The latest by French filmmaking duo Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo (Inside, Livide, Among the Living) might be their most ambitious effort yet. The aquatic haunted house movie The Deep House (read my review here) sees two divers looking to draw in big numbers for their social channels but instead find themselves trapped in an underwater nightmare.

Ahead of the film’s November 5 release on EPIX, the pair chatted with Bloody Disgusting about the challenges of creating The Deep House as practically as possible, the dangers of shooting its ghosts, and why they’re forever linked to horror.

The idea for an underwater haunted house movie came simply for the filmmaking duo. Bustillo explained, “Every time we work, we love challenging each other with ideas, brainstorming. We love underwater sequences in movies, like In Dreams by Neil Jordan or Dario Argento’s Inferno, and stuff like that. We are in love with divers in underwater sequences. Of course, we are totally in love with haunted house movies in general. Suddenly, the idea popped up. Maybe we can make a crossover between these two ideas; maybe we can have an underwater haunted house! Suddenly, we [had] the title; we can call it The Deep House. Boom! 

“We were very, very lucky too because the next day we called Clément Miserez, our producer. We told him, ‘Clement, we have an idea. It’s just a concept now. We did not have a story, but just the idea of an underwater haunted house.’ Clement said, ‘Oh god. I love, I love, I love this idea, so let’s go. We will do this movie.’ We were so lucky because you must know that making and finding money to do a horror movie in France is very, very, very complicated. It’s not like in the US. Horror movies are in your culture, but in France, absolutely not. It’s a shame because France has invented the genre with the Grand Guignol, but after the new wave, the horror genre in France was totally dead. It’s very, very difficult to find money to do a normal horror movie. You can imagine how complicated it was to find money to do an underwater horror movie, but we were very lucky to find Clement very quickly at the beginning.”

Adding complications to the simple concept was the desire to film The Deep House practically. That created unprecedented challenges. Maury says of the process, “Especially because since the beginning, we wanted to shoot this film in real conditions, we wanted to do underwater for real. We knew that, of course, it would be 100 times more difficult than to do it in front of a green screen because that’s the usual way to do underwater sequences. You shoot your actors in front of a green screen, then you add in CGI, fake hairs moving slowly, and you put your friends in slow-mo, and the trick is done. But here, we wanted the audience to have this visceral feeling of being in this element and that it can be as scary as dreamlike. The first thing was to find the right team, especially the [Director of Photography] and the set designer. The DOP was Jacque Ballard.       

“We discovered him with [Naughty Boy ft.] Beyonce’s music video, “Runnin.” It was shot in the ocean, with real artists running underwater. He’s one of the best divers in the world and underwater DOP. When we brought this idea of building a house and putting a real house into a water tank and shooting six meters down with real actors and without a green screen, he was like, ‘Guys, you are crazy, but let’s do it.'”

“The whole process of shooting underwater came step by step, all the security around it and shooting 8 to 10 hours a day underwater. It’s very exhausting. And how to deal with the fact that it’s almost three times slower underwater than a regular shoot. As soon as you want to move something in the set, you have to call through the microphone, ‘Okay, we need to move the pots on the chimney, please.’ You have a diver going down to the chimney and taking the pot and say, ‘Okay, here. No, no, no. On the left. More, more, more, more. Stop! No, too much. Back, back, back.’ It was quite frustrating in the beginning because we are the kind of directors that are on set with all the crew. We are touching everything, and we are changing stuff ourselves. We are talking to the actors, and we are playing for the actors. And here we were on the surface; everyone else was underwater. We are sitting in front of our monitors, with our microphones, and giving our orders to everyone. In the beginning, it was quite frustrating, but it was the way to do it.”

While the two leads are in dive suits throughout the movie, the ghosts are not. When asked about how they approached their ghosts, Bustillo answered candidly, “The ghosts were a real problem at the beginning. We didn’t know how to do the ghosts. We thought maybe we could use special effects, but no. It’s too expensive. It will not work underwater. One day, we spoke with some crew members, and one suggested that maybe we could use a free diver. We started to look after free divers who could possibly play a ghost in a horror movie. We found a couple of older free divers to play the parents, but the more complicated challenge was to find the young girl. It’s very difficult to find a girl around 11 or 12 years old who could dive for real, without oxygen at six meters down. We were very lucky there, too, because we found [Carolina Massey] in Monaco. She was only 11 years old during the shooting, but she was a free diver since maybe three or four years ago; free diving is her passion. She’s trained by the world champion of freediving in Monaco, Pierre Frolla.

“Then we were able to do all the stuff with ghosts for real on the set and without CGI or special effects. All you can see on the screen was shot for real. We give her some oxygen and then action; they go underwater, they act, then up. It was very stressful for us, of course, because it’s a little bit dangerous, but it was incredible to watch on the screen. Wow, it works for real and without effects and post-production CGI. We are not dealing with a green screen. It was a real joy for all the crew to watch. It’s really, really creepy.”

Maury and Bustillo are devout horror fans and love to explore different subgenres or facets of horror. When asked about this, Maury replied, “We’ve always considered ourselves horror fans before being directors. We are always watching horror, and we still profoundly love horror. For us, it’s always a matter of trying to find a way to surprise the audience, because as viewers, we love not knowing where we are going when we are watching a movie.              

It’s the same when we write movies and write scripts. We are always trying to write stories that we would like to see as an audience and stories we would pay a ticket for. Especially in France, where there is not much French horror. We always consider ourselves blessed and very lucky to be able to do our dream job, the job we were dreaming about when we were kids.”

“Our link to horror is forever. We were born with it, and we were never going to lose it,” Maury promises.

The Deep House will premiere on EPIX on November 5 and will also be available for digital purchase from Paramount Home Entertainment on the same day.