The Impossible ‘Whalefall’: Director Brian Duffield Wanted a Challenge, So He Discovered a Way to Crush Austin Abrams in a Whale Stomach That Left Onlookers ‘Baffled’
Turns out that it’s tough to shoot in a whale’s stomach.
“Whalefall” director Brian Duffield is gleefully outlining some of the biggest hurdles while shooting his new movie. 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.
“It’s such a small space and essentially a 360-degree set,” he says. “There’s a couple portals you can kind of shove a camera through, but it’s also somewhat full of water. 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.
“I was talking to a director,” he says. “He had a question and I sent him pictures of the set. 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. He read an advance copy of the 2023 book, and was quickly swept away with the cinematic promise it held. Duffield ended up co-writing the “Whalefall” script with Kraus.
“You get the initial ‘boy inside a whale’ story, which definitely tickled all the genre parts of my brain,” Duffield says. “The idea of making a movie that had never been made before is always really appealing to me. It’s instantly clear how challenging that was, and I was really looking for a challenge. I was hungry to just keep pushing myself and the crew that I had consistently been working with. I think we just had the appetite at the time to take a big swing.”
Duffield is no stranger to ambitious projects. He began his Hollywood career as a writer with a disparate group of scripts, including a big-budget sequel (2015’s “The Divergent Series: Insurgent”), a Western (2015’s “Jane Got a Gun”), a slasher (2017’s “The Babysitter”) and a sci-fi action movie (2020’s “Underwater”). He transitioned into an idiosyncratic directing career with 2020’s “Spontaneous” (logline: a romance is shaded by the fact that people start spontaneously combusting) and 2023’s “No One Will Save You,” a nearly dialogue-free alien invasion movie.
Beyond their high concepts, Duffield’s works are marked by an emotional heft, which is no different in “Whalefall.” Jay’s diving trip is prompted by him trying to locate the body of his estranged father Mitt (Josh Brolin) after he dies by suicide. He’d never be able make amends with, or come to an understanding with his father, a theme that resonates through much of the story.
“I don’t think I was looking for a father-son story, but I think I needed a father-son story,” Duffield, a parent himself, says. “As soon as I was reading it, I couldn’t stop thinking about … not the whale, but about Jay and Mitt in that relationship. I thought, ‘That was the magic trick of the book.’ You’re forgetting about squids and acid and you’re thinking more about how these two guys are thinking they want nothing more than to spend time together, but they can’t quite express how they need to spend time in a different way.”
While Abrams and Brolin were able to bring the emotional gravitas to flashback scenes chronicling key moments in their frayed relationship, shooting the in-whale scenes was the overarching creative challenge.
“I had plenty of directors come and visit and all of them just looked so baffled,” Duffield says. “I had general confusion about how we were doing what we were doing. The thing I’ve learned the most is the joy of making movies for me is the crew and getting to hire a lot of the same people over and over again. I think if I have any gift as a director, it’s hiring people that are extremely talented, Oscar winners and whatnot. I like spending time with them and feel comfortable asking advice. I trust them if I feel like they have a note or an idea — it’s probably good.”
It’s part of a larger ethos Duffield brings to every project.
“I want to feel the effort, and I want to feel like I’m becoming a better filmmaker because of it,” he says.
