The premise for the film, in theaters now via 20th Century Studios, is simple: A young diver named Jay (Austin Abrams) is accidentally swallowed by a whale, ends up in its stomach and must escape before his tank of oxygen runs out. It’s a lean idea, but required an innovative and energetic leader like Duffield to get the claustrophobic shots done on practical sets. All the lighting of the coil is inside the set.
Basically everything that you would have on a normal movie set, we’re putting inside of a very small space. It’s also on a gimbal that’s rocking and rolling. So you take your normal film set footprint and then you put it into a bag.
And then you also put Austin Abrams into the bag, and then sometimes other animals. If Austin’s wrong an inch, it doesn’t really work. Everyone’s cramped in this little doorway.
But he can’t hear us, because the rubber is so thick inside.” Duffield smiles at the outrageous setup. And he was just like, ‘You’ve got to be joking.’ From when the whale is chewing Austin, it’s just a bunch of big, burly men jumping on the set and crushing down on him. And he’s in there, screaming and drowning with a real oxygen tank.
I’m looking at this little monitor and if he needs help, it’s going to sound the exact same. Every time you call cut, you’re just hoping that the screaming stops. We had the studio come to set and watch this thing.
From the outside it just looked so silly. I remember Disney safety reps would come and just be watching it, saying, ‘I genuinely don’t know if this is safe.’ But we worked hard, really hard to make sure Austin was safe.” Everyone made it out of the shoot unharmed, but the finished product is filled with harrowing set-pieces that are sure to push audiences to the brink. Duffield understood the vision early on, as he reached out to novelist Daniel Kraus on social media when he first heard the premise of the novel of the same name, before it was even published.
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