Sinking feeling
Underwater I Under the sea, no one can hear you scream. Kristen Stewart gets breathless…
They say working with kids and animals is the toughest, but try making an entire movie underwater!” Director William Eubank can laugh about it now, but staging a claustrophobic Alien-esque sci-fi horror seven miles beneath the surface of the ocean was every bit as difficult as it sounds.
“I’m not gonna lie, it was tricky,” says Eubank. “We had our cast sweating in 200lb dive suits every day, and we had to contend with water, darkness, pressure and a million other things. But I knew right away that it was the perfect place to set a scary movie. Being in a situation where you’re miles from even being able to take a breath – that’s terrifying. It was scary even holding the script.”
His third feature after sci-fi indie hits Love (2011) and The Signal (2014), Eubank takes a sidestep into horror for Underwater, the story of a deep-sea research station that gets attacked by a toothy sea monster. Forced to evacuate, the survivors face a slow, dark, terrifying escape along the bottom of the ocean.
Leading the group is Kristen Stewart’s Nora – a tough-nut loner with a hard past and a buzzcut to prove it. “Nora’s a badass,” says Eubank, who picked Stewart to lead a cast that includes Vincent Cassel, Jessica Henwick and T.J. Miller. “She’s down there because she wants to get away from the world. The way Kristen plays her is just incredible. It’s a very character-centric film and we were lucky enough to get an amazing cast. Little did they know we were going to dump them at the bottom of a water tank for weeks on end…”
Taking over an abandoned New Orleans cinema, the film crew built their own water tanks from scratch by welding disused shipping containers together. Other elements of the film’s design were less DIY – including detailed ship interiors inspired by both 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien, and fully-functioning submersible dive suits that were so heavy that the actors had to be lowered into each scene with an industrial crane.
Most challenging of all, the filmmakers had to come up with a creature that was scary enough to match the look and feel of everything else on set. “When I started planning there was a real research team exploring one of the trenches off the coast of California, and they were bringing back these pictures of all these creepy things that lived down there – stuff no one had seen before,” says Eubank. “It was way more alien than anything we could imagine, and it was a big part of helping us design our monster. I think we’ve come up with something pretty cool. There is nothing that gives me greater joy than hearing an audience scream…”