What happens when you’re out for a swim on a bright, sunny day and suddenly a whale the size of an eight-story building swallows you up while hunting down a flailing squid of equal might? We all think about it, but writer-director Brian Duffield went a step further and made this October’s Whalefall.
Based on a novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and certified sicko Daniel Kraus, Whalefall stars Austin Abrams (Weapons, Euphoria) as Jay, whose mild-mannered dive off the California coast goes horribly wrong when a local sperm whale gives him the Jonah/Pinocchio treatment. Like Kraus’ novel, trailers for Whalefall tease how Jay’s life-or-death situation sloshes back and forth between dire present and strained past, with Josh Brolin playing his recently deceased father, but at the end of the day, Duffield promises his and Kraus’ adaptation is a “movie movie.” After his straight-to-Hulu spectacle No One Will Save You, he wanted to go big. Whale big.
Ahead of its Oct. 16 release, I jumped on a call with Duffield to hear about his Ahab-like pursuit to capture the essence of Whalefall and if I could rightfully call the movie a two-hander when one of the main characters is also the central location.
Polygon: Brian, are you drinking a Canada Dry Ginger Ale?
Brian Duffield: Yessir. Put that in the piece.
That’s called scene-setting. Now let’s talk about Whalefall. You and Daniel Kraus adapted Whalefall together. Having read his books and spoken to him recently about his absolutely wild year, my impression is the two of you have a very similar taste for inverting tropes and going as hard as humanly possible to execute on a premise. How did you wind up making this film with him?
Brian Duffield: I never met him or talked to him directly before. I think we followed each other because we were nerdy writers. One day, he just tweeted out what Whalefall was going to be about before he had finished writing it, and I just instantly had a lightning bolt. I slid into the DMs and I was just like, “I want to read this as fast as possible… Also, hi, it’s nice to meet you, I’m Brian.” He liked something I had done, which was a nice thing, but I was so relentless about it. When he finished writing the galley and sent it to me, I read it that night and called him the next morning. That happened on my first movie, Spontaneous, as well, where I just knew basically within three sentences of the book that it was meant for me.
Working with Daniel was the easiest process I’ve ever had. The book’s amazing in and of itself, but writing the adaptation with him was a joy. He’s been very involved. He was on set a lot. I’ve seen the movie probably 20 times. There hasn’t been a single moment of friction. And that’s why I think we keep working together. I talk to him almost every day, still. He’s off doing his own screenwriting and novels, and I have my own things too, but I think we’ve become the soundboard for each other on the things that we don’t do together.
I could not say enough great things about Daniel Kraus. Except for the fact that he won a Pulitzer and I didn’t.
It’s almost a parody to say, “My location is like a character!” But in this case, your location is a character. How do you properly bring something to life that’s both living and landscape?
It sounds like a joke to say it, but I mean it seriously: Our challenge was taking the emotions you feel for E.T. or King Kong, these creatures that you fall in love with even though they’re inanimate objects, essentially. E.T. isn’t alive, but it’s puppeteered, and King Kong is stop-motion. But you have to fall in love with them from the inside out.
We talked a lot about how the whale is an innocent bystander in all of this. It’s not going after Austin. It doesn’t know Austin exists. It’s completely oblivious to Austin. But Austin has to grow a fondness for this thing. There’s a little bit of a Miyazaki quality to it, where it has to have a certain beauty, just the awe of you’re inside of a god — that’s something that we talked about. It should be terrifying, but it’s an extraordinary machine.
Austin’s character is very sensitive. He really cares about people and his place in the world. Something with Austin that was really important, that we talked about a lot, was not treating the whale as a monster, treating it as your co-star. And Austin’s amazing at that. I think it comes across in the movie before it gets into the more spoilery kind of stuff.
What was also important was: What’s the line? We knew we had to be PG-13, but it was finding the line between how disgusting it could be and how far we could push it so that it felt like the whale, or at least the stomach, wasn’t sentient on its own. You were always reminded that it’s a living thing that he’s inside of. I think that came down to the work that Weta did building our sets, which ILM then took over to some extent, a lot of extent, and then what the sound guys did. When you see the movie, you’ll pretty much always hear the heartbeat and the whoosh of blood around Austin from veins, and just really being specific that it’s an incredible place that he’s in. He would just rather not be there.
Daniel excels at writing gushy, disgusting prose. I imagine sound was as important as picture in order to do Whalefall justice?
We always talked with 20th [Century Studios] about it feeling really theatrical. From day one, I remember talking to the sound guys and saying, “This is gonna be the hardest job you’ve ever had.” I think they were drunk on that idea. And it was the hardest job they’ve ever had. But you’ll hear it. It’s really astonishing work. We just had our final playback a couple days ago with the studio heads, and they were just like, “Holy shit.” The movie sounds unbelievable.
We joked with [20th Century president] Steve Asbell, who’s a big Lord of the Rings fan. I was like, “It’s Frodo’s journey, but it’s like 10 feet.” We have all these different set pieces and locations, and he’s got this real hero’s quest, but the space of it is very small. The emotion of it and hopefully the visual impact of it is quite immense. It won’t be in any of the trailers, but we have a pretty nutty set piece in the third act that is not limited to the stomach. And then also just him getting swallowed and making that feel as immense of a set piece as possible.
That’s something I’m really proud of, that when people see the movie, they all talk about how it feels like a movie movie. It’s claustrophobic in the right ways, but it doesn’t feel like a small indie movie kind of thing. It feels really theatrical and big and strange. I think it all came back to the idea of, what that would feel like and be like when this whale is 80, 85 feet long. It’s a big boy.
Still, and this is something I talked to Brolin a lot about, it’s a movie about fathers and sons, and you want 10-year-olds to get as much out of it as 70-year-olds. It pushes PG-13 very, very hard. But what Daniel is so great at is having such a universal way of looking at the world and being able to be super hyper-specific at the same time. We’ve shown a bunch of young teens the movie, and they’ve really reacted and gotten something out of it. Then parents like myself and Josh get another thing out of it.
I think it’s that beautiful thing that Stand by Me does so well, where you get to age up with the movie. You start it with River [Phoenix], and then you end it with [Richard] Dreyfuss, and how that movie changes for you. I want fathers and sons to get to see the movie together. Kids can feel like they’re getting away with something pretty rough.
Whalefall opens in theaters on Oct. 16.
