Filmmaker Scott Derrickson is something of a oddity in the movie-making world. He doesn’t seem to make movies with the intent of earning loads of money from them. I’m sure he wouldn’t say No to a hit or two (and he’s had many), but he and his writing/producing partner C. Robert Cargill seem intent on giving audiences (especially horror fans) something different, with works such as The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister, Deliver Us from Evil, Marvel’s Doctor Strange, and his adaptation of Joe Hill’s The Black Phone. His latest work, The Gorge, is one of the few films he’s made that doesn’t have his name on it as a writer (the screenplay comes courtesy of Zach Dean, although Derrickson and Cargill did take a pass to fine-tune it), and what makes it particularly interesting is that the film incorporates about five different genres into one story.
The Gorge starts out as a military thriller, but pivots into a mystery, a science-fiction adventure, and a straight-up horror movie—all the while being a fairly convincing love story featuring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy as a pair of mercenaries (him American, her Russian) on opposite sides of a massive gorge. Their missions are to keep whatever is in the gorge from coming out, while not communicating with each other. This guarding of the gorge has been going on for decades, and they are just the latest in a long line of guardians, but then they went and fell in love, and as soon as they break the rules, all hell breaks loose. I’ll say no more…
I’ve known Derrickson for a few years; I’ve even visited a couple of his sets over the years, including Doctor Strange, and he’s the truest of cinephiles, a great talker about his own works, and honest about the works he admires and doesn’t. He’s already got a sequel to The Black Phone in the can (to be released in mid-October). We had a chance to sit down recently when he was in Chicago for a rare theatrical screening of The Gorge (the film is now streaming on Apple TV+), and we walked through the process of getting this layered work to the screen and discussed how selling the relationship at its center was the key to making the rest of the film work. Please enjoy our conversation…
There are a lot of genres represented here in this movie. What was the logline you gave last night on stage?
Oh, that the movie is a romantic, science-fiction, action, horror, political thriller.
There you go! Did you consider that one of the challenges in taking on this screenplay? Not just to incorporate all of those elements—and I think they’re blended seamlessly; I don’t think there are jarring shifts every 20 minutes or so—was that trickier than you thought it would be?
The challenge was to not let go of the romance amidst all the other genres present. Once you get into the action/sci-fi/horror elements of it, you’ve invested so much time in that romantic relationship that it would be very easy to let that slip away and just let it be video game action. The challenge was to let the action itself be romantic, which is how they look to each other, watch each other, move as a team. That was the thing I was most attentive to. In terms of how the different genres effortlessly move from one to the next, I credit Zach Dean; that’s in the script, otherwise, I don’t think I would have taken the movie on.
What was it about his initial script—and I know that you and Cargill took a pass at it before shooting—that grabbed you and made you excited about doing it?
It was the romantic relationship, particularly the section of them getting to know each other across the gorge. I felt like that was really romantic and also, there was something sublime about the way that these two individuals had been set up. I believe that they were only letting each other in because there was the safety of the distance. If they were not in forced separation, they wouldn’t have gotten so close. That was true to my own experience in falling in love and getting remarried. My wife and I are people who had to fight really hard to be together. There was something about all of that romance that was elegantly done and very truthful. Then it gave way to the mystery of the gorge in such an audacious way, I thought it was very exciting.
You got advice once from James Cameron about putting the relationship first, and it seems like you followed that to the letter here.
Yeah. I was on the set of Avatar; he’d invited a handful of directors down, and I was surprised I was one of them, but I was. He wanted directors that he liked and respected to come down and see the technology, and I learned later that he took more time with me than anyone else. And I asked someone why, and they said “You asked better questions.” I really wanted to understand the tech. But I remember we were talking about The Abyss, and he said, “What I learned from The Abyss was that we focused on the big visual effects sequence at the end and how they were going to market the movie, and then the best scene in the movie is two people in an air tank.” And what he said next, I’ll never forget: “So when it came to making Titanic, by the time most movies end, the ship hadn’t even hit the iceberg yet.” That was all he said. He invested all that time in that relationship so that when the ship starts to sink, you’re with them, you care about them, you’re invested in them as individuals and as a couple. That’s how this movie works; some lessons learned.
I’ve written so many reviews of bad horror films that the more we care about these characters, the more we’re going to care about their fate. If you don’t take that time, your movie is sunk.
And how do you get scared, if you don’t get scared for someone? If you look at someone like Sinister, where Ellison Oswald is really kind of a shit. He’s a self-centered guy, driven by his own fear, but you feel a kind of empathy and interest in his weakness, because he’s so scared of losing his status. There’s something pathetic about it, and then you start rooting for him. “Come on, man. You can grow up, you can get out of this. You cannot die in this house. All you have to do is get past your need for career success and longevity.” And he does, but it’s too late.
That's why I didn’t say I wanted to like a character; I just want to care about what happens to them.
You want to care about them, exactly.
On that initial pass that you and Cargill took, what were the things you guys focused on and made adjustments to?
The way it was structured was very close to turning into a zombie movie. Cargill felt that even more than I did: they go down into the gorge and it’s a zombie movie. We discussed it for a long time, and ultimately what made Cargill excited about making the movie and producing it and doing the writing on it was the idea of putting a mythology at the center of the gorge itself—something that’s new, at least new to cinema. This idea of the DNA hybrids goes back more to folk horror than it does to any other film I can specifically reference, maybe The Day of the Triffids is an influence. The idea of the DNA hybrids of plants and people, and that being a horrific and grueling experience for the victims of that.
Somebody last night mentioned The Ritual, and that’s a very good reference; I probably drew more on that than I realized because I thought David Bruckner made a folk-horror, tree-monster movie, as good as I’ve ever seen. Still, I’m only referencing two movies here; it’s a tradition that's kind of unexplored. And we got more into bizarre things like the root attack, the tree attack, and the bridge, which we called the “body web,” where these things are grown, they’re not assimilated people, it’s just a DNA hybrid of plants and people that’s growing like a vine. I think that stuff is genuinely disturbing and interesting.
From what I read, Anya and Miles had been friends for a long time and had been looking for something to do together for a while. You said last night that you didn’t know anything about that going into this. Looking back, do you think that helped in selling the relationship, them having that chemistry already between them?
I had no idea what their relationship was prior to shooting those scenes. All I know is that I had an instinct that there would be chemistry. I hadn’t spent any time with the two of them together at all, as I was shooting the movie. They didn’t have any scenes together; everything on the towers I shot separately. As they’re relating to each other, the other person isn’t there to react. I would show them shots or describe to them like “Hey Anya, last Tuesday I shot Miles doing this thing, so you have to respond to that.” But they were really on their own during all of that, and it wasn’t until he crossed on the zipline, and there’s a wonderful scene at the base of her tower, that they met in person. That’s the first time I saw those two actors together, and it’s probably my favorite scene in the movie; there’s a real magic to what happens to them in that scene.
Well, there’s a dance sequence, and I never thought I’d see one of those in one of your movies.
And that was my idea. There’s a reference to a little bit of dancing in the script, but I said, “I want a dance number.” Building all of that out, getting a choreographer, and doing it for real, that was all my idea.
Walk me through that. Tell me about the logistics of building that out, why was that important. That’s an extra step for this story.
I look at it like The Terminator, where you’ve got these two people thrown together because of this crisis and they’re under duress, and when they finally come together and consummate their relationship, they’re a couple after that, they’re together, they’re bonded. In this movie, I felt like it was romantic if he crosses over, they have dinner, and then there’s a sex scene. But I didn’t find that as romantic as a dance scene. There’s the sex scene that’s implied, but it’s the dance scene that’s the first time they touch, first time they really work and move together, the first time that she learns something intimate about him, that he wouldn’t tell her before, which is that he knows how to dance. All of that was cinematic and interesting, and I also knew that I was working with two actors who knew how to dance; it was all right there for the taking, so I took it.
As much as it was eventually explained—what is going on in the gorge and what these creatures are—I’m guessing you had a hand in designing all of the creatures. Without giving too much away, what did you want to convey in the look of their designs, how they could move, etc.?
The way that this kind of creature design works is you have to have a good amount of time to develop concept art, and it starts with description. I start with describing, you know, these creatures that are DNA hybrids of plants, trees, insects, leaning toward this kind of idea, and I’ll just pitch something. They’ll go away and bring me 20 images, all varied. Then you go “This doesn’t work, the other 19 don’t, but this one right here, this is an idea we can build off of. Let’s take this and go this direction.” And then they come back with another 50 images, and pretty soon you narrow it down, and you have a language for these Hollow Men.
“Now we need to design 25-30 specific ones.” And they all had names like Wilbur and Clarence; it was fun to get all that design down. Then you’ve got the Skull Spiders and the Body Web and all these other things. It all comes from concept artists hearing your ideas, generating a range of things, and then you pick out what works and give more specific directions to improve it. And you have to do that 15 or 20 times before you really land on what you’re shooting.
As a filmmaker who was also a film fan growing up, you must find that the best part of the job.
It can be for sure. It’s always fun to sit there and be able to dream as far as your imagination can take you. If you can imagine it, there’s a way to put it on film. You might imagine something that’s not going to look great, but that’s the job of the director—to design it in a way where you can use visual effects and makeup effects in a way that will make it look tactile and real. That was also a priority for me.
I’ve noticed a common theme in a lot of your films is the past catching up with us somehow, and this certainly has that. Do you believe that?
When I look at Ellison Oswald or Stephen Strange, in this case Levi, I think they are all characters who are haunted by their past without realizing it. They’re carrying the weight of either past injury or past mistakes without reckoning with them. I do like the idea of characters who are put under duress and are therefore forced to deal with themselves and reckon with themselves, look inside and see what’s going on and express that to another person, get it out in the open and get through it so they can transform. Or in the case of Ellison Oswald, not do that. Characters are interesting because of the way they change or don’t change. What’s interesting about Ellison is that he needs that so badly, from the very beginning of the movie, and he just doesn’t do it until it’s too late.
As opposed to Levi, who in the course of this movie and his encounters with Drasa, who always had her father, a confidante, someone who would literally take her shame, as he says, she doesn’t carry that haunted, compartmentalized shame of doing what she does for a living, because she deals with that directly with her father. And Levi, in having his intimate relationship, is able to deal with himself for the first time. It’s not so much the past catching up as the character catching up with their own past.
I was thinking it was their past catching up with them; it’s humanity’s past, this age-old thing in the gorge.
And that’s what I think the metaphor of the gorge is. It’s the underworld; it’s the Jungian shadow side. Just as they go under the underneath surface to see this monstrous truth that’s under there, you’ve got a character in Levi specifically who is having to go under the surface of himself and reckon with what he is and what he’s been and the despair he’s in and didn’t realize he was in, the way that he was leading a zombie-like existence even though he was so good at what he did and his awakening from that through this relationship and through this experience. I think those kind of stories are powerful because we all need that and, at various points in our life, go through that, where suffering or trauma or a crisis event wakes us up to the truth about ourselves.
When Ethan Hawke was here last year, he was about to go into production on Black Phone 2, and it looks like you’re bringing back most of your surviving characters from the first one. You mentioned last night that Joe Hill gave you the seed of an idea on what a sequel might incorporate. Walk me through the process of what he said and how you built on it.
Well I won’t tell you exactly what he said because that would give too much away, but as soon as the box office numbers landed, I was getting emails from the chairman of Universal saying “You’re going to make another one, right?” I didn’t feel any obligation to do that; I’ve never made a movie because it would make money or because I’d get paid a certain amount to do it.
But then Joe sent me an email with an idea, and I was like “Okay, that’s interesting and a creative way into this that I hadn’t really thought of and was intriguing.” And as I let that gestate for a bit, what occurred to me was that his idea would really work if I’d made the movie as a high school coming-of-age movie, in the same way the first one was a middle school coming-of-age movie. I don’t think the studio was happy about this, but I said, “I’ll do a sequel, but I won’t do it for another three years, because I need these kids to grow up and get into high school.” So I made The Gorge in between because I needed a big movie to fill that slot, but the scheduling of it was about waiting until Finney (Mason Thames) was 17 and Matty was 15, and we were able to put them both in high school.
It doesn’t feel like The Black Phone came out three years ago.
Time does go fast, especially in this post-pandemic era. What’s interesting is that they’re different human beings. There’s such a difference between middle school and high school. It’s one of the biggest leaps that you take in your life. I’ll give this away: the genre demands an uptick also. A high school horror film is not the same as a middle school horror film. You need different levels of aggression and violence.
You started out directing a sequel that wasn’t of your own creation , and you worked on a sequel that you ultimately didn’t get to make , so this is your first self-generated sequel. What has been your attitude toward sequels up to this point?
I’m very skeptical about them. Typically, they’ve made for cynical reasons; they’re made because there’s a guaranteed box office return, and then creative effort that goes into them is typically “Let’s do something very similar because people liked the first one, so let’s to the same but more of it.” The sequels that have been great are the ones that have dared to be a different thing altogether, that really do something new and innovative, to utilize that you get to use the same characters, and you have all of this character work that you did in the first film, and now you get to bring all of those characters that the audience knows and put them in new situations that’s surprising and fresh. When you look at Aliens to Alien or The Godfather Part II to The Godfather, those are the great sequels, and that’s what they did—they took characters that you knew and built upon them and made wildly different kinds of films. That’s so satisfying for fans of the first film.
Back to The Gorge for a second, this is the first time you’ve worked with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on the score. What was unique about your interactions with them in terms of getting your score done.
They work differently than other composers I’ve worked with. They liked the script and wanted to talk to me about it. I think we only Zoomed one time before they signed onto the movie. I told them they were my favorite composers, and the reason why I liked their scores so much was because their scores didn’t simply bolster the visuals; they were not just bolstering the purpose of the scene. But rather, the whole of their scores in all of their films is adding a third thing that’s not there. For The Social Network, which they won an Oscar for, or look at Challengers, these would not be the same movies without those scores, and those scores are not just telling you what’s on screen.
They’re a third thing, and I told them “I want a score with that third thing.” And I think it was Trent who said, “What do you think that third thing is?” It’s the soul of the movie. This is a movie with a lot of plot and emotional exchange between these characters, but there’s a soul to the whole of it that is deeper than any of the individual elements. There’s a purity to it. It has to do with secrets and hidden truth, an angry truth that wants to come out. This time in our world where corporations are running the government, this movie is more relevant than ever in that respect. And the emotional intimacy of self-discovery through a relationship. And it’s a monster movie, a creature feature. So what’s the soul of that? “You tell me guys.”
So what they did without looking at a cut of the movie, they sent me eight pieces of very long music. The first piece was 23 minutes and one of the most amazing pieces of music I’ve ever heard, period. It was so good. I would take the piece I liked most and say “These are the ones I really like, and I’m going to use this for this scene and this for this one. I need something else for this scene over here,” and they would build more. But there was a selection process, and then they would build the whole of the score and the themes for different sections of the movie out of what things I responded to that they pre-wrote. And it was a wonderful way to work, and they are very meticulous and came to more mixes than any composer I’ve ever had. They cared about the mix, wanted it to be just right and not just because they were precious about their music. They would say “The score’s too loud here.” They were also just the nicest guys; I had an amazing experience with them.
Thank you so much, good to see you again, Scott.
Thank you. Really good to talk to you again.