Both the cast and the writer/director of “River” were in awe of how they pulled off the difficult days shooting the horror film out on the water.
While talking to Casey Loving at TheWrap’s studio at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival, writer/direct Joshua Giuliano and stars Jane Levy, Jessica Roche, Dane DiLiegro, and Max Mattern recalled the experience of many night shoot days both on a real river and a man-made pond.
“This shoot was not easy, and I kept saying to [Joshua], ‘When you do your next movie, you’re gonna be like, ‘Holy s–t, I can’t believe I had to do something this hard,’” Levy said. “Like just budgetarily and like being on a river, but he was really not freaked out when he would have to pivot, and you were very creative and flexible, and that was really cool to see.”
Giuliano had previously said that he learned the same lesson Steven Spielberg did shooting “Jaws” and that his next film would absolutely be on land. “River” follows three estranged siblings (Levy, Roche, and Mattern) who reunite to scatter their dad’s ashes on a river and are hounded through the night by a masked killer (DiLiegro).
“Water slows you down,” Giuliano said. “It just cuts the amount of things you want to achieve on any given day in half, and so I plan everything, and yet we would show up multiple days and realize that we’re not going to be able to do everything that we want to do, and so every day I got used to this, so it became part of the routine. I had to rethink the plan, and I had to kind of pivot. And once we were on the water for a couple days, I feel like we were all we were a pretty well-oiled machine.”
Roche added that Giuliano being so calm on the hard days shooting on the water or at the pond – despite it being his first feature – helped put all the actors at ease.
“There were some days out on the water where it was extraordinarily hot, and we couldn’t even get into land,” Roche recalled. “Like we were actually peeing on the side of the boat because it would take too long to get us back in, and we all wanted to maximize the amount of time that we could film things for the screen. Then there were days where it was very, very cold. So the elements were an extraordinary part of this, which I think added to the textural layer of what we ended up being able to capture, which was so exciting.”
She added: “But I think with almost any other director, definitely almost any other first-time feature director, that was such a thing that could have really easily sunk the shoot. And Josh and our production team, and just the crew, and our incredible DP Nick, it’s it’s such a testament to every single person who was working on this.”
