“Whalefall” was not an easy movie to make.
Director and co-writer Brian Duffield’s adaptation of the Daniel Kraus bestseller follows a scuba diver who gets swallowed by a whale and must find a way out before he runs out of oxygen.
The first trailer for the 20th Century Studios thriller, which you can watch above, teases a pulse-pounding ocean-set sequence in which Austin Abrams’ (“Weapons”) character gets eaten, but Duffield — the filmmaker behind 2023’s contained sci-fi thriller “No One Will Save You” and the 2020 spontaneous combustion teen movie “Spontaneous” — told TheWrap that the water stuff was the easy part.
“The bulk of our movie takes place within the whale himself, and we go a really long time without cutting outside,” he said.
Like, a really long time. Duffield, who co-wrote the screenplay with Kraus, said the film plays out nearly in real time as Abrams’ character has only so much oxygen left in his tank and multiple stomachs to move through that are trying to chew him up (whales chew with their stomachs, not their mouths). Oh, and there’s a squid inside the whale’s belly — which was built by the practical effects wizards at Weta — with him too.
“This movie needs to feel like Austin Abrams and the audience are stuck in this whale’s mouth or swallowed by the water or stuck in the stomach together,” Duffield explained of his filmmaking approach, adding that he pushed aside “fancy sexy camera s–t” in favor of centering Abrams’ performance.
There are flashbacks here and there — “Whalefall” is ultimately a father-son story, with Josh Brolin playing Abrams’ dad — but the bulk of the movie is on Abrams’ shoulders. And it is not lost on Duffield that the actor is being put through the wringer twice in the span of a couple of months: he leads Zach Cregger’s “Resident Evil” in September, a month before “Whalefall” hits theaters on Oct. 16.
“I haven’t seen ‘Resident Evil’ yet, but just talking to Austin a little bit and seeing that awesome trailer, I think these are going to be two very different movies and two very different characters and performances, so I’m really thrilled for him that he’ll get quite the fall,” Duffield said.
The filmmaker is also proud that “Whalefall” was shot in Los Angeles, something he was keen on doing even before the fires.
“I just had a really great crew of people. We had a bunch of crew come from ‘Disclosure Day’ and Fincher stuff, and they were the crew that were like, ‘This is crazy and really hard, and we’ve never done it before, and that’s really exciting.’”
“Whalefall” opens exclusively in theaters on Oct. 16.