Interviews
‘The Gorge’ Director Scott Derrickson Discusses His Genre-Bending Creature Feature [Interview]
The world’s most dangerous secret lies within The Gorge, and Scott Derrickson isn’t about to spoil it.
The Sinister and The Black Phone director sat down with Bloody Disgusting to discuss his genre-bending new film, which offers something for everyone this Valentine’s Day with action-packed thrills, passionate romance, sci-fi intrigue, and horrific creatures.
The originality of the concept, scripted by Zach Dean (The Tomorrow War), attracted Derrickson to The Gorge. “When Skydance sent me the script, I just got excited about the idea of a big event movie that’s not a sequel or a franchise or IP, but is an original story blending a lot of different genres.”
Miles Teller (Top Gun: Maverick) and Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch) star as two highly-trained operatives who grow close from a distance after being sent to guard opposite sides of a mysterious gorge. When an evil below emerges, they must work together to survive what lies within.
“I tend to cast pretty well,” Derrickson remarks. “I had to first of all believe in each of the actors as an elite sniper, which in this case I just did. That eliminates a lot of actors from possibly casting. Beyond that, they’re both really good at playing nuanced choices. They’re very good at intimate scenes. I just had a suspicion they would have good chemistry, which they did. It was great.”
Derrickson says it was “a bucket list experience” directing Sigourney Weaver in the film. “She’s everything you’d hope she’d be. She’s really dedicated, very disciplined in the craft. She cares about the movie, wants to understand the movie as a whole and incredibly warm to everybody on set. Everybody loved her. It was terrific.”
Although the threat that lurks inside the gorge is being kept under wraps, Derrickson delved into the creature design process.
“When you’re dealing with creature effects, you have to start at the concept art stage. You have to talk to artists about what your vision is, what you want, and they start to generate images. You give notes on that, build on that and splinter off into more exploration. On this one, we did a tremendous amount of artwork before landing on all the different individual creature designs in the film.”
The biggest challenge he faced on the production were the big set pieces, which were difficult on a technical level. “We did some things that hadn’t been done or hadn’t been done in quite the same way, and a lot of big physical sets. I don’t like virtual environments for the most part. I like set extensions, but the more physical a set, the more real it looks.
“Being able to get all of that done in a timely fashion and have it be ready for production, staying in front of the schedule; you make a movie this size, it’s a little bit like running in front of a moving train. You just got to hit every railroad tie perfectly or the train’s gonna run you over, which in this case it didn’t.”
The titular gorge was a virtual location, but that doesn’t mean it was computer generated. Derrickson explains, “We shot plates in Norway for the canyon, for the rock walls, for the forests, for the sky, and then sort of stitched together the virtual space itself of the gorge. The top of the pillars of the watchtowers were real, giant, to-scale sets, and then the virtual space around them was built from the real photography.”
The filmmaker calls it “a dream come true” to have Academy Award winners Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross (The Social Network, Gone Girl) compose the score. “I was really thrilled that they wanted to do the movie, and their way of working is really interesting. They write you a ton of music based on just the script, on what they hear as being relevant to the film.”
He continues, “They give you more music than you’re ever going to use in a movie, but you sort of pick out the pieces that you think work the most, and then they build off of those. Some of those pieces directly end up in the movie, and then some of them, they’ll take direction and tailor them to different scenes.
“They’re very collaborative, really respectful and boy, do they care. They came to a bunch of the mixes, right up to the final mix. They were very precise about what they liked and didn’t like, and I loved that. I love their investments and how connected they were to the work. It was great. It was really an amazing experience.”
The music also features several choice needle drops: Yeah Yeah Yeahs‘ Grammy-nominated “Spitting Off the Edge of the World,” Ramones‘ classic punk anthem “Blitzkrieg Bop,” Twisted Sister‘s take on “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” and a rendition of Bob Dylan‘s “All Along the Watchtower” by UK rapper Devlin.
“I care a lot about needle drops. I think one of the most important things you do as a director is pick those songs that play in a film because of the tone they bring to them,” notes Derrickson.
“I knew that I wanted to have a big dance scene in the middle of the movie. There was a couple of lines about dancing in the script, but I wanted that to be a real scene. It took me a long time before settling on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song. And then we built the choreography around that song.”
He adds, “Then, of course, the Ramones. I love the Ramones, I love that song, and I thought Anya would have fun with it — which she certainly did.”
Derrickson believes The Gorge will appeal to viewers for the same reason it appealed to him. “If you want to see a big, exciting event movie that isn’t what’s expected, isn’t the same thing, isn’t a franchise, sequel, IP-driven piece of familiarity — this is what you want to see. That’s really why I did it. After I read the script, I thought. ‘I want to see a movie this size that’s this daring and interesting and blends genre this way.’
The Gorge releases on Apple TV+ on February 14.
“It’s Valentine’s Day,” Derrickson reasons. “It’s a very romantic movie!”
RELATED: Scott Derrickson Calls ‘The Black Phone 2’ a “High School Coming-of-Age Movie”
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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