lowe, London). Glazer wanted deciduous trees, a definitively European location and cast. But spring was on its way and anywhere further south was ruled out by lack of snow and the wrong trees.

"That's how we came to be seven hours from Warsaw, constructing a village complete with jetties and fishing huts on a deserted lake," says Cooper. The locals told them they were mad and Lowe account manager Ben Sareen says battling short winter days didn't make things easier, "but we needed somewhere reliably cold that looked like the mythical French location of previous Stella spots. So in the end [Poland] was on a shortlist of one."

As far as shooting costs, Poland is midrange Europe these days, comparable to Hungary and the Czech Republic and cheaper than Iceland and Sweden. "The shoot was expensive because of the scale," says Sareen.

And the ice.

During a location-scouting trip four weeks before the shoot, the ice was clear and rock solid, perfect for the job. When the crew descended in April, 8,000 tons of snow lay on the lake and they had to enlist 250 Polish soldiers to help clear it. As the temperatures rose, they were warned they only had 24 hours before it melted. "We crossed our fingers and hoped for another cold spell and fortunately it arrived," says Cooper.

When Bartek Rainski, executive producer at Polish production service company Proproductions, got the call from Lowe he knew Poland hadn't seen a commercial shoot on this scale before. Glazer wanted the best, so Rainski put together a crew with feature film experience: camera assistants and operators who'd worked with Ridley Scott; grips and gaffers who'd cut their teeth on films like Schindler's List. For lead casting, he and Glazer looked to Krzysztof Kieslowski's (Three Colors) casting agent, but there was also some spontaneous hiring.

"Jonathan knew exactly what he wanted. We were driving through Warsaw and he spotted this big, hulking guy with a hunched back hauling garbage," recalls Rainski. "He immediately wanted him to pull the bell in the spot, so the line producer jumped out of the car and persuaded him. He didn't know what we were on about but the guy eventually played the Cardinal's watchdog. His wife didn't want him to do it because she thought he would meet too many ladies on location!"

The stunts - hairy plunges through holes in the ice - were all done on location, with underwater shots completed in London. Cooper is full of praise for the technical crew and camera operators who had never worked in such extreme conditions before.

"The isolation did make it difficult for everyone and we all learned to skid in a controlled fashion," he says, with tact. "They call it the north pole of Poland," agrees Rainski. "There's nothing there, so the simplest thing you need becomes a special request."

It also meant there was no after-hours high living. The huge crew took up residence in a network of disparate guest houses although there was a chalet on location for the select few. And there was nothing to do in the evening except to plan for the next day and drink vodka. "There are worse things," suggests Sareen.

Despite the climatic difficulties and the nervous strain of working on ice of uncertain durability, the shoot was a success. To the crew's consternation on the last day, the ice experts prevented local inhabitants from walking on the lake because it was becoming so dangerous. "But I don't know if without those conditions, we'd have had such a great atmosphere on the set. It was something special," says Rainski.

As was Glazer's contribution to the atmosphere. "You become one big family. He's the first director I've ever worked with who explained the concept to the entire crew before he started shooting." And predictions by agency producer Sarah Hallett and Cooper that this shoot would be like going to war with nature certainly held true. Luckily, says Rainski, "It turned out to be a well-fought war because we won."

THE WONDER OF HINDSIGHT

"Ice makes the most amazing booming noises. When you're working so closely with it, you get to know it as if it's alive." - Simon Cooper, Academy

"I hope that after this, people will shoot more commercials in Poland. It's so beautiful. People are tired of shooting in Prague where you have to wait a year for permissions and availability, or Hungary where every street corner is familiar from another shoot." - Bartek Rainski, Proproductions

"If I was doing a similar shoot, I'd try and avoid spring or summer when the ice is starting to melt! It's beautiful and scary. When you see beavers moving into shot, you know it's time to get off the ice." - Simon Cooper

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