Brian Duffield tells Variety that Disney's own safety reps watched the shoot and openly wondered if it was safe for his lead actor.
Shooting inside a whale's stomach is apparently exactly as miserable as it sounds. Brian Duffield, who directed "Whalefall," now playing in theaters via 20th Century Studios, has been telling Variety just how far he pushed his crew and his lead actor Austin Abrams to pull off the film's central nightmare.
The story is simple on paper. A young diver named Jay, played by Abrams, gets swallowed by a whale and has to find a way out before his oxygen runs dry. Shooting it was not simple at all.
Duffield describes building a near-360-degree practical set, partly filled with water, rigged with lighting, and mounted on a gimbal that rocked constantly. "You take your normal film set footprint and then you put it into a bag," he said. "And then you also put Austin Abrams into the bag, and then sometimes other animals."
For the scenes where the whale is chewing on Jay, Duffield says it came down to "a bunch of big, burly men jumping on the set and crushing down on him" while Abrams breathed through an actual oxygen tank and screamed into a monitor that gave no clue whether the scream was acting or distress. "Every time you call cut," Duffield said, "you're just hoping that the screaming stops."
It got tense enough that, per Duffield, Disney's own safety representatives visited set and questioned the whole operation. "I genuinely don't know if this is safe," one rep reportedly said, according to Duffield. He insists everyone walked away unharmed and that the production worked hard to keep it that way.
The project started as a book. Duffield read an advance copy of Daniel Kraus's 2023 novel before it was even published and reached out to the author directly, eventually co-writing the screenplay with him. What hooked Duffield wasn't the creature-feature premise but the father-son wreckage underneath it, Jay's dive is prompted by a search for the body of his estranged father Mitt, played by Josh Brolin, who died by suicide.
"I don't think I was looking for a father-son story, but I think I needed a father-son story," Duffield said, calling that relationship "the magic trick of the book."
This isn't new territory for Duffield, who wrote "Insurgent," "Jane Got a Gun," "The Babysitter" and "Underwater" before moving into directing with "Spontaneous" and the nearly silent "No One Will Save You." He's built a reputation on strange, difficult, physically punishing ideas, and by his own account, visiting directors who toured the "Whalefall" set left looking baffled.
With the film now out, the question is whether audiences find the stunt as gripping as the directors who walked away confused on set did.
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