Editorials
[Interview] Mandy Moore and Claire Holt Dive Deep into ’47 Meters Down’
This isn’t your typical shark movie. It’s been forty years since Jaws kept people out of the water, and by now, we’ve learned what to expect from summer thrillers that take place in dangerous offshore territories. There have been a few noteworthy standouts and fun little additions over the years, such as Chris Kentis’ suspenseful Open Water, in which art mimics the real-life terrors of scuba diving couple Tom and Eileen Lonergan, and the more recent and more light-hearted Blake Lively-led The Shallows. However, whereas the majority of killer shark movies take place mainly on the ocean’s surface, Johannes Roberts’ 47 Meters Down stands out due to the majority of the film existing almost entirely underwater.
“When we both initially read the script, it was like, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen a movie like this before that takes place primarily underwater. In that sense, we were kind of guinea pigs. Because no one knew, like, what effects is eight weeks every day underwater going to have,” explains Mandy Moore. “I don’t think either of us realized how physically taxing it was going to be, just all that time underwater. Even just like the littlest movements, or the seemingly simple days. We would get out at lunchtime, and I’m not usually a napper, and I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I was so exhausted.”
In the film, Lisa (Mandy Moore) takes her sister Kate (Claire Holt) on the trip of a lifetime, down to Mexico’s beautiful blue waters and sandy white beaches, in an attempt to bounce back from a bad break up. Lisa confides in her sister that the real reason why her boyfriend left her is because she wasn’t giving him the excitement he craved in life, and Kate takes it as a personal mission to prove him wrong. Within a few short days, the girls are strapped up in scuba gear, sailing out to sea on a small boat with two new handsome friends, and getting ready to step foot into a rickety cage that will plummet them 20 meters down beneath the surface that they can go swimming with giant sharks. It all seems to be going perfectly – the cute boys, the new exhilarating adventure, the possible Instagram-worthy vacay pictures – that is, until the cage that’s holding the girls breaks, plunging them 47 meters down, where they become trapped at the bottom of the ocean, with only an hour’s worth of oxygen left in their tanks, and hungry predators swimming fiercely just overhead.
“I think this movie sort of goes above just being a shark movie,” says Mandy Moore regarding her interest in the film. “What initially attracted both of us to this was, and what I find far more terrifying is the prospect and premise of drowning, of running out of air and it’s a race against the clock. Like, that to me, ugh, is like my greatest fear. That’s far more terrifying than sharks, which are terrifying enough. And I love that this film, it’s about a confluence all those things. It is just an absolute tragedy. It is a horrible confluence of events that lands these girls at the bottom of the ocean, trapped in a cage with no control and very little way to make it to the surface and survive.”
Most movies require their actors to go through rehearsals, and although the specific methods vary from filmmaker to filmmaker, but when it came time to prepare to film 47 Meters Down, the girls had to go through quite unusual methods in order to get ready to shoot underwater scenes, fully submerged, for up to over an hour at a time.
“Those masks were like 20 pounds and it would hurt your neck, and the BCD and the tank were like another 40 pounds,” remembers Moore about her experience on set. “It was cumbersome. We would have like a little mock sort of rickety wooden cage and we would go in and just do these bare-bones rehearsals and sort of figure out a bit of choreography. But then you then down there and it all goes out the window. It just completely changes and you end up doing what feels right.”
Apparently, Holt and Moore were the only ones that could communicate with other when they had their masks on, so they had to rely heavily on each other for safety measures, as well as for direction.
“We had the majority of our face covered by this mask,” emphasizes Holt. “We didn’t know what would read, we didn’t know how big we had to be or whether it was too much, too little, and I think as an actor you’re always conscious of measuring your performance and having peaks and valleys. We really relied on each other with that. You know, ‘Was that too much? Did I overdo that, or could you read that?’ It was really difficult.”
When asked if there were any moments during filming all of those terrifying underwater scenes which came to be a little too close for comfort, Moore and Holt recalled Holt’s character Kate having to take her mask and BCD off for minutes at a time to try to escape the cage. Holt just hoped she could hold her breath long enough to pull off a convincing performance, while simultaneously remaining calm enough not to drown.
“She was such a badass about it,” says Moore as she recalls her co-star Holt’s bravery. “She was like, ‘Oh you need it again? Oh, one more time?’ (shrugs) But we’re 20 feet underwater, and she literally took off her mask and she took off her BCD, and then swims through the thing and I hand it to her, and it’s like … And you did that so many times, and then you have to be able to get your mask back on and clear it in order to breathe again, and so … I don’t know how you did that. I was really freaked out for you.”
“I was pretty nervous at the beginning when I thought about doing that,” reminisces Holt, wide-eyed. “But we just had really great people around us and I knew that I would always be safe, and I knew that someone may be there to stick a regulator in my mouth if I couldn’t clear my mask, or if I was running out of air.”
Although Holt claims she felt completely taken care of by director Roberts and crew, when asked if she’d be getting back into diving gear again anytime soon, Holt immediately responded with a laugh and a resounding no.
“Hell no!” Holt says enthusiastically with a happy grin. “I think I’ve done enough diving to last a lifetime, but never say never.”
47 Meters Down swims into theaters everywhere on June 16th, 2017.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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